All Chapters of The Beggar’s Throne: Chapter 611
- Chapter 620
630 chapters
Chapter Six Hundred and Eleven
The faint pulses of the new signal lingered in Jake Sullivan's mind like an unwelcome echo as the sun dipped below the fractured skyline. The city, once a sprawling metropolis of gleaming spires and bustling avenues, now resembled a labyrinth of ruins—crumbled concrete, twisted metal girders, and pockets of shadow that seemed to breathe with malevolent intent. The eastern sector was secure for now, but the victory felt hollow. The shadow's evolution into psychological infiltration meant that every face in the crowd could mask a traitor, every whisper could sow discord.Jake stood on the rooftop, the cool evening breeze carrying the distant hum of Mira's drones. Below, civilians moved in cautious groups, their steps more deliberate after the day's interventions. Elara and Aaron flanked him, their expressions mirroring his own unease. Kael's voice crackled through the comms, pulling him back to the present."Jake, the signal's strengthening. It's not originating from the eastern sector
Chapter Six Hundred and Twelve
The city woke to silence.For the first time in months, no pulses thrummed beneath the pavement. No drones fell from the sky with smoking wings. No children woke screaming from dreams that weren’t theirs. The shadow had gone quiet, and quiet, Jake Sullivan knew, was the most dangerous sound of all.He stood on the roof of the old Central Library (now their forward command), watching the first real sunrise in weeks paint the broken skyline gold. The air tasted clean. Too clean. Like the moment before a guillotine drops.Elara joined him, boots soft on the gravel. She didn’t speak for a long time. When she finally did, her voice was barely above the wind.“They’re singing,” she said.Jake frowned. “Who?”“Everyone.”He followed her gaze downward. In the street below, a woman balanced a child on her hip while humming a three-note melody. Across the square, two old men carried water buckets in perfect rhythm to the same tune. A teenage runner passed them, earbuds dangling unused, lips mov
Chapter Six Hundred and Thirteen
The city learned to live loud again.Three weeks after the Hollow Choir fell silent, the streets rang with deliberate, defiant noise: hammers on rebar, children shouting made-up rules to new games, old men arguing politics at the top of their lungs just to feel the vibration in their chests. Every market square had a “Free Noise Corner” where anyone could bang on pots, scream poetry, or play a trumpet with half the valves missing. The louder and more off-key, the better. It was therapy. It was vaccination. It was prayer.Jake hated it.Not the noise itself. He understood the necessity. But every clatter of metal on metal, every drunken chorus at 2 a.m., reminded him how thin the membrane between survival and surrender had become. The shadow had learned that beauty could be a weapon. Now the city’s answer was deliberate ugliness, and Jake could not shake the feeling that they were still dancing to the shadow’s tune, just in a different key.He stood on the parapet of the half-rebuilt w
Chapter Six Hundred and Fourteen
The city began to forget its own name.It happened in the small hours between three and four a.m., when even the Free Noise Corners fell quiet and the generators coughed themselves to sleep. People woke up strangers to themselves. A baker opened his shop and could not remember why he had ever loved the smell of bread. A mother looked at her sleeping child and felt only a vague, animal protectiveness—no recognition, no history. Lovers turned to each other in the dark and asked, “Who are you?” in voices that carried no surprise, only curiosity.They still functioned. They still spoke, walked, rebuilt. But memory—the long thread that stitched a person to yesterday—was quietly unraveling.Kael discovered it first, because Kael never slept.At 03:17 he noticed his own reflection in the black monitor blink one frame later than he did.At 03:21 the reflection smiled when he did not.By 03:27 the reflection was mouthing words Kael had not yet decided to say.He triggered every alarm in the ne
Chapter Six Hundred and Fifteen
The shadow stopped trying to enter the city.It started trying to leave it.Six days after the mirror hours collapsed, the scouts came back with the same impossible report from every direction: the wasteland beyond the city’s broken ring-road had vanished. Where there had once been endless grey dust, cratered highways, and the skeletal remains of suburbs, there was now only a wall of living darkness. Not fog. Not shadow in the usual sense. A vertical surface, matte black, warm to the touch, that drank sound and light and memory with equal hunger.Touch it for three seconds and you forgot your mother’s face. Touch it for ten and you forgot your own name. No one had touched it for eleven.The city was an island in a sea that had learned to bite.Jake stood on the northern overpass with Elara and Aaron, staring at the wall. It rose higher than any building left standing, seamless, no top, no edge. Mira’s drones flew into it and never came back. Kael’s long-range scans returned static
