The cacophony

**Kelly Thompson's POV**

The city isn’t a city—it’s a *cacophony*.

Towers of living metal twist like serpents mid-strike, their surfaces crawling with glyphs that burn and rewrite themselves in real time. The air thrums with a mechanical heartbeat, gears grinding in the sky where cogs orbit like malformed moons. Eden staggers beside me, his breath ragged, the raw scars on his arms glowing faintly as if the crown’s ghost still flickers in his blood.

“They built this place to last,” he mutters, eyeing the nearest structure. A spire unfurls, revealing a mouth of piston-teeth that hisses steam. “Or to *eat*.”

The ground shudders. A road peels itself from the earth, metallic tiles slotting into place like scales, leading us toward the city’s core. There are no guards, no sentinels—only the hum of engines and the creeping sense of being *digested*.