Chapter 1: The Ghost of the Gutters

Chapter 1: The Ghost of the Gutters

The rain in Delrick never washed anything clean. It just smeared the grime, turning the alleyways into slick, obsidian mirrors that reflected the lurid glow of neon signs and the sputtering flicker of gaslights. It was a city drowning in its own shadows, and Deon was one of the few who knew how to swim in them.

He sat in his cramped office, the scent of damp leather and ozone a permanent fixture. Across from him, a woman named Lyra twisted a frayed handkerchief in her hands. Her face was a hollow mask of sleepless nights, her eyes pleading. On the scarred surface of his desk lay the reason for her visit: a faded tintype of a girl with bright eyes and a missing front tooth. Elara.

“The Guard… they said she’s a runaway,” Lyra whispered, her voice cracking. “But Elara wouldn’t. She’s a good girl. She was just… marked.”

Deon leaned forward, his worn leather armor creaking. His gaze fell on the small, smudged drawing Lyra had provided next to the photo. It was a crude sketch of a rune, a swirling, angry knot of lines she claimed had appeared on her daughter’s wrist the day before she vanished.

“Marked how?” he asked, his voice a low rasp.

“Like a brand. It just… appeared. Red and raw. The medica said it was just a rash, but I know magic when I see it.”

Deon knew it too. He ran his right hand over his left, the pads of his fingers tracing the cool, engraved silver of his prosthetic. He could feel the low-level hum of Aether in his veins, a constant companion since the accident that had claimed his real hand. It was this connection that made him a ‘Fixer,’ a specialist in problems the city guard couldn’t, or wouldn't, solve.

“The Guard won’t look in the Gutters,” Lyra said, a new wave of despair washing over her. “They say once you’re down there, you’re already gone.”

“They’re not wrong,” Deon said, his tone flat. He wasn’t in the business of selling hope. He sold results, and they were often ugly. “My rate is fifty Solars up front. Another hundred when I find her.”

The woman didn't flinch. She pushed a small, heavy purse across the desk. The clink of coins was a grim finality. “Bring her home,” she begged.

Deon pocketed the purse. He didn't promise he would. He only promised he would look.

---

An hour later, he was standing at the edge of the Warrens, the rain plastering his dark hair to his scalp. Below him, the city descended into a tiered labyrinth of rusted metal and crumbling brick known as the Gutters. It was the city’s sump, where everything unwanted—people, trash, secrets—eventually washed up.

He closed his eyes, drawing on the energy that thrummed beneath the city's skin. A faint, silver light kindled behind his eyelids, and when he opened them again, the world was unveiled. This was his Aether-sight, his cheat. To his enhanced vision, the world was overlaid with the faint, shimmering residues of magic. Most of it was background noise: the dull throb of the city’s power conduits, the faint glow of cheap charms worn for luck.

But here, clinging to the railing where Lyra said Elara was last seen, was something else. A smear of malevolent energy, dark and clotted like old blood. It was weak, fading fast, but it was a trail. The same energysignature as the rune Lyra had drawn.

He dropped over the railing, landing silently on a rain-slicked catwalk below. The air grew thick with the stench of stagnant water and chemical runoff. The trail led him downward, a ghostly thread of violet-black energy winding through the maze. He moved with a practiced ease, his prosthetic hand a useful tool, its silver fingers immune to the rust and filth as he braced himself against decaying walls.

Deeper. The neon glow faded, replaced by the primitive, greasy light of oil lamps and the faint, phosphorescent sheen of runoff from the alchemical factories above. The sounds of the city proper were gone, replaced by the gurgle of unseen water, the scuttling of things best left unidentified, and a profound, oppressive silence. The people here didn't talk; they watched from the shadows of their makeshift hovels, their eyes reflecting a weary predator's caution. They saw Deon, but they didn't see the spectral trail he was following. They just saw another man foolish enough to trespass in their domain.

