Anya was right. The Aetherium sphere, my most sacred charge, my last link to a glorious past, was a beacon for the regime. It was the ultimate, agonizing betrayal of a holy relic. I carefully wrapped it in the coarse, damp linen from a forgotten store shelf and tucked it deep inside my coat. The gentle, familiar hum was instantly choked, replaced by a hollow, terrifying silence. It felt like burying a small, warm heart—my own.
“There’s a cistern,” Anya’s voice was a low, rasping sound, scrubbed raw by fear, yet still carrying the edge of command. “Behind that cracked wall. It was a water purifier, Tartarian design. It’s a dead zone—the crystal matrix sucks the energy clean out of the immediate air. Nothing transmits, nothing resonates. Not even the hum of their cursed steam drills.”
A cistern. A place of cleansing, now a sanctuary of emptiness. My grandfather had taught me to seek resonance, to chase the hum of the universe. Now, I was running toward the void, the one place a true Tartarian should never willingly go.
We scrambled, half-crawling, half-squeezing, through a narrow, jagged fissure in the stone. The rough, broken edges of the passage clawed at the damp wool of my coat, and I tasted the chalky dust of ancient, pulverized masonry on my tongue. We tumbled into a space so devoid of light that it instantly swallowed the faint, ambient glow of the dust filtering from the outer tunnel. It felt like stepping across a threshold not just into a room, but into the inside of a tomb—a crypt for a murdered civilization.
The air here was a profound, shocking betrayal. It was stagnant, thick, and metallic, tasting faintly of residual ozone and wet, calcified mud, yet it carried no sound. Not the distant rumble of the city, not the faint, reassuring hum of the old aetheric grid, and most terrifyingly, not the drumbeat of my own blood against my ears. It was a silence so absolute it felt like a force actively choking sound out of existence. This was the Dead Zone and I felt an unnatural, bone-aching cold that seemed to sink into my very marrow.
The earth above us was no longer a vague, protective canopy. Here, the weight became a palpable, physical reality—tons of compacted, ancient mud and Romanov lies pressing down from all sides. I could feel the presence of the suffocating layers of history: the Tartarian first floors, the Mud Flood deposits, the new city’s cobblestones, and the entire manufactured illusion, all crushing down on my chest. I was under an entire planet’s worth of deception, and the cistern walls felt as if they were slowly contracting, squeezing the life out of us both.
“I heard them say it,” I whispered, my voice thick with the phlegm of terror about a mystery I didn’t want to admit. “My name. Volkov. Somehow they know who I am. They spoke it like a command.”
Anya was silent for a long moment, the only sound the faint, panicked rhythm of my own breathing. When she finally spoke, her voice was a flat, terrible monotone, the chilling pragmatism of a survivor. “Of course they do, Nikolai. You think a man runs an illegal Aetherium experiment in the heart of St. Petersburg and remains a ghost? They probably knew the name the moment you started drawing power from the main node. They track energy signatures like we track a common flu. They don’t need eyes on you, only a name on a ledger.”
Her lack of shock was a profound shock to me. She made surveillance sound as mundane as the rising of the industrial smog. This was the true horror of the new world: the absolute certainty of being watched, tracked, and known by an enemy who didn’t even need to show its face to terrify you. It was total information control, the ultimate weapon.
“But how? How did they link the energy signature to my name? I used my own schematic!”
“You are a Tartarian engineer, aren’t you? Your own schematic is nothing but a variation on a family schema, a unique pattern of resonance passed down through generations. They don’t need a face, Nikolai. They just need to trace the lineage of the knowledge. Every act of defiance is cataloged, studied, and cross-referenced. You’re not the first to try this, only the latest fool. They’ve been waiting. They’ve been listening for your family’s song. Welcome to the New World Order, where even the very essence of your inherited thoughts can be mapped to a surname.”
I felt a spasm of desperate denial. “It is not an order, Anya. It is chaos! If they were truly organized, they would have found me years ago. They would have destroyed the entire grid, not left it to rot. They are just a panicked militia with steam engines and rifles. They are crude!”
Anya let out a humorless, dry gasp of air—the closest she’d come to a laugh. “Crude? Their crudeness is their precision, Nikolai. You think in terms of beautiful machines; they think in terms of control. Chaos is what they want you to believe. They maintain the grid’s silence because that silence is proof that the Tartarians existed—a controllable lie. But the chaos is just for show. Their true order is invisible.”
She shifted in the dark, and I could hear the faint, gritty rub of stone on fabric.
“They use the simplest, most effective form of control: fear and information. They didn’t need to destroy the grid—they just needed to own the key. Your family’s schema, my mother’s fragmented diagrams—these are like passwords to a forgotten system. They collect them, categorize them. They wait for a signal—you activating a power surge—and they match the signature to the name. It’s a bureaucracy of terror, Nikolai. Everything is recorded, cross-referenced, and filed away. The only thing that is chaotic is the life of anyone who tries to dissent.”
