Ren woke up to the smell of ozone and watered-down mushroom soup.
He blinked, staring at a ceiling of rough-hewn stone that dripped condensation. For a moment, panic seized his chest—the familiar, suffocating fear of the classroom, the bus, the ravine. He thrashed, his hand instinctively reaching for a sketchbook that wasn't there, his lungs gasping for air that didn't smell like bleach.
"Easy, Picasso," a voice rumbled.
Ren froze. He was lying on a cot in a long, dimly lit tunnel. The walls were lined with hammocks and sleeping bags, strung up like spiderwebs. It looked less like a military base and more like a refugee camp for ghosts.
Kai was sitting on a crate nearby, sharpening a dagger with a rhythmic shhhk-shhhk sound. The Knight of Shattered Lives wasn't wearing his scarf now. His face was young but scarred, a jagged line running from his jaw to his ear.
Ren noticed something else: Kai wore a heavy leather brace on his right wrist, reinforced with metal splints. His movements were precise, but there was a stiffness to them—a permanent reminder of the bone Alsys had snapped.
"You've been out for twelve hours," Kai said, inspecting the blade's edge against the light. "Your ribs are taped up. Drink this."
He tossed a battered canteen. Ren caught it, wincing as his side flared with sharp, hot pain. The water tasted metallic, like it had been filtered through rusty pipes, but it was clean.
"Where... exactly are we?" Ren asked, sitting up and wiping his mouth.
"Sector Zero," Kai said. "The Decision Point. The only place in Oravus where the King's eyes don't reach."
Kai stood up and holstered his dagger.
"Come on. The Architect wants to see the new recruits. And you need to see where you're going to live for the next... well, for a long time."
Ren followed Kai through the labyrinth.
The Decision Point was massive. It wasn't just a sewer; it was an ancient, subterranean cistern system that had been repurposed into a functioning city. The air was thick and humid, carrying the scent of unwashed bodies, machine oil, and hope.
They passed the Hydroponics Bay. It was a cavern filled with rows of glowing purple fungi and pale, sun-starved vegetables growing in tiered wooden boxes. Ultraviolet lamps, scavenged from the factories above, bathed the room in a harsh, humming artificial light.
"We don't steal food anymore," Kai explained, seeing Ren staring at a massive, pulsating mushroom. "Too risky. Eloi—the Knight of Scales—he set this up. We grow our own. It tastes like dirt and batteries, but it keeps you fighting."
They passed the Armory. It wasn't filled with guns. It was filled with trash. Scraps of Hollow armor, broken pipes, glass shards.
Men and women were welding pieces of porcelain onto leather jackets, the sparks flying like fireflies. Others were grinding glass into dust to coat their blades. The sound was a high-pitched scream of metal on stone.
"We use what they throw away," Kai said. "A Hollow's armor is ceramic. It shatters if you hit the resonance point, but it turns a blade if you don't. We teach you to find the frequency."
Ren looked at the people. They were thin, pale, and covered in grime. But their eyes…
In the city above, the eyes of the Pale Coats were dead fish. Here, the eyes were burning. There was fear, yes, but there was no resignation. They moved with a kinetic energy that felt dangerous.
"Why is everyone moving so... fast?" Ren asked.
He noticed it. People were walking with purpose. Conversations were rapid-fire. There was a sense of urgency that didn't match the stillness of the underground.
Kai stopped in front of a massive, circular iron door.
"Ren, what year is it?"
Ren frowned. "It's the Year of the Silver Dawn. Month 6 since the Dome."
Kai smiled grimly. "Up there? Yes. Six months."
He pointed to a large, intricate clock mounted on the wall next to the door. It had two faces.
The face on the left was moving normally. Tick. Tock.
The face on the right was spinning so fast it was a low hum. The hands were a blur of motion.
"We call that the Relativity Gauge," Kai said. "The King locked the country in a time-space bubble to isolate us. But time is flexible. It stretches when you compress space."
Kai leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper.
"One hour outside the Dome is one week inside the it."
Ren's jaw dropped. He looked at the spinning clock. He did the math in his head, and the numbers made him nauseous.
"So... if the outside world waits a day to react..."
"We live through twenty-four weeks," Kai finished. "Almost six months."
Ren felt dizzy. The scale of it hit him like a physical blow. The outside world—the Alliance, the neighboring countries—they were moving in slow motion. They were statues. A blink of an eye for them was a lifetime in Oravus.
"It's a curse," Kai said, staring at the clock with a mix of hatred and respect. "We age faster than the rest of the planet. By the time the Dome falls, I'll be an old man. My little sister... she'll be older than our mother was when she died."
He turned to Ren, his eyes fierce.
"But it's also a weapon. We have time. We have time to train. We have time to plan. We have fourteen years of internal time for every hour of external hesitation."
Kai pushed the heavy iron door open.
"And the Architect intends to use every second."
The War Room was the brain of the organism.
It was a circular chamber dominated by a massive table covered in maps, blueprints, and mana-density charts.
Eloi Raventhir stood at one end, arguing with a group of scouts. The former Prime Minister looked different. The soft bureaucrat was gone. He wore a heavy trench coat, his sleeves rolled up, revealing forearms stained with ink and grease. He looked like a man who was holding a collapsing economy together with duct tape and willpower.
"We can't hit the Supply Depot in Sector 7 yet," Eloi was saying, slamming a ruler onto the map. "The risk-to-reward ratio is negative. We lose three operatives to gain a week's worth of batteries. Denied."
"But we're dark in the West Tunnels!" a scout argued.
"Then learn to see in the dark," Eloi snapped. "Next."
On the other side of the room, Ylaeth was mediating. She was floating cross-legged in the air, her eyes closed, holding a conversation with three people simultaneously without opening her mouth.
