The Sanctum didn't echo the way normal buildings did.
Adrian's footsteps landed without sound, swallowed by something softer than air. Light ran along the walls in thin silver lines, beating in slow pulses beneath carved brass ribs. He had the unpleasant sense he was walking through the inside of a living machine—one that noticed weight, breath, thought.
Saelen led the way, coat skimming the floor, every step measured like part of a ritual. Godfrey followed a pace behind Adrian—close enough to catch him, not close enough to crowd. A shadow with a heartbeat.
"Try to keep your breathing steady," Saelen said without looking back. "The Sanctum amplifies resonance. Panic makes it louder."
*Good. The building can hear me.*
They passed a series of archways. Behind each, brief, unsettling glimpses: a room full of floating sigils and glass orbs humming in place; a narrow chamber where a figure in a crimson coat stood with eyes closed, silver threads drifting from their fingers into a diagram on the floor; a wide hall lined with cots and pale faces turned toward the ceiling like surrendered prayers.
Some of those faces twitched as he walked past. As if they'd heard something he couldn't.
He kept his gaze forward. *Don't stare. Don't invite attention. Learn first. Then judge.*
They reached a tall set of glass doors.
Saelen pressed her palm to a round brass plate at their center. The metal warmed under her touch, threads of silver Ether igniting beneath the surface in response.
"Saelen," she said quietly.
The plate pulsed once.
**Thmm.**
The doors opened outward.
Cold air hit him, sharp with rain and metal. They stepped onto a wide balcony.
This time no fog blocked the view.
Concordia spread out below them.
The city rose in stacked layers—stone foundations supporting brass towers, glass corridors strung between rooftops like arteries, cables and rails hanging in the air. Steam curled from vents along the streets, rolling over cobblestone and disappearing into alleys like breath released into cold night.
Lines of dull-green gaslamps traced the main roads. Above them, suspended tracks carried trams that glowed faintly from within, light bending around etched runes on their sides. Somewhere distant, a bell tolled twice, its sound swallowed quickly by the hum of machinery.
And beneath it all, another noise. A deeper one.
It took Adrian a moment to name it.
The city was breathing.
Ether moved through the air with purpose, not drift—flowing in lines, rising up spires, sinking through grates, pulsing under the street's skin in currents he could almost see. As if the whole place had a circulatory system.
His chest tightened. The faint afterimage of the dream tried to bleed through—white, violet, gold.
*Not now.*
Saelen watched him from the corner of her eye, hands folded neatly behind her back. Her expression stayed neutral, but the angle of her gaze said she was measuring the way he took this in.
"Concordia," she said. "Human seat of the Aetherveil. The Outer World would call it myth, if they remembered it at all."
The term snagged him.
"Outer World," Adrian repeated.
Saelen's eyes shifted to him. "The unawakened cities," she said. "Beyond the Veil. You won't be returning to them."
Her tone wasn't cruel. Just factual.
*Good. No false comfort.*
Below, people moved along bridges and streets—merchants with crates floating behind them in woven light, children chasing each other as small motes of Ether flickered at their heels, crimson-coated wardens walking in pairs, eyes sharp even in routine.
Adrian let himself watch for a few seconds. Enough to tell his brain: *this is real.* Enough to know he'd never be able to explain it in a lecture hall without being laughed out of his own department.
"Come," Saelen said. "The Lieutenant is waiting."
They took a narrow stair down from the balcony to a lower platform where a small carriage rested—no horses, no tracks. Its wheels hovered just above the stone, a faint glow running along brass spokes.
Adrian eyed it.
"Please tell me this one doesn't go through another… Channel."
A corner of Saelen's mouth tugged. "No. Inside Concordia, we stay in one world at a time."
"That's comforting."
"Relatively."
The carriage door opened on its own with a soft **hiss.** Godfrey stepped in first, silent. Adrian followed, then Saelen. The door sealed shut behind them.
A moment later the carriage moved—smooth, gliding. The city shifted past the windows with no jolt, no clatter. Just quiet transit that hummed in his bones like a held note.
He watched a tram slide by a few levels up, passengers framed in its glass sides. They looked… normal. Tired. Distracted. Talking. Laughing. As if none of them knew someone had just died somewhere else so he could sit here inside a hovering machine.
