Chapter 1: The Price of a Scream

Chapter 1: The Price of a Scream

The rain in the Gutterveins never truly washed anything clean. It just moved the filth around, making the neon signs of black-market apothecaries and back-alley rune-smiths bleed down grimy brickwork. This was Kaelen’s world: a place of perpetual twilight, smelling of ozone, stale beer, and desperate magic.

He leaned against the damp wall of a narrow alley, the worn collar of his duster coat turned up against the drizzle. Opposite him, a wizened alchemist named Filius wrung his hands, his face a mess of worry and cheap glamour that couldn't quite hide his age spots.

“She’s a good girl, Master Echo,” Filius pleaded, his voice thin. “Never stays out. But it’s been two days.” He slid a small, tarnished silver locket across the rickety table between them. “This was on her pillow. It’s all I have.”

Kaelen picked it up. The metal was cold, but that wasn’t what he felt. His gift, his curse, was what the Concord had once called ‘Psychic Echo.’ He could read the lingering ghosts of emotion on objects, see the psychic residue of strong events. He focused, and the world around him dissolved into a symphony of sensation.

Fear. Sharp, cold, and metallic, like a needle to the brain. The locket wasn’t just on her pillow; it was ripped from her neck. He saw a flash of a dark, narrow space, the glint of something chitinous in the shadows, and felt a single, paralyzing spike of terror that wasn’t his own.

Kaelen flinched, his grey eyes snapping back to the grimy reality of the alley. The echo was strong. Violent. He tucked the locket into his pocket and pushed himself off the wall. “The price is the same. Five hundred solari. Half now, half on return.”

Filius nodded eagerly, shoving a bundle of worn, greasy currency into Kaelen’s hand. “Anything. Just bring her home.”

Kaelen didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep. He just gave a curt nod and melted back into the labyrinth of the Gutterveins, letting the locket’s cold trail of fear guide him. It was a miserable way to make a living, chasing the psychic screams of the lost and terrified, but it paid the bills and, more importantly, kept him off the Concord’s lustrous, sanctimonious radar.

For ten years, he’d been a ghost. Ever since the mission that went so wrong, the one that got him branded a liability and cast out. The one that had awakened the thing shackled to his soul. Through his thin shirt, a faint crimson light pulsed from the center of his chest, a soft, rhythmic beat in time with his own heart. The Heart of Ruin. A symbiotic divine fragment, they’d called it. A parasite fueled by rage was more accurate. He kept his temper on a tight leash, his emotions locked down, lest he feed the beast.

The psychic trail led him away from the bustling squalor of the markets and into the industrial rot on the district’s edge. Here, warehouses slumped like sleeping metal giants, their windows shattered teeth in the gloom. The girl’s fear was a screaming beacon now, pulling him toward a specific building—a defunct mag-engine manufactory. The air grew thick, heavy with the scent of ozone and something else… something acrid and otherworldly that made the scars on his forearms tingle with phantom pain. It was a smell he hadn't encountered in a decade, a scent tied to blood and failure.

He slipped through a gap in a corroded security fence, his boots crunching on gravel and spent spell components. The warehouse door hung open, a dark maw promising nothing good. Inside, the cavernous space was unnaturally silent. Moonlight streamed through holes in the roof, illuminating a chilling scene on the concrete floor.

It was a ritual circle, but unlike any he’d ever seen. The lines weren’t drawn in chalk or salt, but etched directly into the concrete with something that had melted the stone, leaving glassy, black furrows. At the center was a pile of discarded clothes—the girl’s, he presumed—and a dark, viscous stain that hadn’t come from any human throat. The air itself thrummed, vibrating with a malevolent energy that felt like a gaping wound in the fabric of reality.

The girl wasn’t here. But something else was.

Kaelen drew the heavy, custom-made revolver from under his coat, its barrel etched with minor disruption runes. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. He took a cautious step into the circle, his eyes scanning the towering shelves and deep shadows. The locket in his pocket was now radiating a frantic, silent scream of pure agony. He was standing exactly where she’d been taken.

A skittering sound echoed from the high rafters. Not a rat. Too heavy. Too deliberate.

Kaelen’s blood ran cold. He knew that sound. He raised his gun, his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the steady, hungry pulse of the Heart of Ruin.

It dropped from the ceiling, landing twenty feet away with a sickening, wet crunch of chitin on concrete. It was a nightmare given form, a thing of too many joints and razor-sharp limbs, its body a glossy, insectoid black. Its head swiveled, and a single, milky-white eye fixed on him, an eye that radiated a palpable aura of emptiness. A Void-tainted creature. A Ripper.

He hadn’t seen one since the disastrous Concord operation on Calypso Rift. They weren’t supposed to exist in the core worlds, let alone in the heart of Veridia.

“By the Shaper’s forgotten bones,” he breathed, his pragmatic cynicism evaporating into pure, undiluted dread.

The Ripper let out a chittering shriek that scraped at his nerves and launched itself forward, a black arrow of hunger and hate. Kaelen fired, the rune-etched bullet flaring as it struck the creature’s carapace, only to ricochet off with a sharp crack. It didn’t even slow it down. He dodged, rolling behind a stack of rusted metal pallets as a scythe-like claw sliced through the air where his head had been, shearing through steel as if it were parchment.

He was hopelessly outmatched. This thing was an alpha predator of the magical world, and he was a man with a fancy pistol and a few parlor tricks. His Concord training screamed at him—tactics, weaknesses, vulnerabilities—but it was all useless. He needed arcane firepower he simply didn’t have. He needed a squad of Justicars with ward-lances and consecrated plasma.

He scrambled back, firing again and again, each bullet sparking uselessly against the Ripper's hide. The creature cornered him against the far wall, its single eye dilating as it loomed over him, the stench of the Void washing over him like a physical blow. Its claw raised for the final strike.

This was it. A pathetic end in a forgotten warehouse, killed by a ghost from his past.

And in that moment of despair, a deeper, hotter emotion ignited in his chest: Rage.

Rage at the Concord for creating monsters like this. Rage at his own weakness. Rage at the universe for dealing him this hand.

The faint crimson light on his chest erupted into a blinding glare, burning through his shirt. The Heart of Ruin, starved for so long, roared to life, feeding on the sudden, pure fury. Power, raw and terrible, flooded his veins. It was an agonizing ecstasy, burning away his fear, his weariness, his very sense of self, leaving only a singular, incandescent purpose.

Destroy.

The world bled to shades of red and black. The Ripper’s chittering shriek turned from a sound of aggression to one of sudden uncertainty. It hesitated.

A low growl escaped Kaelen’s lips, a sound that wasn’t entirely human. He looked up, his grey eyes now blazing with crimson light. He could feel the shockwave of his own power beginning to blossom outwards, a psychic scream that would be felt across the entire city. A dinner bell for the one man he never wanted to see again: Commander Valerius.

He was trading a quick death for a slow one. A quiet end for a hunt.

He looked at the monster poised to kill him, and a grim, terrible smile stretched across his face.

He’d make the trade.