The chapters at the beginning are a little but short but after chapter 4 they will be around 5-7k or maybe more words.
My Patreon for advanced chapters - https://www.patreon.com/cw/Rugss
The morning started with the pipes freezing again.
Caelum woke to the sound of copper groaning inside the walls, that low, sick moan that meant the aether heating had cut out sometime in the night and the water in the pipes had gone to ice. He lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling of his room, which was not really a room so much as a converted storage closet on the third floor of a boarding house that tilted slightly to the left, as though the whole building was tired and leaning on its neighbor for support.
His breath came out in pale clouds. Frost had crept across the inside of the window, and through the glass he could see the rooftops of the Greys stretching out in their endless, soot-colored sprawl, chimneys breathing smoke into a sky that couldn't decide if it wanted to be grey or simply give up on color altogether.
He didn't want to get out of bed.
He got out of bed.
The floor was so cold it burned through his socks. He dressed quickly in the dark, layering the way you learned to in the Greys: undershirt, wool shirt, his father's old coat over everything. The coat was too big for him. It had been too big when Edmund Ashford was alive, because Edmund had bought it during better years when he was a broader man with broader shoulders who carried himself like someone who belonged in the Spire District, which he had, once, before the Severance took his magic and the world took everything else.
Caelum buttoned it to the throat and looked at himself in the cracked mirror nailed above the washbasin. Black hair, too long, falling into his eyes. A face that was all angles, like someone had started carving it and gotten impatient. Blue eyes that a girl at the textile mill had once told him were "wasted on a boy who never smiles."
He hadn't smiled at that either, which probably proved her point.
Seventeen years old. No family. No magic. No plan beyond the next week's rent.
He splashed ice-cold water on his face because the alternative was not washing at all, and he hadn't fallen that far yet. His father had fallen that far, near the end. Caelum remembered the smell of the room above the tannery, the bottles, the way Edmund's hands had trembled, and how the man who had once made paper birds fly across a drawing room with a flick of his fingers could not, in those last months, manage to hold a cup without spilling.
Severance. That's what the Arcanum called it when a person's magic died inside them. Rare. Poorly understood. Spoken about in medical journals with the clinical detachment reserved for conditions that only happened to other people. What the journals didn't describe was the sound a man makes when he wakes up one morning and the thing that made him him, the bright, singing current that had been part of his body since birth, is simply gone. Silent. Like a room where music has stopped and you can't remember the melody.
Caelum had been nine years old when his father's magic went quiet. He remembered his mother's face that morning. Not crying. Liora Ashford had not been a woman who cried. But something behind her eyes had closed, like a door shutting at the end of a long hallway, and it had never reopened.
They'd lost the house within a year. The standing within two. The Spire District didn't keep families who couldn't contribute to the aetheric grid, and a Severed man was worse than a Hollow one in the eyes of the highborn. A Hollow had never had magic to begin with. Tragic, but natural. A Severed man had lost it, and loss frightened the powerful more than absence ever could, because loss meant it could happen to them.
So the Ashfords fell. Spire District to the Merchant Quarter to the Greys, each move a step down a staircase with no bottom. His mother got sick. The kind of sick that aetheric healers could have fixed in an afternoon, the kind of sick that killed you in the Greys because the nearest clinic with a licensed healer had a six-month waiting list and charged fees that would have made a banker flinch.
Liora died on a Tuesday. Caelum was eleven. He remembered the weather: bright sun, not a cloud, the kind of day that felt like the world was mocking you.
His father lasted four more years, but he'd been dying since the Severance. The alcohol just made it official.
Caelum had buried him with money borrowed from Mercer, the old salvage dealer who operated out of a cellar near the dye works. He'd been paying that debt off in labor ever since. Salvage runs, mostly. Digging through condemned buildings and old ruins for anything that might contain residual aether, scraps of magic trapped in old metal and stone, which Mercer could sell to the mid-level enchanters who couldn't afford fresh aether from the licensed suppliers.
It was illegal, technically. Everything useful in the Greys was illegal technically.
He locked his door, which was a generous term for the action since the lock was broken and the door could be opened with a firm push, and headed downstairs. Mrs. Hargrove, who owned the boarding house and was either sixty or a hundred depending on the light, was standing in the hallway poking at the pipe junction with a wrench.
"Heating's out," she said, without looking up.
"I noticed."
"Aether allocation got cut again. Third time this quarter." She gave the pipe a vicious whack. Nothing happened. "They're diverting it uphill. New construction in the Spire. Some lord's building a conservatory, I heard. A conservatory." She said the word the way someone might say "tumor."
"I'll be back late tonight," Caelum said.
"Rent's due Friday."
"I know."
"I mean it this time, Ashford."
"You meant it last time too."
She looked at him then, and her expression softened into something that wasn't quite pity but lived in the same neighborhood. "Your father was a good man, Caelum. I don't like to press."
"Then don't." He said it gently enough. He didn't have anger for Mrs. Hargrove. She was surviving the same way he was, one week at a time, in a district the rest of the city preferred to forget existed.
Outside, the Greys greeted him with its usual hospitality: fog, the smell of coal smoke and wet stone, and the distant hum of the textile mills gearing up for the morning shift. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his collar up, navigating the narrow streets by memory. Past the butcher's where old Calloway was hanging pheasants in the window. Past the aether relay station, a squat iron building where the city's magical current was stepped down and distributed to the district, its output gauge reading so low the needle barely trembled.
Children ran past him, three of them, chasing each other with sticks. One of them, a girl of maybe six with tangled hair and a coat held together with twine, stopped and pointed her stick at the others.
"I'm a Spire mage!" she shouted. "I'll turn you into frogs!"
The other two shrieked and scattered, laughing.
Caelum watched them for a moment. Something tightened in his chest that he didn't have a name for. Not jealousy, exactly. Something older and quieter. The knowledge that even in play, even in a game between children in the poorest district in the city, magic was the thing that meant you mattered. That you could point a stick and the world would listen.
He'd stopped playing those games very young.
He turned the corner onto Ferren Street and headed toward the river, toward Mercer's cellar, toward the salvage job that would keep his roof for another month, and behind him the little girl shouted spells at the sky and the sky, as always, did not answer.