The clan's old pipes rattled with a metallic cough, carrying the humid warmth of the deep vents and the smell of broth through the narrow burrows.
It was a rare morning of relative peace.
Kaylah's siblings, Leo and Myrah, chased each other under the hanging blankets that served as room partitions, their bare feet slapping softly against the packed earth.
Leo giggled, his small face lighting up as Myrah draped a grey wool shawl over her head, pretending to be a "tunnel ghost" come to haunt the larder.
"Hush, you lot," Kaylah hissed, though there was no bite in it. "You'll wake the sleeping scavengers in the next burrow over, and then we'll all be up to our necks in chores."
Despite the warning, a flicker of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She reached into her belt pouch and handed Myrah a scrap of dried meat. Leo, ever the opportunist, snatched it before Myrah could even blink.
A moment later, they were a tangle of limbs and laughter on the floor. For a heartbeat, the tunnel didn't feel like a fortified bunker; it breathed like a real home.
Kaylah turned her attention back to the corner of the room. She pretended not to watch Eris as he settled by the copper pipe mouth, his back against the warm metal. He was quiet, as he always was, but the hollow loneliness that usually clung to him seemed muted this morning.
She moved across the room and sat beside him. Their shoulders brushed, a simple, grounding contact. She felt the unnatural warmth radiating under his skin, a heat that had nothing to do with the pipes.
Even in repose, there was a faint tremor in his wrist, a vibration that felt like the hum of a distant storm. The comet's silver was still dreaming inside him.
"You're staring again," Eris murmured. He didn't look up, but his voice held a trace of a tired grin.
"I'm checking if you're still made of meat and bone, or if you've turned entirely to metal," Kaylah countered softly.
She let her gaze drift over to Leo, who was currently pinning Myrah to the ground in a fierce, possessive hold on the meat. Watching them, a familiar, jagged ache twisted in Kaylah's gut.
It was a memory not of hunger, but of a deeper, older emptiness – the kind that settled in when you understood that some things, once gone, never truly returned.
She had never told Eris the full truth before that night; the night the tunnels nearly swallowed them whole, before the name "Haven" meant anything more than a desperate prayer.
The memory clung to her like the thin scars at her collarbone. It lived in the way her jaw stayed tight even when she laughed at Leo's pranks, a soldier's instinct masquerading as a brother's care.
And Eris, for his part, had never spoken of the time before Ruvio found him with the siblings. They carried their pasts like parallel shadows... distinct and dark, stretching out behind them.
They moved close together, but the shadows never truly crossed. They lived in a shared silence, a mutual respect for the ghosts that walked beside them.
She didn't tell him how he felt towards him after that... even now.
She knew, she didn't need to put it into words.
Kaylah stared into the low glow of the embers in the hearth.
The orange light flickered, and suddenly, the sound of the rattling pipes began to change. The rhythm slowed, turning into the heavy, grinding sound.
The warmth of the room began to bleed away into a freezing memory...
The past was a jagged thing, vivid and unyielding in her mind. It had been the night the sky itself seemed to fracture, the night the three siblings were forged into survivors.
Kaylah remembered little of the people she'd lived among. No laughter, no shared bread, only the hollow existence of souls too tired to care. But the storm? The storm was etched into her bones. Lightning split the sky like veins of fire, thunder shaking the earth as if the world itself was trying to scream.
The settlement had always been a place of quiet despair, clinging to the muddy rivers like a sickness. Kaylah had just turned eleven that day, the last day of normalcy.
The Iron Order came without warning, their boots pounding the earth, their torches turning the storm's chaos into something alive, something hungry.
There was no gold, no riches, just the wretched and the forgotten. Yet they came.
And then the cries. The shouts. The panic.
The Iron Order didn't come for treasure.
They came for something else.
Kaylah's parents hadn't panicked. They'd been calm... too calm.
The root cellar was dark, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and fear. Myrah's sobs echoed in the cramped space, her small hands clutching the crystal their mother had given her.
"Don't cry, Myrah. Here, this lucky trinket is for you." Leo had waited, eyes wide, but no gift came for him. Just the weight of silence.
Their father's voice was a whisper through the cracks. "Stay quiet. We're going to fix the barricade. Don't worry. We'll be back before you know it."
But the barricade had fallen.
And they never came back.
The root cellar's air had grown thick with the scent of damp earth and fear. Kaylah's hands trembled as she gripped the crowbar, her strength born of pure terror. The heavy wooden door creaked open, revealing a world erased by wind and fire.
The settlement was gone. Only a few houses stood, their walls blackened and broken. Their home was a shell—three walls and no roof, the scent of ozone clinging to the air like a ghost.
Kaylah's heart pounded as she dragged Leo and Myrah into the dark tunnels, the only place that offered a shadow of protection. The howling wind echoed behind them, a reminder of the world they had lost.
The adults had whispered of Elder Ruvio's clan, a last safe pocket, buried deep beneath the mountain, beyond the ruins of the old city's calcified bones. Haven Below, they called it. A myth, a prayer, a place that might not exist.
