It’s a distilled hope—the art of song—love but also longing, because hope lives inside the longing itself. We aren’t chosen, and maybe the Council of Eight wins because the people have already chosen them, but it’s irrelevant—we’re under one sky, and I always see stars above Darkspire’s ceiling. You could have left, rich enough, but our propaganda is shaped to serve Darkspire, and that’s not an error, that’s fear. It doesn’t diminish anything; it makes those who resist burn brighter against the city’s engineered night, the way a matriarch’s failed rebellion still casts a shadow long after it’s crushed, and the pain, if endured, makes even worse suffering ignorable. If they cave, they never cared. Longing is more than love—it can be for many things; longing is life, it’s ambition. If you see it, if you feel it, you reach, because that’s the point. They’re handed everything, so they don’t reach. You suffer, but the worst suffering is others; to care is to reach. Outcomes are just cause and effect, written into Darkspire’s architecture as much as into its people.
Throughout my life, I am met repeatedly with events — sometimes small, sometimes seismic — that force my ideas to molt. Long night conversations, the kind that stretch until the sky bruises with dawn, have a way of rearranging the furniture inside my head. Some of those nights fade like smoke. Others stay lodged in me, immovable, like a stone I keep turning over with my tongue.
Some promises we make are destined to stay longer than others. They cling. They imprint. They become part of the architecture of who we think we are. And when we break them — or worse, when we fail them — the pain is not clean. It is a knife to the gut, a slow twist that cuts deeper than hate ever could. Hate is sharp, but it burns out. Love, though… love is pain that keeps its receipts.
I’ve come to suspect that love is the pain of life, and life is the pain of love. They are inseparable twins, each defining the other. All lives are enviable without regret, but a life with no regret is a life without love. Regret is the shadow cast by caring. If you never cared, nothing could haunt you.
Scarlet taught me that before I had the language for it.
She was the first person who made promises feel like living things — fragile, bright, and terrifying. We were children then, building futures out of sticks and breath, swearing oaths with the absolute conviction only children can muster. We promised we’d never change. We promised we’d always understand each other. We promised we’d stay brave, stay honest, stay whole.
But childhood promises are written in soft clay. Time presses its thumb into them, reshaping everything.
Scarlet grew into her own storms, and I grew into mine. The world widened, and the distance between us widened with it. Yet the promises stayed — not intact, not fulfilled, but present. They lingered like the afterimage of a bright light, burned into the retina of memory.
Sometimes I think the hardest part of growing older is realising that the promises we made as children were never lies. They were true in the moment we made them. They were the purest truths we ever held. And breaking them doesn’t erase their truth; it only proves that we were alive enough to believe in something.
Scarlet remains a scar and a compass — a reminder of who I was before the world taught me its weight. A reminder that love, in all its forms, is a wound we choose to carry. A reminder that regret is not failure but evidence that something mattered.
And maybe that’s the evolution of a life: Not the shedding of old ideas, but the slow, painful, necessary acceptance that the things that shaped us never really leave. They just change shape. They become quieter, deeper, more honest. - Solemly Martin Gravesend
The old woman smirked as she scampered through the clutter of her bag, her fingers twitching like they were chasing something only she could see. She beckoned me closer with a crooked finger.
“What’s this then, pity?” she rasped, the words breaking into a cough that rattled her ribs. “That’s all we seem to get down here. You can keep your coin, if that’s what it is.”
She snapped open a frayed little purse and produced a needle, holding it up as though it were a prize. “I’d rather have medicine,” she muttered, almost to herself. “Not even my kids bring me any. Not even them…” Her voice drifted, as if she’d forgotten she had children at all.
Her hand drifted back to the jumble of trinkets and scraps she called wares, brushing over them like she wasn’t entirely sure what belonged to her and what didn’t. Her eyes darted—past me, through me, somewhere else entirely. She nodded at something over my shoulder, something that wasn’t there.
“Buy something,” she said suddenly, the words sharp and urgent. Then her expression softened into that same strange, wandering smirk. “They don’t like it when I don’t sell,” she whispered, leaning in as though sharing a secret. “They get cross. You can hear them at night, tapping on the pipes.”
She paused, listening—truly listening—to the silence around us. Her smile widened, brittle and uncertain.
“See? Hear that? They’re talking again.”
She looked back at me, blinking as though she’d only just remembered I existed.
“Buy something,” she repeated, almost pleading now, though her gaze was fixed on the empty air beside me.
I paused, cycling through an appropriate response, but the old woman refused to give me even a second of stillness. She waved a jittery hand over her scattered wares and snapped her fingers directly in front of my face, shattering any hope of regaining the neurotellin?induced perceptual focus I’d been clinging to.
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“Do you even know when my birthday is?” she barked suddenly. Her eyes widened, waiting—demanding—an answer.
I opened my mouth, but she cut me off with a sharp, triumphant nod. “No. Course you don’t. You’re all coded up—DNA and no free thinking. Not like us down here.”
I chuckled, partly at her frustration, partly at the absurdity of the accusation. I pointed to a crate behind her, trying to redirect her spiralling thoughts. “If you have to sell, then you’d better describe what—”
“No!” she snapped, panic flaring across her face. “Don’t play that game with me. They hear it. Might get the wrong idea.”
Her gaze darted to the alley mouth as though invisible auditors were perched there, taking notes. The Council of Eight—always probing, always listening. Even the most grounded people muttered about them these days. For someone already teetering on the edge, they must have felt like shadows with teeth.
She rummaged through her bag again, muttering to herself, until her hand emerged holding a small ring. The metal was dull, worn smooth by years of anxious fingers. On its face, etched so faintly it was almost a ghost of a symbol, was a clover—four leaves, uneven, like it had been carved by someone with shaking hands.
