The room was huge and cold. Thousands of small, iron boxes were stacked from the floor to the ceiling. Inside each box was a person.These were not the "Dregs" who fought. These were the "Hollows."They were people who had been discarded by the Empire. Old servants, failed students, and Nulls who were too weak to work. They were thin, their skin like gray paper. Their eyes were open, but they were staring at nothing.Each person had a silver needle stuck into the back of their neck. The needles were connected to thin wires that led to the golden tube.Drogo walked past the cages. He saw a woman who looked like she was a hundred years old, but her hands were small, like a child's. He saw a man whose legs had been replaced by metal rods.They were all whispering. "Holy is the Sun..." the woman whispered."Pure is the Light..." the man echoed.They were not praying because they loved the Emperor. They were praying because the needles were forcing them to. The machines were "harvesting

The air in the Dross did not move. It was not like the wind in the mountains or the breeze in the High City. Here, the air was a thick, yellow soup made of recycled smog, steam from the mana-foundries, and the smell of a million people who had forgotten what a bath felt like. It was heavy. It sat in the lungs like wet wool.Drogo Payne moved through this fog like a ghost made of obsidian.He was still suppressed. His violet fire was pushed deep into his marrow, making his skin look like cold, dead charcoal. He was eight feet tall, but he walked with a hunched back, blending into the shadows of the giant, dripping pipes. Every few seconds, a massive thump-thump-thump shook the floor. It was the sound of the Spire’s sewage pumps. They were the heartbeat of the undercity, pushing the waste of the rich down into the dark and pulling the "clean" energy of the poor upward.Drogo was mapping the world.Inside his mind, the Abyssal Archive was drawing a new map. It was not a map of streets

The ventilation shafts of Solara were the lungs of the Empire. They were massive tunnels of iron and brass that ran from the very bottom of the undercity to the very top of the High Spire. They were always humming. They were always blowing. They carried the hot, stinking breath of the mana-foundries out of the city and pulled the cold, fresh air of the mountains in.But in one specific section of the shafts, the air did not smell fresh. It smelled like a graveyard in the middle of a swamp.Drogo Payne moved through the shadows of a giant, spinning fan. He was eight feet of silent obsidian. He had pushed his violet fire so deep into his bones that he looked like a piece of the wall. He was no longer the "Breaker" who roared at the sky. He was a shadow. He was a secret.In front of him, built into the very guts of the iron shafts, was a mansion.It was not a beautiful palace. It was a grotesque house made of rusted metal, black stone, and bone. It was the home of Baron Mordant. The Ba

The heart of Baron Mordant’s mansion was a room called the "Sanctum of Harvest." It was a place where the air did not just smell like death; it felt like death. The walls were not made of stone, but of thousands of glass jars stacked on top of each other. Inside the jars, hearts still beat in yellow liquid. Lungs still puffed. Eyes still turned to look at anyone who walked by. It was a library of stolen life.In the center of the room, a large table made of silver sat under a single, glowing green lamp.Baron Mordant stood over the table. He was a short, round man, but he did not look soft. His skin was the color of a bruised plum, and his fingers were long and yellow, like the claws of a bird. He wore a leather apron that was stained with black blood.On the table lay a young girl. She was a Null. She had no magic. She was maybe eight years old, with messy brown hair and eyes that were wide with a terror so deep she couldn't even scream. Her hands were tied to the silver table with

The Sanctum of Harvest was quiet now, but it was a heavy, sick kind of quiet. The green lamps on the walls were flickering, dying out as the magic in the room began to fail. Baron Mordant lay on the floor, his fat body looking like a pile of melting wax.Drogo Payne stood over him. Drogo was still in his "Hollow Ghost" state. He shimmered with a translucent, pink light that looked like a sunset trapped inside a diamond. He was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. He looked down at the Baron with eyes that were no longer human. They were two gray stones, cold and hard.Mordant was not dead yet, but he was falling apart. Drogo had used his [Void-Needle] to unravel the magic inside the Baron’s limbs. Because Mordant was a Rot-Mage, his body was actually held together by the very disease he controlled. Without his magic, his skin was starting to peel away. His organs were visible through his translucent chest, pulsing weakly like tired fish."The... pain..." Mordant wheezed. A b