The Throne Room did not smell of ozone or magic. It smelled of cheap cologne and old blood—a pedestrian scent for such a catastrophic moment.
Alsys, the smiling guard, wiped his boot on Kai's unconscious chest. He didn't stomp; it was a casual, dismissive motion, like scraping mud off a heel before entering a clean house.
"Well?" Alsys asked, his green eyes dancing between Ogdi and Eloi with predatory delight. "Who wants to be the next example? The Architect? The Ex-Prime Minister? Or..." He winked at Ylaeth, who was trembling, her hands still stained grey from the ritual. "...the lovely battery?"
Ogdi forced air into his lungs. It was like breathing soup. The Lattice in the room felt solidified, heavy, as if the air itself had been replaced with clear concrete. Valerius, the Nullifier, stood by the pillar, his mere presence locking the tumblers of reality, preventing any unauthorized Edits.
"Azad," Ogdi thought, the word screaming in his mind. "Options."
"Zero," Azad's voice was cold, stripped of its usual arrogance. "We are in a Null-Zone. The King has rewritten the local physics. Attempting to Edit reality here will result in a 99% probability of cerebral liquefaction."
"I don't need ninety-nine," Ogdi snarled internally, watching the guard's smile. "I just need one."
King Aethelred descended the final step of the dais. He moved with the terrifying weightlessness of a storm cloud. Above his head, the air shimmered, condensing into a physical shape.
It was a Crown. Not the Crown of Silence that Ylaeth had sacrificed to seal the country—that was just a tool, a battery. This was the Regalia. A jagged halo of pure, golden conceptual light. It was the physical manifestation of the Divine Right to Rule.
"You look confused, Ogdi," the King said softly. He raised a hand, and the golden Crown floated down, resting on his brow.
THOOM.
The moment it touched him, the pressure in the room doubled. Ogdi's knees buckled. It felt like gravity had just decided to hate him specifically.
"You thought the Crown made the King," Aethelred mused, walking closer. "But the King makes the Crown. It is an Anchor. It keeps my soul from scattering when I rewrite the world."
He stopped three feet from Ogdi.
"And you... you are unanchored. You are bleeding out your ears because you try to hold the sky with bare hands. You are an amateur attempting surgery with a rusty spoon."
"Run!" Eloi shouted.
The former Prime Minister pulled a hidden flintlock from his coat—a desperate, mundane weapon—and fired.
BANG.
The bullet struck the air two inches from the King's face and stopped. It didn't fall. It simply ceased to have momentum, hanging in the air like a pinned insect.
"Rude," Alsys laughed.
The guard blurred.
He appeared in front of Eloi, his hand chopping down.
CRACK.
Eloi's collarbone shattered. The old man gasped, falling back, but Alsys caught him by the throat, lifting him one-handed with unnatural ease.
"Don't break the toys, Alsys," the King chided gently. "Eloi is useful. He knows the bureaucracy. We'll need clerks for the new administration."
"Let him go!" Ylaeth screamed.
She raised her hands, trying to summon the threads of the Lattice.
Valerius adjusted his glasses. "Denied."
Ylaeth choked, clutching her chest as her magic backfired, burning her nerves like a live wire. She collapsed, coughing up grey dust.
"Enough," Murik whispered.
The old artist stepped forward. He looked small, frail, his clothes covered in stone dust and charcoal. He wasn't looking at the King. He wasn't looking at Alsys.
He was looking at the floor.
"I never liked this room," Murik mumbled, his voice trembling. "The perspective is all wrong. It's too... convergent."
"Murik, don't," Ogdi rasped, blood bubbling on his lips. He knew that tone. It was the tone of a man finalizing his will.
Murik raised his charcoal stick. It was a stub, barely an inch long.
"I can't fight you," Murik said to the King. "I'm just a painter. But..."
He slammed the charcoal onto the obsidian floor.
"...I can change the scenery."
Concept: Vanishing Point.
Murik didn't draw a picture. He drew a hole in the world.
He dragged the charcoal across the unbreakable obsidian, and the stone screamed. A thick, black line appeared, tearing through the King's imposed reality. The line wasn't just on the floor; it cut through the optical depth of the room.
"Valerius!" the King barked, his calm cracking for a fraction of a second.
"I... I can't anchor it!" Valerius shouted, his eyes widening behind his glasses. "He's not attacking the Lattice! He's attacking the visual cortex! He's making the room 2D!"
The world flattened.
