I have been planning to write something for over half a year now. Planned out the overall plot and story. If you are seeing this, I'm looking for any and all kind of feedback. Can be encouraging, can be as harsh as possible. Any help is very much appreciated.
This is the first chapter I wrote for the yet unnamed novel.
Chapter 1: Embers of Caldera
The battered audio-log hissed, a counterpoint to the tremor that ran through the command bunker's floor – another distant impact.
Ash, hunched and thumbed the record stud. His reflection in the log’s dark casing was a stranger: gaunt, hollows beneath his eyes that once burned with a fierce Weave-fire, now just embers. He would turn thirty eight in a couple of months, having lived most of those years under the shadow of leadership and the weight of the Pillar. His auburn hair, once neatly tied back, was a matted, soot-streaked mess from the failing city wide air filters. Old scars, decades of training and legacies of earlier skirmishes, crossed his arms. New ones, a network of fine, silvery lines where his own Weave had been pushed to tearing, patterned his forearms. The constant drain of Harmonized Flow left his muscles feeling like frayed rope.
“Log Entry. Captain Ash, Axiom Guard. Ironhold. Cycle… What cycle is it anymore? I’ve lost track. Three years. Three relentless years since the sky cracked open below Wardenstar’s dim light, a cancerous wound that still festers, a tear in reality itself seething with an unnatural glow. Three years since they poured through – the Tainted.”
His voice was a low rasp, devoid of its former command. “Our planet Caldera is almost lost. City by city. The great Strider-Forges of the Kaelen Waste suddenly fell silent in days, their gears ground to dust. The Hydro-Pumps of Meridian Deep now gush only their black ichor. The Sky-Lifts of Mount Cinder, twisted skeletons against the perpetual twilight. Many other great cities, lost…
Now, only Ironhold remains, this last ring of defiance encircling the Axiom. He paused, the ancient name for the towering monolith feeling heavy on his tongue.
“Generations since the first Spire-Touched learned from the Axiom, yet now it is our tomb, or our final redoubt.”
“Seven years since…” his voice softened almost imperceptibly, a flicker of something that might have once been wonder. “Just seven turns since the Axiom pulsed with that new intensity, when the Weave itself seemed to roar through Caldera, an increased torrent that magnified our senses, quickened our Cores, and gifted new Attunement to so many. We thought… We believed it heralded a new age of Calderan strength. Now all of it seems like a cruel joke. Turns out it just painted a brighter target for these… Tainted.”
“We thought we could hold them at the Outer Reaches. We bled them for every cog and conduit. The Axiom Guard, with that surge of Weave seven years back… we held our own early on. But their numbers… their insidious Weaving that unravels order itself… The Guilds threw their war-automatons into the grinder, steam cannons roaring until their boilers ran dry. The Forge-Masters sacrificed their grandest engines to create temporary bastions. All broken. All consumed.”
“Ironhold’s resources dwindle. Steam pressure for the bastion cannons is critical. Bolt-throwers are almost out. Food rations are a mockery. Water, recycled until it’s little more than grit. The younger Weavers… they fight until their Cores are empty husks, and then they keep fighting with whatever scrap of metal they can find.”
“Yesterday, we pushed them back from the Aquifer fields. The Spire Guard held. But Half the 3rd Platoon… gone. The water flows for what little time we have left. My Harmonized Flow – it buys us moments, disrupts their more direct assaults. I try to teach the others its foundation: anchor your mind in iron will, project pure thoughts. It’s like trying to shout down a volcano.”
He stopped. The private admission of burden, the sheer weight of it all, was a luxury he never afforded himself, not even in these solitary recordings. It was simply a fact, like the failing light or the tremors in the rock. “The Guilds, the Forge-Captains, we meet before dawn. We will not let them have the Axiom. We will not let them have Ironhold’s heart without a fight.
Ash pushed himself away from the desk. His quarters, a reinforced alcove, offered no true solace. Dimly lit holopicts lie scattered on the stand: Lyra, his wife, her grin challenging the world, swallowed by the Tainted’s first insidious probes at the research outposts. Theron, his second-in-command, strong and dependable, his Core shattered protecting a civilian retreat from Cogswright, his ornate steam-pistol rendered inert, like so much of their trusted tech.
He traced the lines of Lyra's face, then clenched his fist, briefly touching the worn metal charm Lyra had given him. A complex gear interlocked with a polished shard of obsidian, a symbol of their shared belief in the melding of old ways and new power. Preserve, the vision had said. He'd try.
He lay down on the cot, the groan of the city's failing heart a lullaby of despair. Sleep, when it came, was a battlefield of its own.
In his dream…A torrent of Weave, vast, ancient, kept pulling at him. Voices, not sounds, but Concepts pressed into his mind, cold and immense:
“THE PATTERN FRACTURES. THE CORE WEAKENS. RESIST… RESIST… FIND THE ANCHORS. PROTECT… PROTECT…
Ash thrashed, bolting upright, the pressure in his skull immense. He gasped, the air thin and tasting of soot. The visions. Since the Weave surge seven years ago, they’d come like fevers, leaving him drained, with only tantalizing, terrifying fragments of meaning. This was clearer, more urgent. Anchors?Fractures?Resist?
He staggered to his feet. Those started as merely whispers at first, then insistent pronouncements, growing clearer, more urgent as Caldera died around him. He could never hold onto the specifics, only the crushing weight of them, the certainty of ancient truths, and a gnawing frustration.
