Chapter 5: Cracks in the World

The rain drummed a steady rhythm on the old glass windows of Yahya Kasim's small apartment. It had been hours since the team had disbanded for the night, but Yahya found himself unable to rest. The file on the Circle of Sorn lay open on the table, its pages scattered in a chaotic heap, like fragments of a past he couldn't outrun. The world had changed, and so had he—war had seen to that.

Yahya stood by the window, his reflection blurred against the rain-soaked cityscape of Cinderfire. The city was alive beneath the darkened skies, its gothic spires reaching into the clouds like skeletal fingers. The constant fog combined with the factory smoke made everything seem surreal, almost dreamy. He lit a cigarette, illuminating his face from years of battle and reminiscing about his past before the world's collapse and his current state.

The war had begun like a storm no one saw coming. What had started as a territorial dispute between the eastern and northern territories had spiralled into a full-scale war, dragging in every nation? The Empire, mighty and proud, had been confident in victory. They had the wealth, the technology, and the manpower. But they had underestimated the cost.

Yahya had been young when he enlisted. A hotheaded idealist, eager to serve his country. He remembered the parades, the banners, and the speeches about honour and sacrifice. They had sold the war to men like him as a righteous cause, something worth dying for. And he had believed it—at least, at the start.

But those illusions had been snatched away on the battlefield. Early in the conflict, Yahya's battalion was deployed to the front lines, where they witnessed the atrocities of contemporary combat. With the constant roar of artillery in the distance, the odour of death in the air, and trenches buried deep in the burnt dirt. The muck had devoured their boots, and their spirits had followed shortly after. 

The real turning point came during the "Final Push," a moment etched into the nation's collective memory. The government had developed a weapon, something that would end the war once and for all. A marvel of science, they called it—a beacon of hope. But those who had been there knew the truth. It had been a device of unimaginable destruction, one that tore apart the very fabric of the world.

Yahya had been there, on the front lines when they deployed it. A weapon they said would bring peace but instead brought annihilation. The land had cracked beneath it, and the sky had turned to fire. Entire cities vanished, swallowed whole by the aftermath, and countless soldiers—on both sides—were vaporized. The war had ended, but it had taken so much more than lives. It had shattered whatever innocence Yahya had left, along with any belief that victory had been worth the price.

Yahya exhaled a cloud of smoke, his mind still stuck in those moments. He could still see the men's shocked looks as they realised what they had unleashed, felt the heat of the weapon, and heard the screaming. The weapon had ended the war, but the following peace felt hollow. The Empire, now fractured and struggling to rebuild, was a shadow of its former self. The era that came after the war was nothing like the grandeur they had fought for.

The world had slid into a sort of Great Depression—factories once booming to fuel the war effort now stood empty, their smokestacks idle. The rich still clung to their wealth, but the common people suffered. Starvation was rampant in the lower districts, and diseases born from poverty spread faster than the authorities could control. The grand cities, with their towering gothic architecture and intricate stonework, had begun to crumble at the edges, the weight of neglect pressing down like a slow death.

In the midst of this decaying world, men like Yahya Kasim wandered the streets, lost in their memories of a time before. The war had created a generation of the forgotten—veterans who no longer had a place in this broken society. Some, like Yahya, had tried to find purpose in the aftermath. Others hadn't been so lucky.

Yahya's hand absentmindedly traced the scar on his left arm, a souvenir from the war. It was a jagged reminder of a battle in the northern territories, where the freezing winds had been more merciless than the enemy. He'd survived that fight, but not all of his comrades had. He could still see their faces—young men, eager to serve, who had perished before they'd even begun to live.

There was one face, in particular, that haunted him still—Henry Moore, his best friend from training. They'd enlisted together, full of hope and dreams of becoming war heroes. But Moore had died in the Final Push, one of the many lives snuffed out by the very weapon they had been told would save them. It was a bitter irony that Yahya had survived while the better men had not.

It was Henry's death that had changed Yahya the most. Before that, he had clung to some notion of duty and honour. But when he watched his friend die, crushed under the weight of betrayal—betrayal by the very people who had sent them to fight—something inside him had hardened. From that moment, Yahya had become a different man, one who questioned everything and saw the lies behind the rhetoric. He had lost something in the war that he would never regain.

He saw the ember of the cigarette disappear into the rain as he flicked it out the window. Except for a few stray people wearing tattered clothes, the streets below were deserted. The city itself was a mirror of the world that had previously lived, a spectre of its former splendour.

Yahya turned back to the table, his mind returning to the present. The Circle of Sorn. James Baker. Men like him had thrived in the chaos after the war. They preyed on the weak, offering them power in exchange for loyalty, feeding on the desperation of a world broken by conflict. The weapon that had ended the war had also torn open something darker, something that men like Baker sought to control.

Yahya's thoughts drifted to the conversations he'd had earlier in the club. Lenz's words about Baker still rang in his ears. "We won the war, sure. But it cost us more than we gained."

The weapon that had ended the war had done more than destroy cities. It had left scars on the world—scars that ran deep beneath the surface. The land itself felt different—there were whispers of strange phenomena in the aftermath, places where the laws of nature no longer applied, where shadows seemed to move with intent, and the air felt heavy with something unseen. People had begun to speak of "the Hollowing," a term coined for the strange occurrences that had spread in the years after the war.

Yahya had personally witnessed some of it: hauntings, strange locations, and unexplained disappearances. At first, he had written it off as post-war stress, but the more he looked into it, the more difficult it was to ignore the fact that something had changed.

The world was no longer the same. It had been cracked open, and men like Baker were trying to dig into that crack, seeking power where they shouldn't. And Yahya, for all his cynicism and weariness, couldn't walk away from the fight. Not now.

A knock at the door pulled him from his thoughts. Yahya glanced at the clock. It was late—too late for anyone but the team. He opened the door to find Adam standing there, his face as stoic as ever.

"We've got movement," Adam said, his voice low. "Baker's people are planning something. We need to go."

Yahya nodded, grabbing his coat from the chair. He carried the burden of the past with him into the night as he followed Adam, but he also felt a feeling of resolution. He may never return to his pre-war self, but he continued to fight. Not yet.

The shadows of the city beckoned, and Yahya knew that in the world they now lived in, there was no such thing as true peace—only the next battle. And for him, the war would never truly end.