He ran.
Not toward the hovel. Never again.
Ash and soot scoured his lungs. Rage echoed behind him—booze-soaked, bitter, already fading.
He didn't stop until the Sinks swallowed him whole.
The city's underbelly writhed: chimneys hacking out smoke, steel wheels grinding, stray dogs yowling at nothing. The stench of rust and sweat wrapped around him like a second skin.
He collapsed in a guttering alley, ribs like knives in his chest, hunger gnawing with tiny, cruel teeth. His breath hitched. He was nine. He felt ancient.
—
Three years passed.
The boy who had fled no longer ran. He hunted.
Lugal had grown lean—built like a shadow with teeth. His eyes were emptier now. Not dead, just... focused. Always calculating. Always watching.
He slipped through the Sinks market like a whisper, weaving between stalls of rotting greens and meats dripping with flies. He spotted it: a bruised apple on the edge of a merchant's cart.
His hand moved before thought.
Cold fruit hit his palm.
Then iron fingers locked around his wrist.
"Thief," the merchant snarled. His breath was meat and ale. "You little rat."
A fist rose. Slow. Heavy. Familiar.
Lugal didn't flinch. He closed his eyes.
Here it comes.
Worthless.
But the blow never landed.
A blur darted in—a smaller boy, wild-eyed, barefoot, fast.
He slammed into the merchant's knee.
The man staggered.
"Run, idiot!" the boy snapped.
Then he vanished into the crowd, apple and all.
Lugal stood frozen, skin buzzing. Chest tight. That wasn't mercy. That wasn't kindness. Those things didn't exist in the Sinks.
But something strange smoldered in him anyway.
Gratitude.
He never saw the boy again.
But he remembered.
Not the face. The gesture.
A flicker of light in a place where light didn't belong.
—
That night, the hunger returned. Stronger than ever.
He curled in an alley behind a crate of rusted nails, breath shallow. His ribs ached. His pride gnawed at him harder than the hunger.
And then she found him.
A shape. A voice. A question.
"Hungry, boy?"
The woman was tall. Her cloak was clean—not from coin, but ritual. Her skin was bronze-dark, her eyes like obsidian knives. She didn't pity. She didn't ask about the bruises.
She offered bread.
And a choice.
"What are you willing to do to climb out of the gutter?"
He took the bread. He swallowed the question. And he followed.
—
The Sunken Forum.
They never showed their faces. Only shadows, smoke, and instructions. A whispering council wrapped in secrets.
Tasks, at first:
Watch. Listen. Carry. Return unseen.
Then:
Names. Routes. Maps. Eavesdropping through pipes. Stealing from ledgers. Extracting truth from silence.
They didn't heal the broken boy.
They sharpened him.
He learned to vanish between footsteps. To read lies in a twitching brow. To become a rumor with teeth.
They didn't comfort him.
They gave him a knife.
And with it, a promise:
You can rise.
You can matter.
You can make them all choke on their words.
He clung to it like breath.
A vow made beneath the belt. A hunger given shape.
And that voice—his father's—still echoed, distant and withering:
You'll never be nothing.
He would prove it wrong.
He would become something terrible enough that even his past would cower.
—
The dream broke.
Lugal gasped awake. Sweat soaked him. The cell greeted him—cold, reeking, alive with despair.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
The sound of time wearing even the strong down to bones.
He curled into himself again.
The past was a weight he carried.
The future had no face.
And yet...
The promise still burned.
You will rise.