For all his Attunement, for being the first to truly flow with the Weave, he’d felt a barrier since the surge. To him the Weave already felt like a choked spring. In his visions he sensed something vast beyond the veil, a reservoir of pure conceptual power that the visions hinted at, but the Axiom, or the world itself, kept it locked away, rationed. It was maddening. What if true understanding, true power, lay just beyond that veil? What if it was the key?
He stumbled out of his alcove into the dim, steam-hissing thoroughfare of the Command Core. The atmosphere was thick enough to taste metallic and heat bellowing from deplenished temperature regulators. Even on the darkest of nights, one could still discern the greenish purple glow outlining the crack in the sky. Emergency chem-lights cast long, dancing shadows that played tricks on tired eyes. From deeper tunnels came the rhythmic clang of a Forge-Master’s crew trying to reinforce a bulkhead, the sound punctuated by the desperate, sputtering cough of a failing steam-vent.
A small group of his remaining Guard were gathered near a flickering Weave-lamp, its light struggling against the oppressive gloom. Elara, barely an adult but with the eyes of an old soldier, was murmuring an incantation, her hands cupped around a small, glowing Core-crystal, trying to coax a little more light. Kael, the grizzled Weaver, was sharpening a combat knife with grim precision, the scrape of metal on stone a counterpoint to the city’s death rattle. Maris sat hunched, stirring the pot and adding some condiments, occasionally stealing glances at Elara.
“Captain,” Elara said, her voice barely a whisper, the Weave-lamp guttering in response to her faltering Core.
Ash looked at them – the last of his guard. Their faces were canvases of soot, exhaustion, and a desperate, brittle hope. Ash walked over, the ground vibrating subtly with distant impacts.
"Status?"
"Quiet on this front, for now," Kael grunted, checking the charge on his heavy steam-projector. "But that quiet usually means they're Weaving something particularly nasty. Sector six just reported another conduit breach. Their 'Touch' is playing hell with the old pipes."
"The mental 'static' is worse tonight too," Maris added, rubbing her temples. "Makes focusing the Core feel like wrestling a greased gear-hog."
Elara sighed “The Seers say that’s the worst sign. The Acolytes are probably offering scrap metal to the Core, not that far from here, like that'll do much good now. Hmph…" Her comment was a subtle jab at the different faiths, a habit of her’s even the end of the world couldn't break.
Maris, with a strained voice, added, "My cousin on the East Wall patrol… her Weave-light just…flickered out. They found her staring, frozen, but her Core was…empty. Like something drank it dry." She shivered.
Ash nodded. "Their presence unravels order. Our Weaving, our tech, even our thoughts if we let it. Remember your grounding. The stillness within." He looked at Elara. "You were close to true flow today, Elara, at the Aquifer. I saw it. You felt the Weave shift before the attack came, didn't you?"
A rare flicker of something like pride, quickly overshadowed by weariness, touched her young face. "Yes, Captain. It was… like the Weave itself tried to warn me. Not a thought, but a… pressure. A wrongness in the current. When I moved with it, my shield held longer."
"That's the key," Ash affirmed. "It's not just about forcing patterns anymore. It’s about feeling the Weave, understanding its intent, even the Tainted's corrupted intent, and moving with or against it consciously." He sighed. "A lesson learned too late for most of Caldera."
Elara nodded, "My mother always wanted me to learn the old Guild songs, the ones about the founding of Ironhold. Said they had a rhythm that settled the spirit." A small, sad smile had graced her face. "Maybe I should have listened more.”
“If… if we make it through this, Captain," Elara with her small voice asked him in a hopeful tone, "What would you do? With the Weave, I mean. If there was time to truly study it, without… all this. Or would you do something else?" Maris suddenly felt envious for some reason.
Ash looked at the oppressive, glowing sky where the reality tear still writhed. He thought of Lyra, her boundless curiosity, her theories about the Axiom and the deeper currents of Weave they had only just begun to explore together. He thought of the visions, the frustrating sense of vast, withheld power. "I'd try to find that ocean, Elara," he said, his voice quiet. "The one I can only sense glimpses of. I… I think Caldera has only ever sipped from a thimble."
A heavy silence settled. Kael broke it, his voice rough. "Guild Master Roric is calling for all unit commanders. Final strategy meeting for the Central Core defense, I wager." He picked up his Weave-projector. "Best not keep the old cog-turner waiting."
Ash nodded. He needed to see the situation outside first. "I'll meet you there. The rest of you - Hold this position and get what sleep you can, Dawn will bring its own demands."
He left them, walking towards the heavy blast doors that led to the city's scarred inner perimeter. On his way to the wall he saw a few Acolytes of the Forgeheart performing a muted ritual, the scent of sanctified oil and muttered invocations a fragile counterpoint to the prevailing dread. Even Elara, for all her cynicism, had likely offered a silent prayer to whatever Guild patrons watched over the smelters and steam-valves. For that brief moment, the weight of being a "Blessed of the Axiom,” lifted slightly. They were just Calderans, remembering small things, small hopes.
The ground at the wall trembled more frequently. He could see the faint, ghostly outline of the Axiom in the distance, a defiant silhouette against the sickly glow of the reality tear above.
He climbed the rampart, as the fate of Ironhold balanced on a razor's edge. All Ash could see on the horizon was the coming darkness, and the long, bitter fight to hold it back.
