My first steps off the platform don't make sense. Nothing I'm seeing makes sense.
The station is open-air. Concrete benches. A rusted departure board nobody has updated in what looks like decades.
People moving through it with the specific, practiced rhythm of people doing their jobs—a woman sweeping the far end of the platform, a man stacking crates onto a hand trolley, two others arguing quietly near a pillar over a piece of paper.
Normal.
Underground.
I clear the platform overhang and see the skyline.
I stop walking. Not tactically. My feet just stop.
The city is enormous. Azure Prime enormous. Maybe larger.
The architecture is pharaonic and salvaged at the same time—massive stone facades sitting next to welded scrap and packed earth, towers carved with the kind of patient ambition that only happens when people have nowhere else to be.
It wasn't designed. It was accumulated…
Someone arrived here and started building and never stopped.
