Chapter 2: Ashes and Iron

The ash didn’t fall like snow. It stuck to the air, hung in it like a heavy fog, and curled into your lungs until you coughed up bits of the planet itself. In the Hollow Wards, the ash was a constant—an invisible killer you couldn’t see, but always felt. By the time Adam reached Sector 9, his mask filter was already sputtering.

The tremor had started during the second shift bell. Not unusual at first. The ground was always angry in Virelia. But this one had a rhythm to it. Not like the usual groans from the planet’s core. This felt patterned, almost like breathing.

Kael had noticed it too. The same Kael whose voice could still a crowd and silence even the more brutal handlers with just a glance.

"Shut down the southern vents," Kael had said. His voice carried the same calm urgency that made everyone act. "Now. Before the ash gets into the Wards."

So Adam ran.

Each level he passed grew darker. The power grid had been unstable for weeks, flickering like the dying heartbeat of a god too tired to hold this planet together. Kids younger than him were crying near collapsed carts. Slag ore lay scattered, still warm from the disruption. Emergency lights blinked uselessly against the dark.

Sector 9 had once been a manufacturing annex before it was converted into overflow housing. Most of the families here were displaced from deeper quakes. Now they lived lower than even the Hollow Wards—a pit beneath the pit.

Adam jumped over a fallen beam and ducked under a chain of broken piping. He reached the control terminal—cracked, dented, but still glowing faintly. He input Kael’s bypass code and forced the southern vents to seal.

For a moment, the tunnel went quiet.

Then the screaming started.

Not human.

Something was caught in the filtration system.

It screeched like metal being torn in half, but there was movement too. A blur. The ash didn’t settle. It rose.

Adam backed away slowly. He had seen things in this world—shadows that moved on their own. Miners who wandered too deep and came back wrong, their eyes hollow, muttering about the "Echo beneath the Stone."

He turned and sprinted.

He kept one hand on his pocket the whole way back, where the glowing shard from Shaft 14 pulsed faintly through the fabric. He hadn’t let it go since slipping it past the armored guard back in Sector 5.

By the time he returned to the Hollow Wards, Toka was already waiting at the bunk.

"You look like shit, Adam."

He collapsed onto the cot, lungs burning. “Vent nearly failed. Southern line.”

Toka tossed him a wrapped piece of fungus bread. “Yeah, I figured. Got the aftershock here. Almost lost my teeth.”

Bren sat cross-legged on the floor, goggles still on, soldering wires from a scavenged device he insisted would become a working map drone. He had stripped a personal assistant unit from the Authority’s scrap pile and replaced its head with a flashlight. The thing twitched occasionally.

“It screamed,” Adam said.

Bren looked up. “Who?”

“The vent. Or something inside it. It wasn’t mechanical.”

Kael entered, wiping black grease from his palms. “Then it’s starting.”

Toka raised an eyebrow. “You mean the rebel whispers, or the actual end of our lives?”

Kael dropped an old datapad onto the table between them. It buzzed before displaying a flickering schematic of Virelia’s understructure.

“That quake wasn’t natural. It was triggered. A controlled detonation. They’re opening the Vault again.”

Adam sat up. “I thought the Vault was sealed. Omega code.”

“It was,” Kael said. “Until now.”

That night, the lights in the Hollow Wards went out for six full minutes.

That never happened.

In that blackout, something walked through the steam tunnels. People heard it. Some saw it. No one spoke of it afterward. But the next morning, one of the Authority checkpoints was empty. No blood. No struggle. Just a melted helmet and a quiet unease.

Adam couldn’t sleep.

He sat outside the bunk, back against a vent, staring at the flickering mural of the two suns. One red. One gold. A symbol that had shown up in the Vault schematics Kael uncovered.

He remembered the boy from Chapter 1, the one who traded him a cracked medallion. That symbol was on it too.

The gold sun looked eerily like the one in the Vault blueprints.

Adam looked at the shard again. It glowed faintly, like it remembered being part of something greater. Like it wanted to go home.

The wind shifted.

Eve, he thought. That name again.

He didn’t know where it had first entered his mind. Maybe from the murmurs in the old terminals. Maybe the graffiti. Maybe the dreams.

The shard pulsed once in his palm, cold as frost.

Behind him, Bren stirred. “Can’t sleep either?”

“Too much ash in the air.”

Bren nodded. “You ever wonder what came before? Before the Wards, before the Baron, before all of this.”

Adam didn’t respond. Not because he didn’t know, but because he wondered that every single day.

He closed his fist around the shard.

Tomorrow, they would enter the Vault. Not because they were ready.

But because something inside it was already waiting.