A stillness settled, thick and cold, in the cramped chamber. Every surface felt coated in the Evermist’s breath, a presence Rhys had known since birth. In the deepest hours, when Gloomhollow finally slept, the world held its breath.
Then, a faint discord. Not a sound, but a ripple through the Mist itself. A tremor in the delicate currents that flowed through the settlement’s fractured walls, even into Rhys’s solitary space.
Eyes snapped open. A cool dread prickled along Rhys’s spine.
Rising like a whisper, Rhys moved. Steps silent as falling ash. The gaze fixed on the heavy plasteel door.
This room, barely large enough for two prone forms, had no windows. Only that door, its worn handle a dark promise.
Holding breath, Rhys watched. Waiting.
*Click. Click.*
The metallic whisper of a turning handle. Loud, despite its faintness, in the pre-dawn quiet. Each turn an echo against Rhys’s awareness.
*Thunk.*
The lock mechanism surrendered. A narrow gap opened, a sliver of deeper gloom peering in.
Shadow shifted in the opening. A hand appeared, grasping a scavenged shiv, the blade a cruel sliver of adult’s forearm-length steel.
Unaccustomed to the perpetual dimness within, the intruder edged inside. Feeling his way, a phantom against the Evermist’s embrace.
Rhys remained frozen. A silent sentinel, observing. Every detail, every shift of the Mist, registered.
Oblivious, the man stepped further. Closer.
Then.
*Snap!* A faint sound. A tripwire, carefully strung, yielded underfoot.
*Thud!* A choked cry tore through the quiet.
A dull thud and the intruder’s pained gasp erupted as one.
A crude dart, tipped with rusted metal, jutted from the man’s side. Designed to launch from a spring-trap, activated by the slight tension of a thread.
He had paid the price for his carelessness.
“Agh! What…?” The man writhed, a dark shape on the grimy floor.
Rhys moved. A coiled spring uncoiling. Propelling from the shadows, landing astride the man’s chest.
Seizing the dropped shiv, the blade was pressed, cold and unforgiving, against the man’s throat.
His eyes, wide with disbelief, stared up at Rhys.
“Gah! You little…!”
“Thought I heard a rat scratching at my door,” Rhys murmured, voice low. “Just Kael from the next burrow.”
Kael. Rhys knew him. A face often seen, often avoided, in the narrow passages of Gloomhollow.
His eyes, even in passing, held a hungry malice that had settled deep in Rhys’s memory.
A hand, calloused from scavenging, tapped Kael’s cheek. “Isn’t it a bit much, Kael? Robbing your neighbors?”
“Rob? In this hole? You scrawny pest! Let go. You know who my kin is?” Kael spat, defiance warring with fear.
“How could I? Tell me, Kael.” Rhys’s grip on the shiv did not waver.
“He’s Mist-Touched. A wielder of the Whispering Winds.”
A bitter laugh escaped Rhys. “A Mist-Touched’s brother, living in this squalor? Lies should at least taste real.”
“It’s true! I’m here… temporarily.”
“Then act like it,” Rhys countered, leaning closer, the shiv pressing harder. “Don’t slink in here to take from a child, Kael.”
“Ha! Damn it! How could I just leave it, when I saw a glimmer-stone right there?”
“You saw it?” Rhys clicked a tongue, irritation stinging.
A small glimmer-stone. A rare find, scavenged from a forgotten crack in the settlement’s foundations. Rhys had been examining its dim, internal light, mesmerized by its strange beauty. Kael must have peered through the door’s crack, catching the faint glow.
Foolish. Rhys cursed the lapse in caution. In Gloomhollow, a lower tier clinging to the underside of the true sky-city, rules bent to raw need. No justice, only strength. Weakness invited prey.
Rhys knew this. Born and raised in the neglected depths, survival was the only law. Scavenging, stealth, silent footsteps – these were the only lessons learned. The faint gleam of the glimmer-stone had been a momentary indulgence, a luxury of wonder Rhys couldn’t afford.
Briefly, Rhys considered Kael’s fate. If his brother truly was Mist-Touched, a powerful Solas, there would be repercussions.
Then, Kael’s eyes glittered with a sudden, venomous cunning.
*Swoosh!* A smaller, sharper blade materialized in his hand, drawn from a sleeve. A last resort.
“Die, you brat!” Kael roared, twisting, swinging the hidden dagger.
Rhys recoiled, a blur of motion. Evading the wild strike. Kael pressed the attack, eyes burning with a desperate, murderous intent. The glimmer-stone, the thrill of blood — it consumed him.
“Agh!” Rhys grunted, grappling, pushing against Kael’s sudden surge of strength. The small room became a maelstrom of desperate struggle.
*Plop!* A wet, sickening sound. A blade piercing flesh.
“Argh!” Kael’s scream was cut short. He crumpled, the original shiv, now back in Rhys’s hand, buried deep in his chest.
His gaze, fixed on Rhys, held a flicker of utter disbelief before it glazed over. Kael shuddered, then stilled. His breath hitched, then ceased.
“Damnation.”
Rhys sagged to the floor. The world spun. This was new. This was different.
The chill of the shiv entering Kael’s flesh, the sudden resistance, the way his body had gone limp – it was all too vivid, too real.
“Why, Kael? Why did you have to come in?” The words were a ragged whisper, a plea to the unhearing dead.
Rhys stared at the body. A cold certainty settled.
