thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
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Reading
11 d, 4 h
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The first ticket arrived before the body. At 11:47 p.m., the decommissioned City Hall station was supposed to be empty. The last authorized maintenance crew had signed out at ten, the museum tour gate was chained, and the loop track beyond the tiled platform had been dead to passenger service for more than a century. Yet Martin Vale heard a conductor call his name from behind the cinderblock wall. He stopped beneath a brass chandelier that had not worked since his grandfather was young. His flashlight…-
25.9 K • Completed
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The green chemical flare sputters, hisses, and dies. Absolute, suffocating darkness swallows us. It is a darkness so complete, so physically heavy, it feels like being submerged in freezing oil. The millions of tons of obsidian pressing down from above no longer feel like architecture; they feel like a tomb. "Amaya?" I say, my voice a harsh, dry rasp that barely penetrates the dead air. "I'm here," she answers instantly. Her voice is close, mere inches to my left. The thick canvas of…-
22.0 K • Completed
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There is a terrifying, specific agony in becoming a machine. I am pinned against the smooth, freezing surface of the obsidian altar, my spine arched so fiercely it feels like my vertebrae might snap. I cannot see the cavern. I cannot see Ciro or Mateo. My vision is entirely consumed by the blinding, incandescent white light of the crystallized blood tether binding my wrist to the mountain's core. The geode is starving, and I am its only source of kinetic life. The magic drags my human heartbeat out of…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The geode cavern is shrieking, a sound of crystalline tectonic plates grinding against one another as the mountain’s gravity collapses into a singularity. Ciro is braced against the shaking floor, his sword jammed into a fissure to keep him upright, while Mateo is a blur of motion, his hands tracing complex, desperate patterns in the air as he tries to weave a containment field for the overflowing surge of white magic. "The feedback loop is too strong!" Mateo yells, his voice cracking.…
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22.0 K • Completed
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— Eclipse Red Over Condor Citadel The air at the summit of Condor Citadel tastes of copper, frost, and impending death. I kneel before the great altar of the Apex Temple, my breath pluming in the freezing dark, my fingers working blindly inside the shattered housing of the reliquary. Three thousand feet below, the terraced cloud cities are blissfully unaware that they are about to suffocate. The sky above the open oculus is bruising into a deep, sickly violet. The once-in-a-century eclipse has begun…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The air at the summit of Condor Citadel tastes of copper, frost, and impending death. I kneel before the great altar of the Apex Temple, my breath pluming in the freezing dark, my fingers working blindly inside the shattered housing of the reliquary. Three thousand feet below, the terraced cloud cities are blissfully unaware that they are about to suffocate. The sky above the open oculus is bruising into a deep, sickly violet. The once-in-a-century eclipse has begun its crawl across the sun, and the…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The world above us is swallowed by a violent roar of fracturing stone and screaming wind, replaced entirely by the crushing darkness of the abyss. I am falling, the wind tearing at my skin and the sudden, terrifying weightlessness stealing the air from my lungs. Below, the jagged, unseen teeth of the lower mountain reach up through the freezing cloud layer. Before the panic can truly set in, a shadow eclipses me in the freefall. Mateo. His dark robes snap around him like the wings of a massive…
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22.0 K • Completed
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Suffocation does not feel like a fading of the light. It feels like swallowing crushed stone. The barometric pressure of the high altitudes, stripped away by the absolute totality of the eclipse, is collapsing my lungs. Every desperate pull of oxygen is a razor dragging down my throat. My vision tunnels into a gray, static blur. Decades of martial discipline, of commanding the greatest military force in Condor Citadel, dissolve into a singular, pathetic biological imperative: Breathe. Breathe.…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The dust on the cave floor does not settle. It rises. I watch in silent, breathless awe as the pulverized stone and frost drift upward, catching the faint, residual light of the oath cord that still pulses around my wrist. The ambient magic of Condor Citadel—a system of barometric locks, crystalline conduits, and blood-oaths built into the very bedrock—is desperately trying to stabilize itself. With the eclipse stripping the atmosphere, the mountain is compensating by manipulating its own localized…
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22.0 K • Completed
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Geometry is the language of survival. Before the commander of the Elite Guard even finishes his downward arc, my mind calculates the exact trajectory of the pneumatically charged broadsword. At a forty-five-degree angle, the blade will cleave through the space where Ciro is currently standing. I do not need to shout a warning. I do not need to move to intercept. The tether pulsing at my wrist does the work for me. Through the crystallized blood cord binding the three of us, my spatial calculation fires…
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22.0 K • Completed
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