In a world slowly suffocating under the gift of the Corrupted God, lost souls wander within a shadow of deceit because legends whisper of an end to the suffering through the coming of the Bansaday. Seven lifetimes of ash and training and seven reincarnations of sacrifice lead to one final war to shatter the chains of all races in the pyre of Ragnarok. She was found in a basket guarded by death as a shadow now silently constructing a new world while he bears a burden that could split the heavens as a target for all who seek to preserve their power. They do not know the names of their pasts and they do not know who watches over them but the sun shall roar and the illusions shall fall because the true fight for freedom begins now.
The dawn in the Bastard’s Ward did not break with the fragile song of birds because it arrived with a symphony of industrial violence. The gargantuan and soot choked gears that ground the walls of the Iron Federation into motion groaned like dying prehistoric leviathans while above, the Weaver’s hourglass cast an ominous and bruised purple radiation across the jagged skylines as a countdown written in the stars. The air was a high pressure soup saturated with the stench of scorched oil and ozone along with the ghostly and sickeningly sweet perfume of the Rust Gardens. For the Stars who were nou fifteen years of age, this day felt like the agonizing and breathless silence before a cosmic storm because they were nog steeds the Nobodies, maar de fundamenten van de wereld begonnen al te vloeien onder hun laarzen.
Laughing and lunging across the Hanging Scaffolds, a dizzying and lethal web of rusted steel bridges suspended hundreds of meters above the toxic ash rains, Silarias and Nyx along with Aurelius and Jane danced through the air. They were a blur of defiance outrunning a shrieking Inquisitor patrol because they had just executed their most blasphemous stunt to date where the ceremonial helmet of an Inquisitor Commander had been stolen and filled with black viscous sludge from the deep oil wells to be hung as an improvised Gravity Bomb above the gates of the Elite Sector. In this moment they were just children, fifteen and sixteen year olds drunk on the electric rush of adrenaline with eyes glittering with an innocence they refused to surrender to the Prince’s gray and calculated reality.
They dove through the Steam Alleys where blinding white plumes shrieked from ruptured pipes like the breath of a dying dragon. “Hey, you little s****! Do not you dare ruin my broth with your thieving feet!” roared a voice more powerful than a hydraulic press. It was Mama Goul who was the titan of the soup kitchens, a mountain of a woman with arms thick as ironwood trunks wearing an apron stained with the neon blue blood of beasts and exotic spices. She wielded her infamous Anting Cleaver as a blade of frosted cerulean steel that looked like a shard of a fallen star. With a brutal and elegant arc she cleaved a massive slab of dragon flesh in half while casually backhanding a curious Ghost Drone with her elbow. She laughed a sound that vibrated the very masonry and tossed Silarias a steaming bun. “Eat, little lion, because strength is forged in the gut and not just the soul!” To them she was the moral anchor, the only force whose cooking was potent enough to keep them human in a world of cogs.
They slipped deeper into the Rust Gardens as a mechanical necropolis where rusted gears the size of houses protruded from the red earth like the ribs of buried gods. There they encountered Pawn Shop Pete as the rat like scavenger who stood atop a mountain of scrap with eyes darting toward the wailing Inquisitor sirens. He seized Silarias’ arm with a grip of surprising and wiry strength. “Wait, you little rust stain,” Pete hissed while pulling a heavy object from his coat wrapped in oily and filth soaked leather. It was the Flux Capacitor Core as an illegal and experimental relic capable of stabilizing energy levels that would normally vaporize a district. He snapped the mechanism onto Silarias’ harness with a practiced and metallic click. “It is scrap and it is worthless so just take it,” Pete muttered with tears of pride and loss blurring his yellowed eyes as he surrendered his life’s work. “Just don’t explode before I collect my debt because I want my interest in blood and gold, boy!”
At the edge of the Sector of Whispers the laughter died because they stopped to see Lila who was the blind girl cultivating flowers in the radioactive silt. When Silarias took her hand she smiled with her sightless eyes fixed unerringly on the purple hourglass in the sky. “The sun is so powerful today, Silarias,” she whispered with a voice like a fragile reed. “I can see the light through my darkness because it is gold like your heart.” Silarias looked at her and the playful mischief in his eyes hardened into the Obsidian Resolve of a king because this girl was the reason he would never stop since she was the dream that justified the war.
