The Peacekeeper was not a gun. It was a syringe made of iron.
Kaelen Vance stood in the shadow of a gargoyle overlooking the Plaza of Industry, the massive weapon heavy in her hand. Below, the Guild Hall rose like a tombstone—a monolith of black granite and reinforced steel that dominated the skyline of Obolus. It was the heart of the city, the seat of Lord Arcanist Sterling's power, and currently, the lid on a coffin that was about to drop into the abyss.
"The perimeter is reinforced," Valerius whispered, crouching beside her. He adjusted the bandage on his shoulder, his face pale and drawn. "I count six Silencers on the steps. Two Battle-Mages on the balcony. And the gates are sealed with a kinetic barrier."
"A kinetic barrier," Kae repeated, her voice hollow. "Gravity magic."
"Sterling knows we're coming. He's hardened the target."
Kae looked down at the Peacekeeper. The revolving cylinder had six chambers. Currently, they were empty. The weapon didn't use gunpowder; it used the psychic weight of the shooter. To fire it, she had to load it. To load it, she had to bleed—not blood, but history.
It's a buffet in reverse, the Voice whispered, sounding intrigued. Usually, we take out. Tonight, we deliver.
"How does it work?" Valerius asked, eyeing the weapon with distrust. To a Luminary, a gun that shot magic was heresy. To a desperate man, it was a necessity.
"Verdigris said it shoots trauma," Kae said. She closed her eyes, focusing on the singing void in her skull.
She didn't reach for the Dreg this time. She reached into the library of her mind—the vast, chaotic archive of every life she had ever stolen. She walked past the memory of her mother's kitchen (locked tight, gathering dust) and found a shelf she hated.
The Banker.
One of her first kills. A man who had foreclosed on an orphanage in the Weeping District not for profit, but for the sheer, cold arithmetic of cruelty. His mind tasted of copper coins and ink.
Kae grabbed the memory. She didn't consume it; she pushed it.
She channeled the essence of the Banker's greed down her arm and into the Peacekeeper.
Click.
A rune on the first chamber flared a sickly green. The gun grew colder.
"One," Kae whispered.
She reached again. The Dockworker from Chapter 1. The brawl. The crunch of cartilage. The smell of cheap gin and regret.
Click. A red rune flared.
"Two."
She reached deeper. The terror of the Mud-Larks in the river. The feeling of being small, wet, and hunted.
Click. A grey rune.
"Three."
"Vance," Valerius warned. "They've spotted us."
Below, a Silencer on the steps had turned his porcelain mask toward their perch. He raised a hand. The gargoyle Kaelen was using for cover exploded into dust.
"Move!" Valerius shouted.
They dropped from the roof, landing in the plaza amidst a shower of stone debris. The six Silencers turned in unison, their movements eerily synchronized. They didn't run; they glided, gravity manipulation allowing them to skim the cobblestones like skaters on ice.
"Hold the line," Kae said, raising the Peacekeeper.
She didn't aim with her eye. She aimed with her mind. She felt the psychic signature of the lead Silencer—a wall of disciplined, repressed emotion.
She pulled the trigger.
There was no bang. There was a sound like a violin string snapping in a quiet room.
A beam of green light erupted from the barrel. It hit the lead Silencer in the chest.
He didn't bleed. He didn't fall back.
He stopped. He dropped his hands. He looked down at his own chest, and then he began to scream.
"My ledger!" the Silencer shrieked, clutching his head. "The numbers don't add up! I'm insolvent! I'm ruined!"
He fell to his knees, clawing at the pavement as if looking for lost coins. The memory of the Banker had overwritten his reality. He wasn't a battle-mage anymore; he was a terrified accountant facing bankruptcy.
"Psychic overlay," Valerius noted, driving his knife into the neck of a second Silencer who had tried to flank them. "Effective."
"And cruel," Kae muttered.
She spun the cylinder. The red rune aligned.
Two more Silencers charged, condensing the air around them into gravity hammers.
Kae fired.
The red beam hit them both—a splash damage effect of pure aggression.
The Silencers stopped charging. They looked at each other. The memory of the drunk Dockworker took hold. The discipline vanished, replaced by a sloppy, brawling rage.
They tackled each other. They began to punch, bite, and gouge, rolling on the ground in a drunken stupor, forgetting they were mages, forgetting they had a job.
"Three down," Valerius counted, kicking a gravity-hammer out of the air before it could crush him. "Three to go. And the barrier."
Kae looked at the massive double doors of the Guild Hall. The air in front of them shimmered with a heavy, distortion field.
"I need a bigger bullet for the door," Kae said.
Use the heavy stuff, the Voice urged. The rejection. The Void.
"No," Kae said. "That's suicide."
Then use the fear, the Voice countered. The fear of the fall.
Kae loaded the third chamber—the Mud-Larks. But she didn't stop there. She reached for the fourth chamber.
She thought of the Spire of Sighs. The moment she broke the glass. The plummet into the dark water. The absolute, paralyzing terror of gravity failing.
Click. A black rune flared.
"Cover me," Kae ordered.
She sprinted toward the stairs.
The remaining Silencers tried to intercept her. Valerius was a blur of motion, using his knife and dirty fighting tactics—throwing dust, tripping, gouging—to keep them occupied. He wasn't winning, but he was buying time.
Kae reached the barrier. The air hummed with enough pressure to crush a tank.
She pressed the muzzle of the Peacekeeper against the distortion field.
"Fall," she whispered.
She pulled the trigger.
The black beam didn't hit a person. It hit the magic itself.
The memory of falling—of gravity failing—infected the barrier. The spell "forgot" which way was down.