"Is that common?" he asked, eyes still on the city. "People falling into this. Waking up with—"
He stopped himself before saying *someone else's life.*
"Awakening?" Saelen asked. "Yes. The manner of it? No."
He turned his head.
Her gaze was on his face now. Not invasive. Just thorough.
"You survived an uncontrolled exposure to the Channel," she said. "You looked into it, and it looked back. You merged with Ether without structure, without a guide, and without an anchor on either side."
"Is that your polite way of saying 'you should be dead'?"
"It's my precise way." No softness. "Most who stare fully into the Channel return as Echo. If they return at all."
Adrian swallowed.
"What makes the difference?" he asked. "Between an Echo and… this."
Saelen's shoulders lifted in the faintest shrug. "Core strength. Will. Luck. The Flow's mood. We don't fully understand it. That's why there's a Sanctum. To observe what we cannot predict."
*Comforting in the worst way. Honest.*
The carriage slowed.
"We're here," Godfrey said quietly.
It stopped before a wide plaza of dark stone. Rain slicked its surface, the lamplight breaking into a hundred thin reflections.
Ahead, a building rose—part cathedral, part fortress, part engine.
The Sanctum.
Brass ribs arched up the front, framing tall windows streaked with pale Ether veins. Glass domes sat along the roof, each faintly glowing from within. The main doors were carved with sigils that seemed to shift when looked at too long, like they hated being pinned down.
Adrian stepped onto the wet stone. The air smelled like rain and iron and something sharper underneath—like the moment before a storm breaks, stretched into permanence.
"It feels," he said under his breath, "like walking into a nervous system."
Saelen heard anyway. "It is the Veil's spine, Mr. Whitlock," she said. "You're not wrong."
Crimson-coated wardens at the door watched as they passed, eyes scanning him with professional detachment that still felt like judgment. One inclined their head to Saelen.
"Ma'am."
"Lieutenant Thaddeus is inside?" she asked.
"In the intake chamber."
"Thank you." She didn't slow.
Inside, the air cooled further.
Light filtered down from high windows, mixing with the dim embedded glow of Ether veins in the walls. The floor was polished dark stone, catching ghost reflections of everyone who walked over it.
Voices murmured all around—low, urgent, layered. A young woman with a bandaged arm sat on a bench, watched by a warden. An older man clutched a small box to his chest, eyes shut, lips moving in soundless prayer. A child traced shapes in the air with their fingertip, faint sparks following before a stern attendant gently pulled their hand down.
Saelen cut through the space with practiced ease. People moved out of her path without thinking.
They stopped before a brass door marked only by three small engraved circles.
Saelen's jaw tightened a fraction.
"Lieutenant Thaddeus can be… direct," she said. "Answer what he asks. Nothing more, nothing less."
Adrian exhaled through his nose. "Is he the one who decides whether I'm a person or a problem?"
"Everyone here is both," she said evenly. "He decides whether you're stable enough to become the former before we have to treat you as the latter."
*Not comforting. Honest.*
She knocked once.
**Knock.**
And opened the door.
The room beyond was plain: stone walls, a single high window, a table of dark wood, three chairs.
The man behind the table looked like he'd been built to endure impact. Broad shoulders. Thick hands. Beard shot through with gray. His crimson coat hung open at the collar, brass trim dulled by wear and use.
He didn't look up immediately.
"Saelen," he said, scanning a page. "That your new case, then?"
"For evaluation," she replied.
"Mm." He set the papers down and lifted his eyes to Adrian.
They were green. Tired, but sharp. The kind of sharp that said: *I've seen worse and I'm waiting to see how you compare.*
"Sit," he said.
Adrian sat.
Godfrey took position near the door, still and silent. Saelen moved to stand at Adrian's shoulder, hands clasped behind her back. Not exactly on his side. Not not on it.
Thaddeus flipped the file open again.
"Name."
Adrian opened his mouth—and something moved.
The air shifted. The back of his neck prickled. A smell—coal dust, sweat, cold wet stone—ghosted through his head, vivid as memory and just as unwanted.
"My name is… Garth Whitlock," he said.
The words came smooth.
Too smooth.
Thaddeus watched him over the file. "Age."
A flicker of candlelight. Rain on thin glass. Cards on a table. A laugh, low and familiar.
"Twenty-four."