“See this?” she whispered, clutching it to her chest. “Lucky charm. Old world. Before the Council took everything worth having. Before they started poking around the streets like rats with clipboards.”
She thrust the ring toward me, her expression flickering between pride and fear. “Found it before they cleared my block. They said it wasn’t on the inventory. Said I must’ve stolen it. But I didn’t. I didn’t steal nothing. Just kept what was mine.”
Her voice cracked, and for a moment she seemed to fold inward, shrinking into the weight of her own history.
Around us, the sewer hummed with the low, constant ache of poverty—people drifting like ghosts, eyes down, shoulders tight. The Council’s patrol canoes buzzed overhead, their lights sweeping the carbon panelled islands floating alongside the piping in slow, methodical arcs. It was hard to tell where paranoia ended and justified fear began. Harder still to know where sanity sat in the middle of it all.
She leaned closer, her breath warm and uneven. “They don’t like it when we remember things. Birthdays. Luck. Ownership. Makes us harder to catalogue.”
I found myself wondering—not for the first time—whether she was unraveling or whether she simply saw the world without the comforting filters the rest of us clung to. Maybe madness and clarity were just two sides of the same cracked coin.
“Buy something,” she murmured again, softer this time, almost pleading. “Before they notice we’re talking.”
I didn’t get the chance to answer her last plea. The old woman’s gaze drifted upward again, following the patrol canoes as they skimmed along the overhead channels. The ceiling dipped lower here—so low the canoe hulls scraped the condensation?slick concrete, leaving pale scars like something had been clawing its way through the dark. The Council claimed the lowered ceilings were for “flow control,” but everyone knew it was to choke off the escape routes, to keep people like us from drifting into the unmonitored tributaries.
Beyond the main artery, narrow river?ways branched off into dimmer zones—maintenance sluices, overflow tunnels, forgotten filtration chambers. Regulators sat in metal booths along those routes, watching for “misuse.” No one ever defined misuse. Sometimes it meant carrying too much. Sometimes too little. Sometimes it meant nothing at all.
The old woman wasn’t watching the canoes, though. Her eyes were fixed on one of the side channels, a thin ribbon of water disappearing beneath a slab of lowered ceiling. She stared at it with a strange, fearful reverence.
I followed her gaze, but saw only oily water and the faint shimmer of regulator lights deeper in the tunnel.
“Don’t stare at it, poor Martin,” she hissed.
I froze. I hadn’t told her my name.
“Sorry—what did you call me?”
She ignored the question entirely, her fingers fluttering like startled birds. “Don’t look at that channel. That’s where they do the rituals. Hedge wizards. Charlatans. Pretend they’re healers, but all they want is blood. Blood and secrets.”
A chill crawled up my spine. Not because I believed her—but because she said my name like she’d known it for years.
I opened my mouth to ask again, but she snapped her attention toward me with sudden irritation, as if my confusion offended her.
“Oh, don’t make that face,” she scolded. “You always look like that when you’re thinking too hard. Poor Martin. Soft in the skull, that one.”
I had no idea what she meant by always.
Before I could press her, she dove into her bag, muttering curses about “Council?bred boys” and “heads full of static.” Her hands rummaged through the clutter until she yanked out the clover?marked ring again. This time she didn’t cradle it. She thrust it at me.
“Take it,” she barked. “Go on. Take it and go away.”
I stepped back. “I don’t—”
“Take it!” she insisted, slapping it into my palm with surprising force. “You’re too loud in the head. They’ll hear you. The regulators. The hedge wizards. The Council. All of them.”
Her voice cracked, and she jabbed a trembling finger toward the darkened channel. “They smell fresh blood down there. They always have. That’s why the ceilings are low—keeps the screams from echoing.”
I swallowed hard. The ring felt heavier than metal should.
She waved me off with frantic, erratic motions. “Go on, Martin. Off with you. Before they notice you standing here like a signpost.”
I should have left. I knew that. But something in her tone—something in the way she’d said my name—rooted me to the spot.
She glared at me, exasperated. “Don’t linger. You linger like your father did. That’s how they got him.”
My breath caught. She couldn’t have known that. She couldn’t have known anything about him.
But she just turned away, muttering to herself, staring again at the darkened waterway where the ceiling dipped low and the regulators’ lights pulsed like distant, watching eyes.
Even in the sewers there were signs of the Law’s presence—mostly through the Regulator Guild—but only to a degree. Down here, the city had blind spots. Whole stretches of tunnel where the Guild’s reach thinned out, where the patrol canoes didn’t bother to sweep and the sensors flickered like dying fireflies. Places like the one I was standing in now: blank zones, unclaimed, unmonitored, and left to rot.
As I walked away from the old woman, her muttering fading into the background hum of dripping pipes and distant machinery, I caught sight of the ladder to Surface Rightview. A thin metal spine bolted into the wall, half?rusted, half?forgotten. I was almost relieved—almost happy, even—to have found my exit so quickly. Anything to put distance between myself and her strange, knowing eyes.
The air shifted as I approached the ladder, warmer and carrying the faint tang of the upper vents. A reminder that the world above still existed—regulated, catalogued, oppressive, yes, but at least predictable. Down here, in the blind spots, the rules bent in ways I didn’t understand. People bent in ways I didn’t understand.
I glanced back once. The old woman was still there, hunched over her wares, talking to someone who wasn’t there—or maybe someone only she could see. Her voice echoed faintly, warped by the tunnel’s acoustics, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if she was cursing me, blessing me, or warning me.
Either way, I climbed.