For a dizzying moment, Ogdi felt the depth perceive vanish. He felt like a drawing on a piece of paper. The three-dimensional space collapsed into a flat plane around Murik. The pillars looked like cardboard cutouts. The distance between Ogdi and the King became meaningless.
"Go!" Murik roared, his body turning into ink.
His skin was peeling away, fluttering off like dry parchment. He was burning his own existence to fuel the Edit. His fingers dissolved into black smudge.
A hole opened in the floor beneath Ogdi, Ylaeth, and the unconscious Kai. A dark, swirling drain of ink—a tear in the canvas.
"No escape!" Alsys hissed. The guard lunged, moving faster than the collapsing dimension. He reached for Ogdi's throat.
Ogdi reacted on pure instinct.
He didn't dodge. He couldn't.
He reached out.
Not for Alsys.
For the source of the pressure.
Ogdi's bloody hand slapped against the King's face—no, against the Golden Crown on the King's brow.
The Lattice wants to be held. The Crown was an Anchor. It craved a user who was exerting will.
The King was standing still, secure in his victory. Ogdi was desperate, burning with the will to survive. Ogdi was the active force, he was a drowning man, and the Crown was a life raft.
"Mine," Ogdi snarled.
Exchange.
He didn't have a wish. He didn't have energy. He offered the only thing he had left.
"I offer my name. I offer my anonymity. I will never be safe again. I trade my shadow for your light."
The King's eyes widened in genuine shock.
The Golden Crown shivered. It wasn't a physical object; it was a concept of authority.
The Crown jumped.
It dissolved into golden dust and reformed—instantaneously—around Ogdi's head.
The weight vanished. The crushing gravity that had pinned Ogdi to the floor disappeared, replaced by a surge of cold, absolute stability. He felt the Lattice of the room not as a trap, but as a grid he could navigate.
"You dare—!" the King roared, reaching out, his hands glowing with furious light.
But the floor vanished.
"Go, Architect!" Murik's voice was a whisper of dry paper.
The artist looked at Ogdi one last time. Murik was barely human now—a sketch of a man, half-erased. His eyes were just circles of ink. He smiled.
"Paint something... beautiful."
Alsys's fist connected with Murik's face.
There was no sound of flesh hitting flesh. There was only the sound of paper tearing.
RIIIIIP.
Murik exploded into a cloud of black dust and charcoal fragments.
But he had bought the seconds they needed.
Ogdi, Ylaeth, and Kai fell through the ink-hole in the floor.
The last thing Ogdi saw was King Aethelred standing over the pile of black dust, his face twisted in a rictus of pure, unadulterated hate, and Alsys staring down into the dark, still smiling, casually wiping Murik's remains off his knuckles like graphite dust.
They didn't land. They spilled.
They tumbled out of a storm drain into a pile of refuse in the lowest district of the capital, the Slums of St. Guinefort. The smell of rot and sewage was a welcome mercy compared to the sterile terror of the Throne Room.
Ogdi hit the mud hard, rolling to absorb the impact. The golden halo above his head flickered and vanished, sinking into his skull.
"Kai!" Ylaeth gasped, crawling through the muck.
She reached the thief. Kai was breathing, but his wrist was a ruin of purple flesh and bone splinters.
Ogdi lay on his back, staring up at the sky.
The sky was wrong.
The sun was rising, but it wasn't the sun. It was filtered through the Dome. The barrier they had created. The light was grey, sickly, and dim. It looked like the world was being viewed through a cataract.
They had done it. They had sealed the country.
And they had trapped themselves in the cage with the butcher.
"Murik?" Ylaeth whispered, looking at the drain they had fallen from.
Ogdi sat up. He felt… different. The constant, buzzing noise of the Lattice that usually gave him headaches was gone. It was quiet. The Crown—wherever it was inside him—was filtering the noise. He was anchored.
"Murik didn't make it," Ogdi said. His voice was steady. Too steady. The Crown wouldn't let him shake.
Ylaeth made a sound that was half-sob, half-scream, burying her face in her hands.
"Ogdi," Azad spoke. The entity sounded wary. "Check your status."
Ogdi focused. He felt it. A cold weight in the center of his mind.
Object: The Usurper's Crown.
Status: Integrated.
Effect: Reality Anchor. Allows the user to stabilize Edits without physical backlash, up to a threshold.
Curse: The Beacon. The true King knows where you are whenever you use it.
"We have to move," Ogdi said, standing up. His legs felt like iron. "The King will have the City Watch tearing this district apart in an hour."