"Residence."
The name rose unbidden, like someone else had written it on his tongue.
"Number Twelve Briar Lane. Hollow End Parish."
"Occupation."
Heat. Darkness. The bite of metal on stone. The ache in shoulders that remembered swinging a pick far too long.
"Miner," Adrian said quietly. "Whitmere Coal Concern."
Silence thickened.
Thaddeus made a small note with a blunt pencil. "Good," he said. "At least the pieces match."
Adrian swallowed. His hands were steady on the table. They didn't feel like his.
"How much of that was you," Thaddeus asked, "and how much was something answering through you?"
Saelen shifted beside him. "Thaddeus—"
"No," Thaddeus cut in, eyes still on Adrian. "He deserves the question. He looked into the Channel. We're not going to pretend that didn't do more than scramble his pulse."
Adrian exhaled slowly. "I don't know," he said. "I think that's the problem."
Thaddeus grunted. "Fair enough."
He leaned back slightly. "You remember looking into it?"
Adrian hesitated. The white. The cracks. The immensity that had noticed him. The threads of light that felt like hands inside his skin.
"I remember… color," he said at last. "And… something noticing I existed."
"That is more than most retain," Thaddeus said flatly.
He tapped the file. "Exposure to the Channel usually leaves one of three results. Echo. Collapse. Or—if the Flow feels generous—partial resonance."
"And which am I?"
"That's what we're here to find out."
Saelen's voice slid in, calm. "He arrived whole. No visible Ether corruption. No physical deformity. Cognitive coherence above baseline for a raw awakening."
"That's what worries me," Thaddeus said. "He's too clean."
He closed the file.
"Here's the simple version, Mr. Whitlock," he said. "You were a Dormant. Then someone exposed you to an Ether phenomenon you were never meant to see. The Channel reached back. Now you're awake and sitting in my intake room instead of being scraped off the floor as residue."
He folded his hands on the table.
"That makes you rare. Rare things are interesting. Rare things are also dangerous."
Adrian held his gaze. "You think I'm dangerous."
"I think you're untested," Thaddeus said. "And untested things break at the wrong moments."
The room vibrated faintly, low and sympathetic, as if it agreed.
For a second, the pulse in Adrian's veins stuttered. The second heartbeat surged up to meet the first, then slipped away again, like something inside him had flinched.
Thaddeus's eyes flicked to the movement in his throat. "You felt that."
"Yeah."
"Good. Don't lie to me about it."
Saelen spoke, voice softer. "We'll run him through standard resonance scans. Core alignment. Echo bleed. Spectral imprint. If Channel residue is tangled in his Flow, the evaluators will see it."
Thaddeus nodded once. "And if he destabilizes during them?"
"Then we'll see that too," Saelen replied.
No one called that comforting.
Thaddeus stood. The chair creaked under his weight.
"Until then, Mr. Whitlock, consider yourself… provisionally alive."
Adrian stared at him. "Is that the official term?"
"Unofficial," Thaddeus said. His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Officially, you're an unclassified Neophyte under Concord observation. Don't wander. Don't touch anything that hums. Don't try to leave."
"People usually try to leave?"
"Sometimes." Thaddeus's eyes didn't soften. "They don't get far."
Saelen moved toward the door. "We're done?"
"For now." Thaddeus shut the file. "Send me the scans when they're finished. And Saelen—"
She paused.
"Try not to get this one killed," he said. "It's been a while since we had a Channel survivor. I'd like to see how long he lasts."
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. "Your optimism is noted."
"That wasn't optimism."
Godfrey opened the door.
The hallway outside seemed a shade brighter than before, though Adrian couldn't say why.
Saelen stepped out first. Adrian followed, feeling the faint vibration in the floor under his boots—some machine or ritual or thing beneath the Sanctum that never slept.
Godfrey fell into place at his side again.
"What happens now?" Adrian asked.
Saelen looked back at him, silver eyes steady.
"Now," she said, "we see what the Channel made of you."
She turned down the corridor.
Ahead, at the end of the hall, another set of doors waited. Light spilled from the crack beneath them—steady, white, humming with a sound his nerves recognized and did not like.
The evaluators were ready.
Adrian's two heartbeats tried, for a moment, to fall into sync.
They didn't.
He walked toward the light anyway.