"The frequency of the patrol rotations has shifted," her voice projected into Ren's mind, clear as a bell, making him jump. "Adjust the stealth corridors by forty meters north. The Hollows are listening to the floor vibrations."
And in the center of it all sat Ogdi.
Ren stopped breathing.
He had seen pictures of Ogdi Num on the "Wanted" posters plastered all over the city. The Terrorist. The Saboteur. The Traitor.
The man sitting at the table didn't look like a terrorist. He looked like a statue that was slowly cracking under immense pressure.
Ogdi was staring at a holographic projection of the Royal Castle. He wasn't moving. He wasn't blinking.
Ren squinted.
His vision shifted. The "Artist's Eye" that had gotten him labeled as useless took over.
The room faded to grey. The maps, the people, the stone walls—they all lost their color.
But Ogdi... Ogdi blazed.
Above Ogdi's head, Ren saw it. A jagged, screaming halo of golden light. It wasn't just light; it was structure. It looked like heavy, physical golden chains were draped around Ogdi's neck, anchoring him to the floor, to the table, to the very reality of the room.
And connecting to that halo were thousands of thin, silver threads. They stretched out through the walls, vanishing into the ceiling.
"He's... carrying the ceiling," Ren whispered, horrified.
Kai looked at him. "What?"
"The threads," Ren murmured, entranced. "He's tied to everyone. He's holding the weight of the whole city. If he moves... the roof collapses."
At that moment, Ogdi turned.
His eyes—rimmed with gold—locked onto Ren.
The intensity was physical. Ren felt like he had just walked into a high-pressure wind tunnel. The air around Ogdi vibrated with the silent roar of the Lattice.
"Kai," Ogdi said. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the noise of the room instantly. Everyone stopped talking. Even Eloi looked up.
"You brought the Spotter."
"Ren Vance, sir," Kai said, nudging Ren forward. "Pulled him from a transport to the Kiln."
Ogdi stood up. The golden chains Ren saw rattled, though no one else heard them. Ogdi walked around the table. He moved with a heavy, deliberate gait, as if the air was water and he was wading upstream.
"You see them, don't you?" Ogdi asked, stopping two feet from Ren.
Ren swallowed. "See what, sir?"
"Don't lie to me, boy. The threads. The Crown."
Ren nodded slowly. "It... it looks heavy."
A flicker of surprise crossed Ogdi's face. Then, a dry, tired smile.
"It is."
Ogdi turned to the map. He picked up a piece of chalk.
"They tell me you have an eye for structural weakness," Ogdi said. "That you can see where the paint is peeling."
He pointed to the holographic map of the Royal Castle—the King's fortress.
"Tell me, Ren. Look at this."
Ren stepped up to the table. He looked at the projection of the Castle. It was a masterpiece of magical architecture. The Central Tower, the Throne Room, the spiraling ramparts.
But Ren didn't look at the stone. He looked at the color.
Most of the castle was a solid, impenetrable black. The King's authority was absolute there. The Lattice was perfectly knit.
But there were spots. Tiny, faint discolorations.
"There," Ren pointed to a section near the aqueducts. "The color is... thin. It vibrates."
"The sewage outflow," Eloi muttered. "We ruled that out. Too heavily grated. Sensors every three meters."
"No," Ren said, his confidence growing as he focused on the visual data. "It's not the grate. It's the shadow. The shadow doesn't match the light source."
Ogdi leaned in. "Explain."
"The Lattice there," Ren stammered, using the word he had heard the adults use. "It's... stretched. Like canvas that's been pulled too tight over a frame. If you poke it, it won't break. It will tear."
Ogdi looked at Ylaeth.
Ylaeth opened her eyes. They were glowing violet.
"He's right," she whispered. "The King expanded the Throne Room's defenses last month. He pulled the spatial density from the lower foundations to reinforce the top. The aqueduct region is structurally distinct. It's brittle."
Ogdi looked back at Ren. For the first time, the golden eyes weren't terrifying. They were approving.
"You found a door where we saw a wall," Ogdi said.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a small, metal badge. It was crude, stamped from scrap metal, but it bore the symbol of the rebellion: a broken crown.
"We don't have uniforms," Ogdi said, echoing Kai's words. "And we don't have a school. But we have a job."
He tossed the badge to Ren.
"Welcome to the Architects, Ren. Your job isn't to fight. Your job is to tell us where to hit."
Ren was assigned a bunk in Section 4.
That night—or what passed for night in the underground—he couldn't sleep. The air was too still. The silence was too loud.
He sat on the floor, his back against the cold stone, sketching in a new notebook Kai had scavenged for him.
He drew the Clock. The Relativity Gauge.
He drew the face that spun like a fan—the time inside.
Fourteen years.
If the world outside waited just one month to decide what to do about the missing country, Ren would be thirty-one years old by the time the sun came back. He would lose his youth to a war the world hadn't even noticed yet.
He looked at his hands. They were stained with charcoal.
"Fourteen years," he whispered to the dark.
He thought about the King sitting on his throne, immortal and unchanging. He thought about the Hollows patrolling the silent streets above.
And he thought about Ogdi, the man with the invisible chains, holding the ceiling up so they could all breathe.
Ren dipped his charcoal in water and began to shade the drawing.
He drew the Clock, but he added something. He drew vines growing over it. He drew the hands of the clock turning into daggers.
Time is a weapon, Kai had said.
Ren looked at his drawing.
"Then we're going to sharpen it," he murmured.
He closed the book.
For the first time in six months, Ren didn't dream of the grey city. He dreamed of a storm. A storm of colors—gold, violet, and blood red—rising from the sewers to swallow the sky.
And in the center of the storm, he saw himself, not hiding, but painting the path for the lightning.