The siblings were lost in the ruins when they met Eris wandering like them. He was alone, not speaking, and yet, he walked with them as if they were his kin.
Maybe he was afraid, too. I didn't know how he felt then, but I didn't want him afraid. I looked at him as a savior, even though he was just standing there, looking fragile as we were.
They followed his footsteps... not asking... not knowing his destination. Kaylah just hoped he knew Haven Below.
The children moved through the skeletal remains of a world that had died long before she was born.
And then, there it was. Glass-back!
It loomed before them, its massive form blocking their path. Eris stood before it, a broken pipe in his hands, his body trembling with fear. But he faced the beast like a knight, his eyes steady and determined.
Then, Elder Ruvio appeared, his presence a beacon of hope. He saved them, leading them to Haven Below.
The haven was a patchwork of desperation, rusted scaffolds, half-collapsed subway rails, and pipes that sang with the storms above. But it was home. A place of refuge, of hope.
Families lived in clusters, their numbers growing as strays drifted in with rumors of the surface and gear held together by strings.
There were no crowns, no banners of war, only Elder Ruvio, a man who had survived long enough to matter.
Ruvio was a sentinel, his staff a symbol of his authority, his eyes holding secrets that saw too much. He assigned elders, those who were trusted and could decide without him.
He acted as the Great Elder, the advisor, not directly managing, as he was not always around.
Kaylah's heart ached with the weight of the past. The nightmare that had brought them here, the loss they had endured. Eris bore the heaviest burden, the Silver in his veins a constant reminder of the world they had left behind.
Their first shelter was a hollow dug into the soot-stained subway walls, a pathetic excuse for a home. Blankets patched from scavenged coats still smelled of the surface, and a single, battered stove smoked more than it heated. Pipes overhead rattled like shaking teeth every time the wind above changed.
But to Kaylah and the children, it was a palace. A promise that the monsters, the things with glass backs and void-eyes, wouldn't be able to claw through the dark at night.
They called it Emberlight, their home, the safest place on this ruined land.
Eris had become part of that promise since the day Ruvio pulled him, half-dead and glowing with a strange, terrifying light, from the beast's jaws. He had stepped into their circle of warmth and stayed.
Every night after, the ritual was the same. Kaylah made sure Leo and Myrah ate first, her eyes fixed on the flickering stove to ignore the cramping in her own stomach. She would divide the meager scraps of salted meat or thin broth, watching them swallow as if it were their last meal.
And Eris... Eris was the only one who saw her. He would push his own wooden bowl toward her, his face a mask of quiet resolve. He would pretend he'd already eaten, or that he wasn't hungry at all.
It was a lie they both accepted, a silent pact between two children who had learned too early that love in the deep was measured in mouthfuls.
Kaylah blinked, the orange firelight of the hearth snapping back into focus. She realized she was still gripping Eris's wrist... tightly. She slowly let go, her fingers cold despite the heat of the pipe.
Eris didn't pull away. He looked at her, his hazel eyes soft, reflecting the embers. He didn't ask what she had seen. He knew. He had been to that dark place in his own mind too many times to count. Without a word, he reached out and adjusted the threadbare blanket over her shoulders, a mirror of the care she always gave him.
In that silence, the air in the room shifted.
Tonight, the siblings clung to his sides like pups after bread scraps. Myrah boasted she'd caught a rat (she hadn't). Leo demanded Eris carve him a knife from scrap bone (Kaylah snorted - "Over my dead body").
Over it all, the tunnels breathed. A shiver in the pipes. The soft thunder of far-off storms clawing at the city's corpse.
And far back, where the dim lamplight finally died, Elder Ruvio leaned on his staff, his eyes half-shadowed beneath his battered, dust-laden hood.
He said nothing as he watched Kaylah gently tug Leo into her lap, a small, protective gesture, and flick Myrah's ear when the young girl's chatter grew too loud.
He said nothing when Eris, looking up, caught him staring, his ancient gaze fixed somewhere beyond them, distant and unreadable. Elder Ruvio simply tapped his staff once on the cold stone, the runes at its tip flickering like lightning sealed in iron.
"If the blood remembers," Elder Ruvio rasped, his voice rough as gravel, cutting through the silence. "Then the shadows do too "Eris opened his mouth, a question forming on his tongue, but the lingering echo of the tap seemed to swallow his words whole.
And somewhere, beyond Haven's makeshift walls, past the dripping tunnels and scrap-metal barricades, something else listened. Breathless. Waiting.
Elder Ruvio's staff tapped the stone once more, a sound that seemed to echo too far down the dark, sinking into the earth itself. He murmured something then, a whisper only the deepest shadows heard. A promise, maybe. Or a warning.
Far beyond, in the black tunnels that even Elder Ruvio's ancient eyes did not pierce, something else listened.
Something that remembered the name whispered into blood:
Celestia.
* * *