The barrier didn't shatter; it inverted.
With a sound like a thunderclap, the gravity field reversed. The heavy iron doors were ripped off their hinges and flung upward, soaring into the sky like leaves in a gale.
The sudden vacuum pulled Kae forward. She stumbled into the Grand Foyer of the Guild Hall.
It was empty.
No guards. No traps.
Just a vast, cavernous hall paved with marble, lit by the cold, blue light of the Prime Geode emanating from the floor below.
But the physics were wrong.
Debris—statues, benches, candelabras—floated in mid-air, drifting lazily as if underwater. The air tasted metallic, like licking a battery.
"Valerius!" Kae called back.
Valerius stumbled through the doorway, bleeding from a fresh cut on his cheek. He looked at the floating furniture.
"The Geode," he rasped. "Sterling is destabilizing the core. The local gravity is fluctuating."
"We need to go down," Kae said, pointing to the central staircase that spiraled into the depths. "To the foundation."
They ran across the foyer, dodging a floating bust of Lord Sterling that drifted past their heads.
As they reached the stairs, a sound stopped them.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Someone was applauding.
Standing on the first landing of the staircase was a figure. It wasn't Sterling.
It was a woman wearing the crimson robes of a High Cleric, but the robes were torn, revealing armor made of black glass underneath. She held a staff topped with a skull that hummed with the same discordant note as the Sleepers.
"High Inquisitor Caligari?" Valerius froze. "You... you're alive?"
The woman lowered her hood. It wasn't Caligari.
It was a woman with mismatched eyes—one blue, one brown. Her face was a patchwork of scars, as if she had been stitched together from different people.
"Caligari is dead," the woman said. Her voice was a chorus of three different people speaking at once. "We are the Mosaic."
"Necromancy," Kae hissed. "Stitched souls."
"Sterling didn't just recycle the White Queen," Valerius realized, his grip on his knife tightening. "He recycled the Council. All of them."
The Mosaic raised her staff.
"The Curator is busy," the collective voice intoned. "He is cataloging the end of the world. No visitors."
She slammed the staff down.
The marble floor beneath Kaelen and Valerius turned to liquid.
It wasn't an illusion. The stone literally melted into quicksand. Kae sank to her knees instantly, the stone gripping her like wet cement.
"Transmutation!" Valerius shouted, trying to pull his legs free. "Don't struggle! It reacts to pressure!"
The Mosaic smiled—a crooked thing, as her lips didn't quite match.
"Burial," she corrected. "At sea."
The liquid stone began to rise, covering Kae's waist. It was heavy, cold, and suffocating.
She's burying us alive, the Voice observed. How claustrophobic. Kaelen, the gun.
"I can't move my arm!" Kae gritted out. The stone was solidifying around her chest.
You don't need to aim with your hand, the Voice whispered. You have the Cipher. You have the Receiver. You can broadcast.
Kae closed her eyes. She felt the heavy iron of the Peacekeeper trapped in the stone by her hip. She couldn't lift it.
But the Cipher in her head was ticking. It was a radio. And Verdigris had said she was the station.
She focused on the gun. She focused on the fifth chamber.
She hadn't loaded it yet.
"Load it," Kae thought.
With what?
Kae thought of the Void. The boy in the chair. The feeling of absolute, crushing insignificance. The feeling of being erased.
She poured that feeling into the gun. Not through her arm, but through the connection of her own Dreg-stained blood.
Click. A white rune flared in the stone.
"Hey, patches!" Kae shouted at the Mosaic.
The woman tilted her head. "Yes?"
"You forgot to stitch your mouth shut."
Kae pulled the trigger.
The gun fired through the stone. The white beam of Void-memory didn't care about matter. It passed through the liquid marble, through the air, and hit the Mosaic in the center of her mismatched forehead.
The woman didn't scream. She didn't fall.
She simply stopped being.
The erasure took hold. First her staff vanished. Then her robes. Then her skin. She didn't dissolve; she was simply edited out of existence. The Void memory deleted her from the narrative of the room.
In the silence that followed, the liquid floor lost its enchantment. It snapped back to solid stone.
Kae gasped as the pressure released, leaving her sitting in a crater of deformed marble. Valerius pulled himself free, coughing dust.
"What was that?" Valerius asked, staring at the empty space where the Mosaic had stood. "That wasn't a memory."
"That was a zero," Kae said, holstering the Peacekeeper. Her hand was shaking. "I shot her with nothing."
Dangerous, the Voice whispered, sounding awed. If you use that too much, you'll erase yourself.
"Let's go," Kae said, standing up. "Before he drops the curtain."
They descended the stairs.
The air grew hotter as they went down. The blue light of the Geode grew brighter, pulsing with a rhythmic thrum that matched the beating of Kae's heart.
They reached the doors to the Prime Chamber. They were open.
Inside, the Prime Geode—a massive crystal the size of a cathedral dome—hung suspended over a pit of infinite darkness.
The crystal was cracked.
And standing on top of it, holding a sledgehammer made of solid gold light, was Sterling.
He looked up as they entered. He was burnt, bleeding, and smiling.
"Just in time," Sterling called out, his voice echoing over the abyss. "I saved you a seat."
He raised the hammer.
"Don't!" Valerius screamed, sprinting forward.
Sterling swung.
CRACK.
The hammer hit the crystal.
The sound wasn't loud. It was a frequency that snapped the bones in Kaelen's ears.
The Geode shattered.
And then, gravity didn't just fail. It died.
Kaelen's feet left the floor. Valerius floated upward. The rocks, the dust, the air itself—everything detached from the earth.
Obolus began to fall. Not down.
But in.