“And you think you can beat that system with a steam engine and crossed wires?” I countered, the question laced with my old, ingrained contempt.
“No,” she snapped, her voice suddenly rising in intensity. “I think I can create noise. Your perfect, harmonious activation would have been an elegant note on their ledger. My explosion? That was a temporary blinding, a brief moment of static. It forces their system to divert resources, to panic, to show its seams. It’s the difference between a controlled surgical cut and a massive, blinding flash. I am a scavenger, remember? I work with broken pieces to fight a system that thrives on perfection. You think like a builder, Nikolai. I think like a saboteur.”
The Weight of the Scavenger
We sat in that terrifying darkness, huddled behind a huge, silent cylindrical tank. The silence was a constant pressure, a sensory deprivation that screamed louder than any explosion. I could no longer hear the hum of the aether, and for the first time in my life, I felt utterly disconnected—a state of being that was physically painful, like being starved of breath.
“Who are you, Anya Turov?” I demanded, the question tasting like ash. “How do you know all this? You use the old technology with a brutality I’ve never seen, yet you speak of the Okhrana’s methods with chilling familiarity.”
Anya’s body stiffened. “My name is Anya Turov. I’m a hybrid, as you might call it. My mother was one of the quiet survivors, an artisan who stayed in the city. My father… he was a servant of their control, a man who navigated the highest echelons of the new industrial order. He saw no glory in the past, only the mechanics of power in the steel of the new world. He earned the regime’s trust, served them, and believed he was indispensable. But the Okhrana has no friends. When his usefulness ran out, they…discarded him. I never really knew my mother. I don’t know what happened to her for sure, but the fact is that I was raised on the surface, forced to attend ‘their’ schools, trained to believe ‘their’ history. As a result I was closer to the machine than you ever were, Nikolai. I saw its gears turn, and I learned where the smallest fault lines lay.”
Something about the way Anya’s spoke gave me the impression her story was a masterpiece of careful omission. Her father as a servant of the “highest echelons,” yet betrayed and discarded? If it was true it might explain her bitterness, yet still she was clearly shrouding the identity of the powerful man who was her true father. The partial truth only served to increase my unease about her. Anya wasn’t just a rogue engineer; she was an orphan of the system, a walking wound from the regime’s own inner circle.
Before I could question her further, Anya steered the conversation to something else. “You said you had a journal, Nikolai. From your grandfather? A complete book, right? Well I had only a few half-burned wiring diagrams and snippets of notes which I believe in my heart were from my mother’s possessions – those my father hadn’t managed to steal for himself. I had to reverse-engineer the principles of Aetherium from those damaged, incomplete texts and discarded parts. My brute-force approach wasn’t arrogance; it was a necessity born of desperation and the fear of time running out. I have no time for the harmony you revere. I need to know what works now before they cement the lie forever.”
She leaned closer, and I could feel the cold of her breath. “Where you might see a sacred glyph, I see a circuit diagram with a missing value. You see harmony. I see the quickest way to dump 50,000 joules into a coil to create a counter-frequency that might get a signal through their iron curtain. Your grandfather’s generation, they were custodians. But right now we are scavengers. We have to be violent, because the new world is violent. Your reverence for the past is a comfort, Nikolai. But comfort is how they keep you asleep.”
Her words hit me like a physical blow, dismantling the image of my own mission. Was my reverence for the past merely a form of comfortable cowardice? A way to keep the journal safe without ever truly risking everything?
The Glimpse of the Lie
Anya then reached out in the dark and touched my arm. “The Grid itself reacted violently to my primitive attempt, yes, but it responded with a deeper, more profound terror to something else. It was a scream of existential fear, Nikolai, not just electrical overload. It felt like the core of the world itself was recoiling, like a living thing trying to escape a cage. You felt it, didn’t you? That conscious terror, that chaos.”
I nodded slowly, the memory of the psychic shriek still a raw nerve. “I felt it. I thought it was just the system—ancient technology pushed beyond its limit.”
“No. It was too alive for that. The system has been dormant for a century, but it hasn’t forgotten the great crime. It hasn’t forgotten why it was silenced. You and I, we are chasing the technology that was buried. But the Okhrana, the ones who control the surface—they are guarding something far larger than a few library basements. They are guarding the foundation of the lie. Nikolai, your grandfather’s journal, my mother’s fragmented wisdom… do they hint at the true nature of the world itself? I wonder – what do you know about the…shape of the world?”
The question was so jarring, so unexpected, that it cracked the fragile shell of my composure. “The… the world? I don’t understand. What do you mean ‘the shape’ of the world. Obviously we live on a sphere, a globe. Pythagoras taught us that much.” I repeated that truth like a mantra, a defense against the impossible.
