Chapter 1: The Rooftop and the Rift

Chapter 1: The Rooftop and the Rift

The rain fell on Veridia like a curtain of liquid neon, each drop catching the glow of the sleepless city before splattering against the slick asphalt of the rooftop. For Corbin Pierce, it was just another Tuesday. Another night spent trading the stale air of a lecture hall for the ozone-laced breath of the storm high above the streets.

Perched precariously on the head of a granite gargoyle, Corbin ignored the water plastering his unkempt brown hair to his forehead. His worn tweed jacket, a relic from a life he’d tried and failed to build, was soaked through, but the combat boots gripping the stone were solid. Below, the city hummed—a beast of steel, glass, and a million overlapping lives. He could feel its pulse, a low thrum that vibrated through the soles of his boots and up his spine. This was the Echo, the city’s soul, and tonight, it was screaming.

“Just hold on, you furry little disaster,” he muttered, his voice swallowed by the wind.

Across the chasm of a thirty-foot alley, on the adjacent roof, the source of the Echo’s distress was caught in a shimmering net of silver light. Pudge, a raccoon of frankly obscene girth, was chittering a stream of what Corbin could only assume were profanities. The net pulsed with a sickly magical energy, designed to trap and drain spirits. A couple of low-life poachers—Leeches, as they were known on the fringe—stood over him, their faces obscured by the hoods of their cheap rain slickers. One held a gnarled staff that crackled with stolen energy.

“Look at the size of him,” one Leech rasped, his voice thin and reedy. “He’s practically bursting with essence. We’ll get a good price for a Hoard Spirit this potent.”

Pudge, for his part, tried to bite the glowing strands of the net, succeeding only in getting a mild shock that made his fur stand on end. A half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza, its cheese still faintly glowing with the spirit’s own residual magic, lay sadly on the roof beside him.

Corbin sighed. His desire was simple: a quiet night with a cheap bottle of whiskey and the blissful oblivion of marking poorly-written essays on the Peloponnesian War. The obstacle was the thirty-foot drop and two magically-armed idiots threatening his only reliable informant, who also happened to be a gluttonous raccoon.

He backed up, crouching low. The city’s hum grew stronger in his mind, a familiar symphony of concrete, electricity, and memory. He didn’t use incantations or fancy gestures. His magic was cruder, more intimate. He simply… asked. He asked the worn brick for purchase, the gusting wind for a lift, the very gravity of the metropolis to look the other way for a second.

Action.

He sprinted. Three powerful strides and he launched himself from the gargoyle’s head. For a heart-stopping moment, he was suspended between buildings, the city a dizzying kaleidoscope of light and shadow below. The wind caught him, a tangible hand at his back, and the faint, silvery energy of the Echo swirled around his boots, giving him an impossible mid-air push. He landed, rolling on the opposite rooftop with a grunt, the impact jarring his teeth.

The Leeches whirled around, surprise widening their eyes. “A Warden? Here?”

“Adjunct Professor, actually,” Corbin corrected, getting to his feet and letting his hands hang loosely at his sides. The faint glow of magical energy, like heat haze, began to shimmer around his palms. “And you’re trespassing. Pudge has a territorial claim on the dumpsters behind Saint Rocco’s Cathedral. It’s all filed with the local spiritual authorities.”

The Leech with the staff scoffed. “There are no authorities out here, old man.”

He jabbed his staff forward, and a bolt of sickly green energy shot towards Corbin. Corbin didn’t try to block it. He sidestepped, his hand slapping against a rusted air conditioning unit. He drew on its history—decades of summer heat, of rattling work, of slow decay. The Echo answered. A wave of oppressive heat and the psychic shriek of dying machinery erupted from the unit, slamming into the Leech and making him stagger back, clutching his head.

The second poacher lunged, pulling a wicked-looking knife forged from cold iron. Corbin was already moving. He kicked a puddle of rainwater, and with a whispered request to the city, the water rose like a striking snake, freezing into a spike of ice mid-air that caught the man in the chest. It wouldn’t kill him, but it knocked the wind out of him and sent him sprawling.

Staff-wielder recovered, snarling, and swung his weapon in a wide arc. Corbin ducked under it, his own glowing hand grabbing the Leech’s wrist. The man screamed as the raw, untamed energy of the city’s soul—the asphalt, the rebar, the forgotten memories in the brickwork—surged from Corbin’s palm directly into him. It was like force-feeding a man a library. The Leech’s eyes rolled back in his head as his mind overloaded, and he crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

Result.

Silence descended, broken only by the rain and Pudge’s indignant squeaks. Corbin walked over and kicked the staff, sending it clattering away. With a touch, he unwove the magic of the net, which dissolved into silver dust.

Pudge scrambled free, shook his ridiculously fluffy body, and immediately snatched up his pizza slice. “Took you long enough, landlord,” the raccoon’s voice echoed in Corbin’s mind, raspy and perpetually unimpressed. “Another minute and they’d have started haggling over my pelt.”

“You owe me, Pudge. Big time,” Corbin said, rubbing his temples. A familiar headache was beginning to bloom behind his eyes.

“My gratitude is payment enough,” Pudge retorted, stuffing the pizza into his mouth. “And maybe a tip. Saw something weird by the old cannery district earlier. A flicker in the Echo. Tasted… wrong.”

Before Corbin could press for details, the headache exploded into a full-blown migraine. The world dissolved into static. This was the price of his gift, the other side of his connection. When the city felt a sharp, sudden trauma, so did he. A turning point. A surprise.

He wasn’t on the rooftop anymore.

He was in a pristine, minimalist office high in a skyscraper, looking through the eyes of a man in a tailored suit who was bleeding out on an expensive white rug. The air was cold, sterile, and thick with the coppery tang of blood and terror. Corbin couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He was a prisoner in another man’s final moments.

A figure stood over the dying man, cloaked in shadow, their form indistinct. But their hand… their hand was perfectly clear. Gloved in black leather, it reached down, and as it did, a sigil burned into existence on the back of it—a stylized, open palm with a single, unblinking eye in its center.

The Hand.

The name hit Corbin like a physical blow. The faint, silvery scar on his own temple, a memento from their last encounter, began to throb with a phantom ache. He hadn’t seen that mark in five years. Not since the night he’d failed, the night he’d lost… everything.

The gloved hand pressed against the dying man’s chest. There was no chant, no ritualistic flair. There was only a soundless, horrifying pull. Corbin felt it through the Echo, a violent tearing sensation, as if a thread was being ripped from a tapestry. The man’s soul—his memories, his fears, his love, his essence—was being siphoned out, harvested like a crop. The light in the man’s eyes didn’t just fade; it was extinguished, leaving behind an empty vessel.

The vision shattered.

Corbin gasped, falling to his knees on the wet rooftop. The taste of bile rose in his throat. The city wasn’t just screaming anymore; it was weeping, a raw, gaping wound torn in its very soul. Pudge had dropped his pizza and was staring at him, the raccoon’s usually mischievous eyes wide with an ancient fear.

“Corbin?” the spirit’s voice was a small, worried whisper in his mind. “What did you see?”

Corbin pushed himself up, leaning heavily against the brick parapet, his knuckles white. The rain felt impossibly cold against his skin. He had spent five years teaching history, pretending that the past was something you could confine to books and lecture notes. He’d tried to run, to hide in mediocrity and cynicism.

But the past had found him. The game he thought was over had just begun again.

“The Hand,” Corbin breathed, the words tasting like ash. “They’re back. And they just took their first piece.”