Istoki Mysli
The aetheric shriek was a siren’s call, a frantic, desperate scream that cut through the silent hum of the city. It was not the harmonious resonance of the old world, but a chaotic, untamed energy, raw and dangerous. It felt like a dissonant note in a sacred hymn, a wrench in the gears of a perfect machine. My paranoia, so recently soothed by the quiet solace of my workshop, returned with a renewed, sharpened urgency. This was no fellow traveler on a secret path; this was a vandal, someone trying to tear the veil open with a hammer and a crude, barbaric will. The sound was a desecration of the sacred, a violent, ignorant attempt to bend a living system to the will of the industrial age. It was a sound that would not only fail but would certainly bring the Okhrana down upon all of us.
They must be stopped! I vowed as I rose from the cold floor of my flat, the Aetherium sphere still clutched tightly in my hand. I began a journey that would take me through the buried city, a desperate, hopeless race against an inevitable end. I moved with the skill of a man who knew every turn and every shadow. The path was a secret history of the city, one that had been erased from the maps of the new world of the Romanovs. I navigated the submerged passageways with ease, my boots splashing in the perpetual dampness of an ancient, forgotten world. I am a ghost, and these are my haunted halls.
This was the true St. Petersburg, a vast, hollowed-out carcass of a forgotten city living beneath the new one. The mud that had buried the Tartarian ground floors had solidified into a clay-like tomb, preserving a world frozen in time. I ran past buried storefronts, their once-grand display windows now opaque with a century of mud, the skeletal remnants of mannequins and products eerily visible inside. I skirted the edges of grand, sweeping staircases that now led to nowhere, their ornate railings caked in grime. The air was a mixture of damp earth and the faint, coppery smell of aetheric decay. It was the scent of a dying world, and I was its last mourner. Every footstep was a betrayal of the stillness, every breath a gasp of a man too late to save his people.
As expected, I was not alone in this subterranean world. In the dim light of my small, aether-powered lantern, I passed other Tartarian ghosts—the quiet, unseen survivors of the Great Reset. I saw a figure crouched in the corner of what was once a majestic ballroom, a man meticulously cleaning a piece of old machinery, his movements slow and deliberate, a silent prayer to a forgotten god. Later, I passed a woman sitting on a submerged bench, her hands busy with a needle and thread, her face a serene mask of concentration. These were the Tartarian remnants who had chosen to live in the silence, to be forgotten—but to survive. They were the ones who had accepted their fate, who had become a part of the oppressive, quiet lie, trading a life of glory for a miserable existence. And they looked at me, a man running, a man with purpose, as a fool.
They looked at me as I passed, their eyes wide with alarm. A hurried whisper, a sharp shake of the head. My frantic pace was a violation of their unspoken rules. I was moving too fast. I was drawing attention. I was a beacon of desperation in a world that demanded stillness and invisibility. I heard a low hiss from a man polishing an ancient copper pipe: “Fool! You’ll bring them down on us all.” The censure stung, a bitter taste of shame and righteousness. He was right, of course. My small, defiant act would likely lead to my capture and death, and perhaps the capture and death of others. But what was the alternative? To polish copper pipes for a lifetime? To live in the mud, a forgotten footnote in a history that would never be written? The aetheric scream I heard was getting louder now—a jagged and painful discordance in my mind. The source was a place I knew intimately, a place of profound importance: the old City Library.
The library was a modern monument to the new world’s arrogance. They had not built it; they had simply occupied and rebranded it. In the time of Tartaria, it was called the Istoki Mysli—The Sources of Thought—and the building had been a true temple of knowledge, a hub of communication and aetheric power. Its immense, multi-tiered dome was not a mere architectural flourish, but a parabolic resonator designed to pull aetheric energy from the very air, powering the city’s myriad systems. The central chamber, now a repository for the new regime’s sanctioned histories, had once been a grand hall where knowledge flowed freely, a place where scholars and aetherium engineers could communicate with the entire world through the instantaneous, silent transfer of information. The official histories of the Romanovs claimed the building was a testament to the “new Russian Empire’s” architectural genius; yet I knew it was a grand piece of a stolen grid. The new masters of the modern world, in their infinite ignorance, had filled it with their own books—volumes of re-written histories that sang their praises and puffed up their pride. It was an ultimate act of mockery, a library of lies built on the bones of a temple of truth. And, for reasons I myself still didn’t understand, Voyeveda Orlov’s troops had not destroyed the old-world technology of the Tartarians—leaving it to rot in the basement, perhaps believing it to be a defunct relic of a primitive age or perhaps waiting to figure out how to make use of it themselves.
Soon enough I emerged from a forgotten service tunnel into the library’s basement. Immediately I got a whiff of ozone and the acrid stench of burnt copper. Worse yet, the aetheric shriek was deafening here—a physical force that vibrated in my teeth. The air was thick with it, an invisible, painful assault on my mind and my body. I was on the verge of running away, of turning back into the shadows and embracing my fate as a forgotten ghost. But then I saw her: a young woman, no more than twenty, hunched over a massive, ornate aetheric conduit, clearly trying to tap into its energy.