Anya’s laugh was brittle and cold. “I suspected as much. So you believe in The Great Lie. The ultimate act of mental enslavement.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, more terrifying than a shout. “Nikolai, your grandfather’s journal—does it contain any information about geodesy? What about the true maps of Tartaria?”
I hesitated, the secret of the old family journals—the true one, the final revelation—trembling on my lips. My grandfather had sworn me to secrecy, had said this knowledge was the last thing to be revealed. “It contains more than schematics. It contains the truth of the Mud Flood—that it wasn’t a natural disaster, but a calculated, terrible choice by the elites to seize power.”
“The Mud was the cover. The lie of the Globe is the cage,” she hissed, her voice sharp as glass. “We don’t live on a spinning ball, Nikolai. That’s what they created to disconnect us from the limitless energy and resources that surround the real world. That spinning ball is a prison without walls, a perfectly crafted illusion. Even the so-called ‘North Pole’ is a lie. That pole isn’t at the northern top of the globe; instead the true ‘north’ pole is at the center of a vast, flat plane – it’s the magnetic powerhouse of our world. The ancient Tartarians knew this and their grid was built to draw energy from that source. The new elites didn’t just bury our technology; they changed our entire reality to prevent us from accessing the truth about our world – and what’s beyond the Great Ice Wall.”
My breath hitched. My grandfather’s warnings—the ‘calculated choice,’ the Mud Flood—it all snapped into a terrifying, yet incomplete, focus. The Romanovs, Orlov, the Rockefeller-like elites—their motive wasn’t just to sell coal and oil. It was to maintain the illusion of this tiny, closed-off, spherical world? It was a prison designed to make us believe we were alone, running out of resources, and utterly disconnected from the limitless power of the cosmos? Could Anya’s claims really be true?
I pressed my face into the cold stone of the cistern wall, trying to shut out the crushing weight of her claims. The Earth… a flat plane? Surrounded by an Ice Wall? “No,” I choked out at last, the word muffled and weak. “That sounds like a fairy tale. That is the madness they use to discredit all other Tartarian truths. It makes the rest of our fight look ridiculous.”
Anya didn’t reply but continued to look at me with confidence. I had to look away. The oppressive weight of the earth above us suddenly shifted in my mind, becoming not just tons of dirt, but the entire, crushing weight of a manufactured reality. Still, I couldn’t accept it; yet I couldn’t dismiss it either.
The possibility of Anya’s story was a cold, alien horror that twisted my stomach. If that was true, every map I had ever seen, every lesson I had learned, every star I had looked at, was a lie.
It also meant I was fighting an enemy that didn’t just control the newspapers; it controlled the very geometry of my life. I didn’t want to believe her, but the sheer scale of the lie—if true—was so profound it temporarily paralyzed my ability to deny it. My mind could only hold the terror of the Volkov command and the sound of the approaching drill; this cosmic betrayal was too large to process, too insane to accept, yet too perfect an explanation to ignore.
The Drill’s Final Bite
I was almost thankful when I saw Anya was no longer looking at me – her eyes were now fixed on the stone ceiling above us.
<SCRAAAAAAPE!>
A metallic shriek suddenly ripped through the oppressive silence, closer and louder than anything before. It wasn’t the distant hum of the drill; it was the sound of its steel bit tearing into the final layer of stone. The ground beneath us convulsed. Dust and fine pebbles rained down from the cistern’s ceiling, stinging our eyes.
“They’re here!” Anya screamed, her composure finally shattering, revealing the terrified girl beneath the ruthless engineer. “They’ve pinpointed the dead zone! The crystal matrix is failing!”
The drill’s grinding noise became a violent, tearing roar, vibrating through my very bones. It was directly overhead, a terrifying, grinding thrum that shook the very foundations of the buried city. A hairline crack spider-webbed across the cistern’s ceiling, and a thin stream of gray, filthy water began to trickle down.
We were trapped. There was no way out. I looked at Anya, her face illuminated by the faint glow of the outside dust. Her eyes met mine. They were not filled with fear, but with a hard, uncompromising resolve. “The tunnel behind the cistern!” she yelled, grabbing my coat. “It leads to the sewage system. A dead end for anyone but us!”
I scrambled to my feet, my mind numb with the knowledge that I was fighting a war for the very shape of the sky. The drill bit—a monstrous, churning maw of the new world—was about to punch through the ceiling. The feeling of utter hopelessness, of fighting an enemy that controlled not just the streets but the very shape of the cosmos, was suffocating. I clutched the muffled sphere, now a dark, silent weight in my coat. My duty was clear, even if the world was a lie.
Survival was the only rebellion left.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 