The trail ended abruptly in a squat, concrete culvert half-submerged in brackish water. The entrance was a gaping maw, exhaling a chill that had nothing to do with the rain. The magical residue was thickest here, pooling around the entrance like a stain. It pulsed with a faint, rhythmic sickness that made the Aether in his veins feel sluggish and cold.

Deon drew the heavy, modified wrench he carried for protection, its head weighted with lead. He waded into the ankle-deep water, the silver of his hand cutting a clean wake through the filth. Inside, the darkness was absolute. He clicked his tongue, and a small, captured wisp of Aether flared to life in a glass bauble on his pauldron, casting a cool, white light.

The beam swept across the small space. Graffiti, debris, more filth. Then it landed on a small object bobbing near the far wall. A child’s doll, its yarn hair matted, its button eyes staring up at nothing. The Aetheric signature was screaming from it. This was where Elara had been taken.

A sharp tang of ozone and iron hit his nostrils. Blood. Fresh.

The silence broke.

Scrrraaaape.

The sound was low, guttural. The noise of immense weight being dragged across concrete. It came from the deepest shadows of the culvert, a place his light hadn't quite reached. Deon froze, his heart slamming against his ribs. That wasn't a rat. It wasn't a desperate gutter-dweller.

Scrrraaaape. Clank.

He swung his light toward the sound. Two points of light ignited in the darkness, glowing with a malevolent, blood-red hue. They weren't eyes. They were burning embers, set within the hollows of something vast and inhumanly large.

The figure stepped forward, and Deon's breath hitched. The stories, the hushed warnings parents gave their children, the rumors whispered by drunks in low-life taverns—they were all true.

It was the city’s ghost. The boogeyman.

He was a giant of a man, built like a fortress wall, his pale skin a horrifying tapestry of scars and glowing crimson runes that seemed stitched directly into his flesh. Heavy, enchanted chains, thick as a man's wrist, were wrapped around his torso and arms, shackling him like a beast. In one hand, he dragged a greatsword made of chipped, non-reflective obsidian, its tip carving a groove in the concrete floor. The scraping sound.

This was the Warden. The Sanguine Covenant’s tithe-collector. A living weapon and a walking warning.

Desire, goal, and payment evaporated from Deon's mind, replaced by a single, primal instinct: survive.

He lunged backward, but the creature was impossibly fast. The obsidian blade swung not with a warrior’s grace, but with the brutal, inexorable force of a wrecking ball. Deon threw himself sideways, the wind of the passage roaring in his ear as the sword slammed into the concrete wall where he'd been standing, shattering it and sending shrapnel flying.

Deon scrambled away, splashing through the water. He wasn’t a warrior; he was a Fixer, a survivor. He used his wits, not his muscle. He hurled his wrench at the creature's head. It bounced off its skull with a dull thud, having no more effect than a pebble.

The Warden didn't even flinch. It just turned its head, those burning runes for eyes fixing on him. And in that moment, under the stark glare of Deon's light, he saw it. Past the monstrous form, beyond the burning runes and the slave's chains. For a fraction of a second, he saw a flicker of something else in those depths. Not malice. Not fury.

Agony. A profound, bottomless despair.

The moment was shattered as the monster charged, its chains rattling a death knell. Deon didn't wait. He spun around and fled, bursting out of the culvert and back into the rain-swept labyrinth of the Gutters. He didn’t look back, but he could hear the relentless, heavy footfalls and the scraping of the obsidian blade echoing behind him.

He vaulted a rusted pipe, scrambled up a rickety ladder, and didn't stop until the sounds faded and he was back in the familiar, grimy territory of the upper Warrens. Leaning against a wall, chest heaving, rain mixing with the cold sweat on his brow, the grim reality settled in.

This wasn't just a missing persons case. The girl, the rune, the monster in the dark—they were all connected. The ghost of the gutters was real, and it was collecting people for a purpose he couldn't begin to fathom. The city didn't just have a rot, it had a cancer. And he had just cut into the tumor.