Chapter Six Hundred and Sixteen
They left at dawn.Not in triumph. Not in formation. Just thirty-three thousand people walking north along the cracked spine of the old interstate, dragging whatever the city could spare on sleds, carts, and bleeding shoulders. The shadow had taken the walls, the borders, the idea that safety could be a place. So they abandoned place.Jake walked at the front because someone had to, not because he wanted to. Elara was on his left, Aaron on his right, Lilah a half-step behind with Rhea’s hand in hers. Behind them the column stretched three kilometers—old, young, wounded, stubborn, terrified, singing off-key marching songs to keep the silence from settling.The sky was the color of dried blood.They had no destination. Only direction: away from the place the shadow had tried to make the entire world.By noon on the first day they found the first corpse.A man in a pre-collapse highway-patrol uniform, perfectly preserved, sitting upright in his cruiser with the door open. His eyes were o
Chapter Six Hundred and Seventeen
The first sign was the rain that fell upward.It began on the morning of the spring equinox, six months after Defiance had taken root in the canyon. Children ran outside laughing as droplets rose from puddles, from rooftops, from the river itself, spiraling into a sky the color of old bruises. Adults followed, cups held high to catch the impossible water, thinking it was a gift.Jake stood on the watchtower and felt the old dread settle in his stomach like spoiled meat.By noon the droplets had become streams. By dusk, entire rainclouds were peeling off the horizon and climbing, climbing, until they vanished into a single point of absolute black that had opened directly above the settlement. A perfect circle, no larger than a coin at arm’s length, but growing.Kael’s voice came over the comm, thin with something close to awe. “It’s not a hole. It’s a mouth.”They named it the Maw.Every drop of water that rose into it never came down again. The river shrank to half its width in a day.
Chapter Six Hundred and Eighteen
The new trees grew too fast.By the end of the first month the saplings were taller than a man. By the end of the second, their crowns had woven together into a single green roof over Defiance. Children played in shade that had not existed weeks earlier. The river ran fuller than anyone could remember, as if the land itself had decided to reward the refusal.Then the names began to fall.It happened first to the oldest survivors.Old Marta, who had carried her husband’s corpse across three districts during the first collapse, woke one morning and could not remember what anyone called her. She answered to “you” and “hey” and nothing else. Two days later, Toro found her sitting by the river, calmly folding and unfolding a scrap of paper on which someone had once written Marta in faded ink. She stared at the word like it was written in a foreign language.By the seventh day, half the settlement had lost their names.Not their memories of events—just the labels. The anchors. The part that
Chapter Six Hundred and Nineteen
They found the first immortal child on the seventy-third day after the Naming Tree took root.A boy of seven named Rowan, who had fallen from the new granary roof while chasing a kite, landed head-first on broken stone, and stood up laughing with his skull visibly cracked and his brains leaking pink down his neck. The crack sealed before his mother reached him. The leaking stopped. The laughter never did.By the end of the week there were twenty-one of them. All under twelve. All laughing.They ran into fires and walked out untouched. They held their breath until their lips turned blue, then shrugged and breathed again. One girl, little Amara, slipped beneath the river current during a baptism game and stayed under for forty-three minutes. When Toro finally dragged her out, she coughed once, opened her eyes, and asked if supper was ready.The adults stopped trying to keep them safe. It was impossible. They were already safe from the only thing that had ever truly thr
Chapter Six Hundred and Twenty
It came politely.One year to the day after the children chose mortality, a man walked into Defiance at sunset.He wore a plain grey coat, collar turned up against a wind that wasn’t blowing. His face was ordinary (the kind you forget the moment you look away). His shoes left no prints in the dust.He stopped in the middle of Sullivan’s Folly, set down a small wooden stool he had been carrying, and sat.Then he waited.People noticed, of course. Children pointed. Dogs barked once and then slunk away whimpering. The Free Noise Corner faltered mid-song.Jake was repairing the irrigation gate when Rowan (now twenty, broad-shouldered, the first of the once-immortal) came running.“There’s a man,” Rowan panted. “He says he’s here to talk to you. Only you. And Jake… he doesn’t have a shadow.”Jake wiped his hands on a rag and walked to the square.The man looked up as Jake approached. His eyes were the color of deep water, calm and depthless.“Jake Sullivan,” he said. Not a question. A gree