"Where do we go?" Ylaeth wept, wiping mud from Kai's face. "The King controls everything. The Castle, the Army, the Lattice..."
Ogdi looked at the grey sky. He looked at the towering spires of the Upper City, where the "purification" would begin. He could already hear the distant bells tolling—not for celebration, but for curfew. A mournful, heavy sound.
"We go down," Ogdi said. "To the places the map forgot. We become the grime he wants to wash away."
He reached down and hoisted Kai onto his shoulder. The thief groaned but didn't wake.
"The First Act is over, Ylaeth," Ogdi said, his eyes flashing with a faint, golden rim. "We tried to save the country from the top down. We failed."
He turned toward the labyrinthine alleyways of the slums.
"Now... we burn it from the bottom up."
…
Three Days Later.
The Capital had changed.
It wasn't a war zone; it was a prison camp disguised as a utopia.
The streets were terrifyingly clean. The beggars were gone. The stray dogs were gone. The graffiti was gone.
In their place were the Pale Coats—state employees. Men and women who had been "assessed" and found useful. They walked with their heads down, brisk, terrified of making a sound.
And on every corner stood a Hollow.
The porcelain soldiers were no longer dormant. They patrolled in pairs, their red eyes scanning the populace for "inefficiencies." The click-clack of their ceramic feet was the new heartbeat of the city.
In a boarded-up cellar beneath a textile factory, the air was thick with the smell of medicinal herbs.
Ogdi sat at a rough wooden table. A map of the city was spread out before him, weighed down by a dagger and a stone.
Kai sat in the corner, his arm in a heavy splint. He was awake, but he hadn't spoken since he woke up. The memory of Alsys snapping his wrist like a twig played on a loop in his eyes. The thief looked broken, his swagger gone.
Ylaeth was brewing tea. She looked older. The riddles were gone. Her silence was heavy.
"Report," Ogdi said.
"The Aristocracy is being dissolved," Eloi said, stepping out of the shadows. The former Prime Minister wore rags now, his fine suit burned. "The King issued a decree this morning. The Meritocracy Act. Titles are void. Wealth is confiscated. Your status is determined solely by your contribution to the Nation."
"And those who don't contribute?" Ogdi asked.
Eloi hesitated. "Recycled. The biological matter is being fed into the Hollow manufactories."
Silence stretched in the cellar. A heavy, suffocating silence.
"He's building an army," Kai rasped, his voice rough. "Why? The country is sealed. Who is he going to fight?"
"Us," Ogdi said. "And eventually, when he breaks the seal... the world."
Ogdi picked up a piece of charcoal—Murik's charcoal, which he had found in his pocket. He stared at it.
"We need soldiers," Ogdi said. "Not an army. An army gets noticed. We need ghosts."
He looked at his companions.
"I can't undo the seal. Not yet. But with this..." He tapped his forehead, where the invisible Crown rested. "...I can share the burden."
He stood up. The golden halo flickered into existence above his head. It was undeniably regal, casting long, sharp shadows in the damp cellar.
"Kneel," Ogdi commanded.
It wasn't arrogance. It was a mechanic. To empower them, he had to appoint them. The Crown demanded hierarchy.
Kai, Eloi, and Ylaeth looked at him. Slowly, hesitantly, they knelt on the dirty floor.
"I don't have land to give you," Ogdi said, his voice echoing with the Lattice's power. "I don't have gold. I have only this war."
He placed his hand on Kai's uninjured shoulder.
"Kai. I appoint you the Knight of Shattered Lives. May your blade never be seen until it is too late."
A surge of golden energy flowed from Ogdi to Kai. The thief gasped. The shadows around him darkened, wrapping around him like a cloak.
Ogdi moved to Ylaeth.
"Ylaeth. I appoint you the Knight of Whispers. Keep the secrets. Bind the silence."
She shuddered as the energy hit her, her eyes glowing with a renewed, violet light.
Ogdi moved to Eloi.
"Eloi. I appoint you the Knight of Scales. Judge the cost. Balance the books."
The old politician straightened, his fatigue washing away, replaced by cold calculation.
Ogdi stepped back. The halo vanished.
He felt the drain immediately. His reserve was lower, but his connection to them was forged. He could feel their location, their status. They were a part of his Lattice now.
"We are the rebellion," Ogdi said. "We are the weeds in his garden."
He drove the dagger into the map, right into the heart of the Royal Palace.
"The King wants a perfect world?" Ogdi whispered. "Let's show him what a mess looks like."