The tremor sent a shiver in the stone beneath my boots, faint but undeniable.
I froze, my lantern staff raised, as the path groaned around me. Dust sifted down in soft, deliberate cascades, and the hair on my arms stood on end. I looked around at the other commuters, none showed any sign of concern nor panic. They all went about their way as if nothing had occurred. The quake was mild — nothing like the calamities I’d seen a few chrokars ago, when the capital Karkarus suffered its worst quake in living memory — but it was enough to stop me dead in my tracks.
The old miners used to say that Lytheos of the Molten Heart, breathed through these quakes. A warning to the foolish who dare to forget who owns the world.
I muttered the words they used in prayer, though I meant them as defiance rather than devotion. “When Lytheos breathes, we breathe. When Lytheos feasts, we feast. When Lytheos sleeps, we sleep…” I tightened my grip on the staff, and pressed forward.
A bridge drew me into the rough neighbourhood of Pheseus. Rust-eaten pipes ran like veins along the walls, dripping with condensation. The air smelled of oil, machine grease and mould. Forgotten vents murmured with breath from somewhere deeper, cycling stale drafts through bronze grilles.
Overhead, copper conduits thrummed faintly with power, though the lamps they fed, many were long dead, leaving only my staff to glow against the dominating dark. Shadows fell across mosaics of worn and cracked tiles underfoot, as men and women with lamps on their heads jostled to avoid the mechanical beasts treading to predestined waypoints, steam valves hissing.
I meandered because a faster pace would incite scrutiny, the formation of questions in the minds of security patronii… accusations of wrong doing.
The capital Karkarus, the deepest city of all the Geotheocracy, folded around me in layers of stone and steel, its streets breathing like a living thing, too old to care who it harboured within its lungs. Prayer wheels rattled in alcoves where votaries pressed their foreheads raw against basalt. The air tasted of oil, incense, and damp. I kept my head low and my pace uneven, letting the crowd carry me while my heart hammered, almost loud enough to betray me.
Everywhere, the city watched, a hydra of eyes embedded in every nook and corner, scanning, sending pixels to the divine authorities.
The ancient quarters were swollen with bodies from all corners of the Geotheocracy. Pilgrims in mineral-stained robes stitched with devotional glyphs brushed past armoured political thugs and mesh-backed clerks. Neonite-clad elites mingled with near-naked memory scribes. Enslaved machine-men clanked along prescribed lanes, their joints clicking with each obedient step, faces smooth and expressionless except for the faint glow behind their eyes that marked leased cognition. Silphe skittered between vendors and buyers, insect pets trained to mimic humans, their black chitin polished.
Above us all, the Archurch bells began to toll.
The sound was not merely heard but felt, a pressure wave rolling through the vaults, almost vibrating bone. Each strike carried official state doctrine. Each echo named a crime. Somewhere, a sentence was being passed. Somewhere, an iron cage was being raised. I did not need to see it to know.
Geotheocratic patrols thickened as the bells rang.
Quadrals.
Their helmets reflected street light in rigid planes, eyes hidden behind lenses. They moved with indifference, hands resting on shock-rods and scripture-stamped rifles.
Fanatics.
A quadral passed close enough that I caught the scent of their armour, sanctified oil laced with the chemical extracted from the skin of bloodglass. One of them turned their head slightly, and for a heartbeat I was certain they were looking directly at me.
I ducked into a side passage before the certainty could become fact.
The street narrowed, then widened again into a market hollow carved from older stone. Vendors were packing up in haste, muttering prayers as they shuttered stalls. Word was travelling faster than feet. Arrests. Public judgements. Heretics dragged from their homes before dawn. The government did not need to shout. It whispered, and the whispers were enough.
I felt it then, that familiar tightening behind the ribs, the pressure that came whenever my thoughts strayed too far. Impending panic.
Karkarus was not merely a place; it was an instrument of devotion, located deep in the crushing dark of the lowest strata, where the heat of the world’s heart bled through the stone. It began as a monastery, a desperate sanctuary carved by ancient ascetics who sought closer communion with Lytheos.
Tens of thousands of chrokars later, waves of pilgrimages and migrations established Karkarus as the heart of the faithful. Atomics blasted out a dense lattice of tunnels, chambers, and vaults that could withstand the world’s trembling long after the old capital of Santhos fell to ruin. Now it stands as a titanic cathedral-city, a hive of ten million souls etching out a living at the centre of the known world.
I passed a shrine where a local man knelt, his hands blistered raw, murmuring thanks to Lytheos for sparing him from death on that high tide. His gratitude curdled something in me. Not envy. Grief. We had been taught to thank the stone god for not killing us.
The bells struck again. Closer now. Louder.
I broke into a run, abandoning any pretense. Boots slapped wet stone. A Silphe, a dark, tall and brown variety from Tikon, burst from behind a crate and scattered, its wings rasping in alarm. Someone shouted behind me, not a command, just surprise. I did not look back.
Looking back had never saved anyone.
The street rose and fell in shallow terraces, each level marking a different era of construction. Atomic blasted stone gave way to older masonry, then back again. I brushed past a column etched with the names of rulers long dead, their letters softened by centuries of touch.
Another quadral patrolled ahead, forcing the crowd to split. I slipped with the flow, shoulder grazing a woman whose eyes were red from weeping. For a moment, our gazes met, and I saw my own fear reflected there, stripped of ambiguity.
The city watched. The city listened.
I felt it most keenly as I neared the Carcerium district, where the air itself seemed heavier, saturated with judgement. Chains clinked somewhere in the air above, the sound carried through load-bearing ribs of the dome. My pace slowed despite myself. Some part of me wanted to turn away, to pretend ignorance was still an option. But ignorance had resulted in the enslavement of an entire empire, the outlawing of knowledge...
I thought of forbidden texts sealed behind law and under pain of death, of maps redacted into nonsense. Of fables that refused to die no matter how often they were declared false. I thought of how many truths had been strangled quietly so the Geotheocracy could keep breathing.
The bells fell silent at last, leaving a ringing void in their wake. In that silence, my own breath sounded obscene, loud and unregulated. I pressed a hand to my chest and kept moving.
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