She’ll destroy us all! The thought was a scream in my mind, a desperate, final warning. I remained hidden near the tunnel’s door, my body a statue of fear and rage, as I continued to study the interloper who remained busy with her work. At first glance, a torrent of contradictory thoughts flooded my mind. A spy? my paranoia shrieked. An agent of the Okhrana? A trap for me? The new regime was not above using a delicate face to set a trap. Surely after my own experiment, they were still searching for me. Then again, I wondered if perhaps she was a rogue engineer from another Tartarian family? Or maybe a rival seeking to awaken the grid for her own selfish purposes? The thought was almost as terrifying as the idea of a trap. A rival?
I had been so isolated among my own thoughts for so long; the idea of another aetherium engineer, let alone a young one like myself, had never even crossed my mind. I was the last, or so I had believed. After all, my knowledge came from my grandfather’s journal, and I knew that was a one of a kind book. Or was it? The thought was a poison, an insidious seed of doubt that bloomed in my mind. What if I was not the chosen one, not the last hope, but merely one of many? A competitor? The idea of a shared burden, of a community, was too beautiful to be true, and I dismissed it as quickly as it came. This was the world of the Okhrana, a world where everyone was a potential threat. I was alone. I had to be.
In spite of the noise, my fear receded just enough for me to get a better look at the girl. Her hair, a cascade of dark, unruly waves, was tied back with a bit of string but still managed to escape in wild curls around her face. Her clothes were an odd mix of the new and the old: a simple, coarse dress of the new world, but with an old, embroidered silk scarf wrapped around her neck, a defiant splash of color in a world of gray. Even from afar I could see that her face, smudged with soot and grease, was a study in fierce concentration. The same fierce concentration I saw in my own reflection.
But then she turned her head and looked straight at me. Her eyes—a striking, intelligent green—blazed with a mix of defiance and exhaustion as I froze. Her beauty, a fierce, untamed kind that both captivated and unsettled me. She was so young, so full of a reckless, dangerous fire. She was everything I had been, before the fear, before the hopelessness. Turning back to her work, the woman pushed a lever—causing the aetherium’s song to screech and scream.
“Stop!” I said, my voice a desperate, hoarse whisper. “You’ll destroy the whole node! You don’t understand what you’re doing!”
“Leave me!” she commanded in a tone that would brook no defiance. “This is the only way to get a signal!”
My mind raced. I had never seen a method so primitive, so violent. The girl was working with a crude, repurposed steam engine and a mess of wires, trying to force a connection, to brute-force a living system that was meant to be treated with reverence and harmony. She was trying to shout at the aether, to beat it into submission with the crude tools of the new world. I wanted to run over and break her machine before it was too late, but my feet were rooted to the spot. It was a kind of madness I had never witnessed before. A beautiful, terrible madness.
My gaze fell to the massive aetheric conduit that the woman had connected in to. The conduit was a masterpiece of Tartarian engineering, a seamless, single-crystal cylinder that hummed with latent power. Now, it was groaning, a low, metallic moan, under the immense, unnatural stress caused by the intruder’s device. Sparks began to leap from the conduit, not the gentle, rhythmic pulses I was used to, but jagged, angry bolts of pure energy. Yet the woman didn’t seem to care—her face, her eyes squeezed shut in concentration, a thin vein throbbing in her forehead, were the tell tale signs of her exertions as she was pushing the machine to its very limit.
It can’t work, I thought, my own body trembling. The entire philosophy of the old world is harmony, not brute force. Yet, as the sparks began to grow brighter and the ground began to shake, a tiny, dangerous part of my mind, the part that had spent years in lonely desperation, wondered if this was perhaps another way. Could a new, more savage world only be met with a similar savagery? Could the old nodes, dormant for over a century, be reawakened only by the violent shock of the new? The thought was a heresy, a terrible, tempting lie. It was the logic of my enemies, the logic of the Okhrana. And for a fleeting moment, I almost believed it.
For a single, agonizing moment, the conduit’s humming intensified, rising to a piercing crescendo. A thin, ethereal blue light pulsed deep within the crystal and amazingly, it seemed to me, that for a fleeting instant, the girl might actually succeed. The thought filled me with a mixture of terror and exhilarating hope. Was I wrong about everything? Was the old way truly dead? Was this violent, desperate act the only way forward?
But it was a false dawn.
The Tartarian system was ancient, fragile, and utterly unprepared for such violence. A massive, blue-white arc of aetheric energy erupted from the conduit, leaping across the room and hitting the steam engine with a deafening crack. The engine then exploded in a shower of sparks and steam, and the young woman was thrown violently back against a stone pillar, a pained cry torn from her lips. The air was again filled with the smell of ozone and then…silence.
The aetheric shriek was gone. The silence that followed was more terrifying than the noise. The silence of a dead machine, a dead hope. The silence of inevitable doom.