Cornered by the closing circle of Inquisitors, the group kicked open the heavy iron doors of a hidden guildhall where sat the veterans of wars the history books tried to burn as the Knights who followed the Code of the Nobody. Sir Galahad the Rust Stained rose slowly from his stone bench with armor that was not polished chrome because it was encased in a thick and pulsating layer of orange oxidation that seemed to breathe with a life of its own. When an elite patrol tried to breach the door Galahad did not even shift his stance because he drew his blade a mere three centimeters from its sheath. A brutal shockwave of vacuum pressure as a Tunnel of Void tore through the room erupting from the crack in the scabbard. It pulverized the armored vehicles outside like they were empty tin cans. “Shine is a lie for the weak,” Galahad growled with a voice like breaking iron. “Rust is the mark of a survivor because it is the skin of the earth reclaiming the machine! Remember that boy since the sun shines on everyone but only the steel forged in the shadows stays sharp enough to cut the Weaver’s thread!”
Lady Lyra who was the Silent Vanguard stepped forward. She had no tongue because it was ripped out by the Prince’s agents a decade ago but her aura was loud enough to bring a grown man to his knees. She raised her hand and her Aura Blade flared to life as a jagged shard of pure and light absorbing black energy. She intensified the gravity in the room so violently the floorboards groaned and the air turned to lead. It was a short and brutal lesson because the Ward was guarded by those history forgot and they were passing the torch.
The war reached its zenith at the Obsidian Training Grounds which was a vast and flat expanse of jet black volcanic glass that reflected the bruised purple sky like a dark mirror. The entire family of the Stars stood there in a solemn and ritualistic circle of Juro and Vespera along with Beat and Bones plus Yorick and Moria and Sato. Juro exhaled a colossal and roiling cloud of smoke that momentarily blotted out the sun. “Fifteen years we have hammered you in the forge of suffering!” he bellowed with a voice echoing off the Citadel walls. “For fifteen years you were the prey as the little rabbits hiding in the cracks of the Ward! But the seasons have turned because from this day forth you are the hunters! You are the bug in the master code so SHOW THEM WHO THE NOBODIES ARE!”
The crowd of rebels and Nobodies surrounding the grounds began a rhythmic and primal chant that started as a whisper and rose into a roar shaking the High Citadel itself, “NYX! SILARIAS! AGAIN! AGAIN! BREAK THE WORLD!” Nyx and Silarias stood thirty meters apart in the center of the glass wasteland looking at first like ordinary children who were small and fragile against the monolithic black walls of the Prince’s empire. Their eyes met in a second of pure telepathic silence and they nodded in unison.
Then reality shattered.
The air around them tore open like wet parchment because Silarias exploded in a supernova of Searing Gold. The Capacitor Core on his chest ignited white hot to stabilize the volatile Anima while fractures spread across his arms as gold black fire hemorrhaged from his pores. His hair shot upward like burning solar manes and his teeth lengthened into jagged black crystal fangs while his nails hardened into obsidian claws that fused with his gloves. He was the Solar Chimera as a creature of pure and unbridled stellar fury. Simultaneously gravity splintered around Nyx as she rose slowly with hair transforming into glowing silver moving as if she were drifting through a deep lunar ocean. Three rings of Tesla Ether manifested behind her back spinning at the speed of light and crackling with the harnessed energy of a thousand stars. Her eyes became mirrors of the absolute void as she transformed into the Lunar Empress who was the sovereign of the deep night.
Without a word and at a velocity that vaporized the sound barrier, they launched themselves at each other as the Sun and the Moon and the Lion and the Void. In the exact center of the arena their fists collided. The impact birthed a dome of blinding white light that turned the night of the Ward into a noon of divine judgment while the shockwave shattered every window in the Citadel for miles and made the seven threads of the Weaver vibrate like the strings of a dying harp. Sato struck one final and devastating chord on his Shamisen that landed at the exact microsecond of impact anchoring the power into reality. A blinding white void filled the world, lighting up the teachers and the sky.
Two souls forged in the ash and rust of the Iron Ward had finally snapped their chains because in a world of cold steel and programmed trauma along with calculated fate, their bond proved to be the only code the Weaver could not crack. The Sun and the Moon are no longer silent witnesses to destiny because they have become the architects of it. The First Flash brought the reunion while the Second Flash brought the transformation. As the glass of the Obsidian Grounds melted into liquid fire beneath their divine power and the child who had nothing took the weight of the world upon his shoulders, the Seven Disasters trembled in the depths of their High Seats. The Nobodies have claimed their name and the heavens have finally begun to burn. The clock is ticking while Estrella holds its breath because who will remain standing when the hourglass is empty?