In Gloomhollow, one learned. Learned that survival meant compromise, sacrifice, and sometimes, unimaginable acts. The knowledge of having to kill, one day, had always been a distant shadow. Never expected to arrive so brutally, so soon.
Rhys forced the shock down. Solas. Kael’s brother. A Mist-Touched of the Whispering Winds. He would come. The dead could not be hidden indefinitely in this warren of close quarters.
Better to leave the body. Better to disappear. Swift action, born of desperation.
The decision made, Rhys moved with renewed urgency. The outer latch of the plasteel door was secured. Then, Rhys slipped into the labyrinthine darkness of Gloomhollow.
---
“Damn him! A true Mist-Touched. Solas of the Whispering Winds. How could my luck be so foul?”
Rhys muttered, the words lost in the rumble of the Mist-Crawler’s engines. The vehicle, a hulking construct of riveted steel plates, lumbered through the swirling Evermist beyond Gloomhollow’s protective domes.
Solas, Kael’s brother, *was* a genuine Mist-Touched. Not just any. A Tier B. A practitioner of the potent Whispering Winds, a force known for its destructive grace. Even a low-tier Mist-Touched was a matter of life or death for the un-touched. A Tier B was akin to the old legends of demigods.
Among the few hundred Mist-Touched dwelling in the heart of Aethelgard’s sky-cities, Tier B was a distinction held by barely a handful. For someone like Rhys, born into Gloomhollow’s forgotten corners, a Tier B Mist-Touched was nobility, a force of nature.
Capture meant more than death. Solas, enraged by his brother’s demise, cared nothing for Kael’s thieving attempt. His brother, gone at the hands of a mere Mist-dweller. The affront was unforgivable.
“Today, I flee like a wraith in the Mist. But I will return. Solas, I swear it.”
Solas. A wielder of air itself, of sound, of pressure. A tempest in human form. And like Rhys, Solas knew the lower tiers. He understood the hidden paths, the desperate bolt-holes. He had mapped out Rhys’s potential escapes.
Cornered, Rhys had little choice. The Mist-Crawler. An armored transport, running from the fringes of the sky-city to the deep, treacherous Evermist-Shrouded Mines, seventy kilometers distant.
Outside the sky-city’s jurisdiction, Solas’s power would be diluted. His ability to track, hampered by the dense, sentient Evermist that ruled the outer lands.
*Never thought I’d take this path voluntarily.* Rhys bit a lip, a metallic tang of blood in the mouth.
Beyond the sky-city’s glowing walls lay the Evermist. An endless, shifting gray ocean. Here, the sentient Mist held absolute dominion. No blades of grass, only ancient ruins swallowed whole.
Peril lurked everywhere. Mist-Wraiths, drawn to the unwary, dissolved flesh and bone. Gloom-Crawlers, creatures born of the Mist’s deepest, most corrupted currents, scuttled and preyed. Even bands of desperate wanderers, preying on those who traversed the routes between settlements.
Safety was a myth. That was why the desperate, the poor, the abandoned, clung to the sky-city’s neglected underskirts. The Mist-spawn dared not approach too close to the sky-city’s luminous barriers. It offered a thin, threadbare protection.
But with Solas hunting, Gloomhollow offered no refuge. It became a cage.
“Damn it! If only I had been truly Mist-Touched…”
A century ago, the Great Descent had birthed the Evermist, transforming Aethelgard. Most of humanity perished. Survivors clung to elevated bastions. And from their ranks, a fraction emerged, touched by the Mist, imbued with its power. The Mist-Touched.
They became the architects of the new world, the wielders of its fundamental force. Even the lowest tier of Mist-Touched were given sanctuary, privilege. Compared to them, Rhys was less than a ghost. If Rhys vanished into the Mist, no one would mourn.
Ultimately, the Mist-Shrouded Mines. A place where the Evermist was densest, richest in glimmer-stones. The energy from these stones kept the sprawling sky-cities alive.
Mining them was brutal. Tunnels, narrow and winding. Pickaxes, swung by hand. Lives, lost continuously. Always a need for labor.
The sky-city cared little for who boarded the Mist-Crawler to the mines. No questions asked. No identities checked. Just warm bodies for the dark depths.
This was Rhys’s only exit. The only way to outrun Solas.
*No matter what, I’ll survive. I’ll make my way in the mines. And then, I’ll have my vengeance on Solas.*
As Rhys watched the churning grey outside the plasteel window, the Mist-Crawler filled. All miners. Faces etched with hardship and resignation.
“Hey, kid! You heading to the mines, too?”
A hulking form next to Rhys rumbled, a voice like gravel. Broad shoulders, scarred hands. A man made for brute labor.
“What of it?” Rhys’s response was clipped, guarded.
“Got a fierce glint, you do. But watch yourself in the mines.” The man’s eyes lingered, a slow, appraising gaze.
“Why?” Rhys asked, a knot tightening in the stomach.
“That place… plenty of men who’d fancy a soft boy like you. Heheheh!” A crude chuckle escaped him. His gaze, heavy and possessive, moved from Rhys’s face down the lean frame.
*This foul beast.* Rhys knew that look. Gloomhollow was rife with such hunger, often directed at Rhys’s slender form, the features too finely drawn. Only Rhys’s constant vigilance, the feral edge, had kept the vultures at bay.
Rhys’s hand instinctively tightened on the worn hilt of the shiv, still hidden beneath the tattered cloak. The blade, still sticky with Kael’s blood, felt cool and solid beneath the fingers.