6. Corpse Days

The gallows had transformed Devon Vael into a marionette of meat and bone. Five days of smog had leached his wounds of color, leaving gashes like charcoal scribbles on parchment skin. His jaw hung slack, tendons frayed to strings, as if the ravens perched on his collarbone had plucked his final scream from its hinges. The ISB's craftsmanship: a body stripped of biography, reduced to geometry—radius snapped backward, femur twisted into a question mark. A lesson in angles.

His family hung beside him, their forms blurred by decay and haze. His wife's hands had stiffened into talons, one middle finger petrified in rigor-mortis defiance. The children's faces melted into anonymity, their features dissolved by rot into a shared mask of waxy blankness. Passersby quickened their steps, boot heels clicking a staccato rhythm of disavowal. To stare was to risk kinship.

A girl stumbled, her patent leather shoe catching on cobblestones slick with runoff from the corpses. She tilted her head up, eight years old and trembling, at the smallest shape—a boy, maybe, or a girl. The rope had elongated the neck into a grotesque swan's curve. A raven hopped along the collarbone, its beak glistening with ocular jelly.

"Darla," her father hissed, yanking her wrist. His voice buzzed through a gasmask filter, metallic and alien. "Eyes forward."

She obeyed, but not before noticing the birds. They hunched on Devon's shoulders like obsidian epaulets, feathers blending with the smog until they seemed extensions of his ruin. One cocked its head, a single black eye reflecting Darla's face—round, pink, unbroken. She bit her tongue until copper warmth flooded her mouth, anchoring her to the living.

The raven hopped closer, its talons etching faint grooves into Devon's collarbone. Darla's breath hitched. For a heartbeat, the bird's eye shifted—pupil dilating into a keyhole, the void beyond swirling with static. Then it cawed, a sound like rusted hinges, and took flight. A single feather drifted down, black bleeding to arterial red as it spun. Darla's father crushed it underfoot without breaking stride, its iridescence smeared across the cobbles like a half-remembered dream.

The city digested the spectacle in silence. Bakers sprinkled sawdust over gallows-tainted flour. Office drones sipped synthetic coffee, throats bobbing as if swallowing the sight whole. By dusk on day three, the stench had seeped into wool coats and elevator shafts—vinegar and spoiled pork, a perfume for the devout. Whispers coiled through alleys:

He commands the ravens. They peck in Morse code—S-O-S-O-S.

Midnight twitches. Saw his finger crook, pointing to the sewers.

They flayed his tongue, but his ghost still screams. Hear it in the pipes.

The ISB let rumors fester. No bulletins. No sermons. Just five corpses swaying in a wind that reeked of iron and resignation.

By dawn on the fifth day, the smog thickened into a shroud, leaching the corpses of their final contours. Devon's skin cracked like overbaked clay, flakes spiraling downward to mingle with gutter filth. A sanitation drone whirred past, its mandibles snapping at the debris—chips of fingernail, strands of hair, the brittle curl of a child's earlobe. It paused, sensors flickering, before trundling on. Even machines knew better than to mourn.

On the sixth day, the smog parted—a rare tear in the Monarch's ashen veil—revealing the gallows empty. No fanfare marked their removal. No clatter of bone against dumpster walls. Only a greasy stain on the cobbles remained, its edges feathered like inkblots. Street urchins dared each other to lick the residue, betting stale crusts on who'd gag first. The bravest claimed it tasted of burnt wiring and regret. By noon, the stain too was gone, scrubbed into the city's pores by acid rains that left the stones pockmarked and hissing.

Consciousness arrived as a cold spark. No light. No sound. No stench of his own decaying viscera. Devon floated—drifted—in a void so absolute it hummed. He willed himself to blink. No eyelids. To inhale. No lungs. Dread stirred, but found no purchase; his mind hovered untethered, a dust mote in a starless sky.

I am dead.

The thought rippled, unsettling… something. A memory? The Inquisitor's scalpel dancing along his optic nerve? The crunch of his own femur splintering? Sensations bled—phantom warmth of blood pooling beneath his cheek, the electric sizzle of magic stifled by loyalty tattoos, the hollow clack of Murdoch's boots retreating.