They’re coming now for sure! My heart hammered against my ribs. The silence was a death knell. I knew with a certainty that the explosion, no matter how contained in the basement, would have been felt across the city. The Okhrana would be on its way. My immediate, instinctive thought was pure, unadulterated terror. I had to run!
I looked at the Aetherium sphere still in my hand, a lifeline to my mission. I had to protect it. I overlooked at the unconscious girl, her body crumpled against the stone, and felt a cold, ruthless resolve. She brought this on herself, I thought. This is what happens when you are a fool. She deserves her fate. I am a custodian, not a savior. My duty is to the legacy, not to a single, reckless life.
Quickly then, I turned and fled, my boots slapping against the wet stone floor of the basement—and I didn’t look back. The memory of her face, of her defiant green eyes, was already beginning to fade.
Escape
I raced back into the familiar, murky passages of the underworld, my mind focused on a single thought: escape. I am a ghost, and a ghost, above all, must remain unseen. I was already a fool for coming here; to stay would be suicide. I ran faster, the memory of the mysterious girl’s face, of her fierce green eyes, fading into the background. She was a ghost story, a warning. My own life was all that mattered now.
As I burst out of a narrow passage, I nearly collided with a small, elderly woman. Her face was as lined as my friend Arkady’s, her hands gnarled from a lifetime of careful, unseen work. She was carrying a single aether-powered lantern, its light a quiet, comforting glow in the perpetual gloom. As I weaved around to avoid her, the woman looked up at me, and for a fleeting, heart-stopping instant, her face, in the warm glow of her lantern, bore a striking resemblance to the girl in the basement.
The same high cheekbones, the same defiant set to the chin? I noted in an instant. The woman’s eyes, wide with alarm at my frantic speed, were a faded version of the same defiant green I’d seen back at the library. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. This was not a ghost; she was a living, breathing connection. A mother, a sister, a grandmother. A line of lineage.
I froze. The face I saw now was a mirror. She was not a stranger, but a reflection of a life that could have been, a legacy that was almost lost. I saw the face of every Tartarian who had been taken in the night, and the thought of leaving that injured girl to be found and taken by the Okhrana, was a shame I couldn’t bear. My resolve, so cold and ruthless just moments ago, shattered into a thousand pieces. I had always told myself I was a custodian of the past, but in this moment, I had been a coward, a man willing to sacrifice one of his own to save himself. Reality didn’t fit the comfortable narrative I had created.
Without a word, I turned back towards Istoki Mysli, my legs burning as I ran. I heard the faint sound of boots on the cobblestones above, the heavy footfalls of the new regime closing in. I knew I had the advantage of the underworld passages being a faster way of traveling. Racing back, I arrived in the basement just as the young woman began to stir. I hurried over to her, my hand reaching out, intent on pulling her to safety before the Okhrana arrived. My mission was no longer about a dead past; it was about a living, breathing person.
The girl groaned as she pushed herself up against the stone pillar. Her eyes fluttered open and she looked at the smoldering ruins of her machine, at her failure, and then at me. She saw a strange man, standing over her. I still held the Aetherium sphere in my hands, and the woman’s face hardened into a cold, immediate suspicion.
“Who are you?” she hissed, a thin line of blood running from her temple. “You’re the one who cut the connection, aren’t you? What have you done to my work?”
“I… I came to help,” I stuttered, the tramp of heavy boots now louder, a frantic drumbeat in my ears. “We have to go. They’ve heard the surge. They’re coming.”
The unmistakable sound of the main library doors being forced open echoed from above, followed by the clatter of rifles and a gruff order shouted in Russian. The guards had entered the building, yet the woman didn’t move. The silence between us was thick with distrust, a tangible, physical force. I had raced back to save her, but I realized now that this strange woman, whoever she was, looked upon me as an enemy, a rival, or worse. The weight of her suspicion was a final, crushing blow. Even among our own, there was no trust, only a pervasive, suffocating paranoia. We were so broken by the Okhrana, by the lie, that we could not even recognize each other.
<BOOM!> The heavy wooden door to the basement burst inward with a splintering crash. The Okhrana agents rushed in, their modern guns and dark uniforms a stark, violent contrast to the aetheric glow of the ancient basement.
My heart dropped. It’s too late. They’ve found me. My small, valiant act of courage had lasted for only a few minutes. I was not a hero. I was a fool who had run back into a trap.
I looked at the woman, a final, desperate plea for understanding on my face. To my great horror, her expression only showed a slow, knowing smirk and her eyes were filled with a cold triumph. The silence was broken by her voice, clear and chillingly devoid of emotion.
“It’s not a lie,” she said to me. “It’s all a lie.” And then she looked past me, a flicker of something terrible and victorious in her gaze, and she began to laugh – a low, terrible sound that echoed in the cold, damp air.
My heart sank in the sickening realization that I had not been a ghost running from a monster, but a blind man running toward a trap – too late to discover that she was the bait.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 