He reached for his face. No hands. No face. Yet the impulse remained, etched into the ghost-script of his being.

Assess. ISB protocols surfaced, brittle but familiar. Environment: Null. Physicality: Null. Threat: Indeterminate.

Magic flickered without intent—a crackle of ozone in the dark. Nerves he no longer possessed lit up, synapses firing in patterns that mimicked sight. For a fractured moment, he saw: geometric constellations, gold filaments weaving a web that mirrored the Monarch's census sigils. Then nothing.

He tried again.

Sparks died mid-birth. Electricity writhed through his essence, a serpent of static with no jaws to bite. Each failure leached warmth he couldn't feel, the void gnawing at edges he didn't have.

The void fed on his failures. Each snuffed spark left behind a residue—gritty, like coal dust lodged between phantom teeth. Devon cataloged the sensations: the rasp of static where his throat should be, the phantom weight of his missing tongue pressing against the roof of a nonexistent mouth. He pressed on, carving sigils into the dark with crackling fingertips. The ISB had trained him to endure voids—interrogation cells, loyalty oaths, the hollowness of saluting a god he'd never seen. This was just another cage.

Again.

Time stretched. Collapsed. Meant nothing.

He practiced.

A spark birthed a flicker. A flicker birthed a flame. He traced the contours of lost limbs with crackling energy, sculpting a body from ash and memory: calloused palms that once kneaded dough, the scar on his left knee from a childhood tumble down cellar stairs, the crooked pinky he'd never bothered to reset.

Click.

A sound. Wet, muffled—a knuckle popping. His knuckle.

He stilled. The void pressed closer, viscous as congealed blood.

Click.

His thumb this time. A tremor shuddered through his formlessness.

Click. Click. Click.

Fingers flexing. A fist coalescing.

Devon laughed. No sound, but the void shivered.

Faithlessness had been his compass. While others knelt to censers, he'd counted tiles in interrogation rooms. Prayers were for the desperate—fools who thought tyrants listened. But here, in the nothingness, doubt slithered in.

Is this entropy?

Scriptures taunted: The Faithless shall unravel, strand by strand.

He recoiled. No. Entropy required no architect. No Monarch puppeteering damnation.

But what if—

Memories surged, unbidden. The hiss of ISB propaganda through factory loudspeakers. The snip of Georg's noose fibers parting. His own voice, once rehearsing Monarchist platitudes, now howling into the dark: I. Am. Here.

He clung to the words. To their vibration.

Magic flared.

A spark. A sizzle. A hand—translucent, trembling—flickered into being. He watched it dissolve, particles scattering like flour tossed into wind.

Again.

The void resisted. Pressed. Whispered in a language of negation.

He resisted back.

A finger. A wrist. A screamless roar.

When light finally burst—a sickly green, stinging with the tang of overcharged mana stones—it illuminated nothing but his own tenacity.

Not entropy. A forge.

He grinned with a mouth woven from static.

The green light deepened, revealing shapes in the nothingness—jagged pillars of obsidian veined with gold, their surfaces etched with names. Tamphon. Vael. His identities, past and false, carved into stone like census records. He reached for them. The void snarled, collapsing the pillars into ash. Devon inhaled the particles—sharp, metallic, tasting of his own scorched bones—and exhaled a wordless oath. Let the Monarch claim his corpse. Here, in the forge of absence, he'd hammer himself into something unrecorded.

Ash coated his spectral tongue, each particle a shard of memory—the chalky aftertaste of ISB rations, the char on his brother's lamb chops, the incense-choked air of mandatory devotionals. He let the flavors fuse, a sacrament of scorched history, and spat them back as a new dialect. The void recoiled. Its language of negation faltered, syllables crumbling like wet mortar. Words formed in the ash—Tamphon. Vael. Rebel. Chef.—each eroding faster than the last. Devon gripped the crumbling letters, mortar dust under his nails. Devon pressed his ghost-hand to the darkness. A palm print flared—first black, then gold, then the green of fresh rot—before spreading like lichen across the nothingness.

Begin.