1

  Kirom hated promises.

  They were all he ever heard. Promises of change, breakthroughs, salvation just around the corner, a universe of wonders and solutions always poised right at his fingertips, but never quite touching. Every promise dissolved the moment he reached for it.

  Loudspeakers crackled above his roof. Another promise for the morning.

  “Attention, citizens. Prepare yourselves. Today marks a moment of significance.”

  A pause. Dogs barked. Someone yelled at him to get on with it.

  “This is an official transmission from the Department of Interdisciplinary Advancement — confirmed, cssified, direct from the highest authority.

  That’s right. The best minds, the greatest schors, the architects of tomorrow have spoken. And what do they say?”

  Another pause, deliberate. Static swelled in the brief silence.

  “Anomalies. Signals. Patterns we were never meant to ignore. Something beneath us. Something vast. Something structured.”

  The speaker’s voice dipped lower, weighted with the kind of certainty only broadcast towers and bureaucrats could afford.

  “Not just another trick of the earth. Not another weathered ruin, not some old-world wreckage left to rot. No, this — this is different. This is discovery. This is change.

  “This is the future.”

  Kirom sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the peeling wall.

  He had spent his life waiting. First for his father to return from beyond the mountain peaks, then for his mother’s fever to break, and eventually, for any promise to come true.

  None ever had.

  Kirom exhaled slowly and stood. The movement felt mechanical, like muscle memory rather than intent. He spshed cold water over his face, watching it run down the sink, feeling the chill, waiting for it to shake something loose in his chest. He looked up. The mirror in the washbasin was cracked at the corner, spiderweb fractures spreading out toward his reflection. His own face stared back. Same gaunt angles, same sharp eyes, same exhaustion deepening in the hollows of his cheeks. Every day, a little more empty. Every day, a little more like the pce around him.

  He gnced at the bed. The old uniform y untouched, stark white against the sheets. His hand found another one instead. Grey, stiff, yet to be worn.

  But not yet. Not now.

  The air outside was thick with wet dust, a scent that clung to the back of his throat like rust. The ground was still damp from st night’s rain, but it had done nothing to wash away the grime. Puddles reflected the sky in oil-slick smears, their surfaces broken by slow, deliberate ripples — of something moving underneath, unseen.

  The vilge sprawled out before him, a patchwork of sagging rooftops and walls tattooed with paint and crude repairs. Wires tangled between rusted poles, heavy with makeshift fixes from engineers who had either left or died. Water dripped from an exposed pipe onto the same cracked pavement it had been eroding for years, carving a slow, patient wound into the manmade ground.

  Kirom’s boots met the mud with a squelch. It swallowed his steps, sucked at his heels, made leaving feel like effort. The chickens were already out, pecking at the soaked ground with frantic, mindless determination. For earthworms, maybe. Or whatever else the rain had dredged up.

  Somewhere, an old radio crackled between static and some pre-recorded government broadcast, its words half-lost under the distant cng of metal against metal. A child ran past him barefoot, kicking up a spray of dirty water. For a second, Kirom’s heart clenched. The kid barely gnced at him before disappearing between two buildings. They would grow up fast. They all did.

  The market was waking up. Stalls lined the street. Vendors set out their goods with the same slow, resigned movements as the sun dragged itself over the horizon. The air was thick with conflicting smells. Fried dough, unwashed humanity, the sharp sting of fermenting produce left too long in the heat.

  One man sat by the roadside, his face carved from years of hard bor and harder luck. His hands, thick with callouses, worked to fix an old generator, fingers steady despite the tremor of exhaustion running through them. Kirom knew the expression on his face. The look of a man who had stopped expecting anything better, but still found himself doing the work anyway.

  Another woman hacked apart a bundle of fish. Kirom watched the knife come down, the wet sp of the bde against the wooden block, the precision of someone who no longer needed to think about the motion. He wondered if she had ever thought about leaving. If she had ever stopped mid-slice, mid-motion, mid-breath, and realized she would never actually go.

  They were all still here.

  A megaphone crackled to life somewhere in the distance, another announcement straining against the fraying edges of cheap speakers. Something about progress. Something about change. Something about advancement.

  Advancement.

  The word tasted like rust. Like blood. Like the rugged edge of a worn-out knife dragging across his tongue.

  He stopped and stared at the word, etched in white, on the polished bck marble sign in front of him.

  DEPARTMENT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY ADVANCEMENT

  Kirom inhaled. Long. Slow. Held it in his chest like something worth keeping. Then let it out. He stepped forward. The doors slid open. And he walked in.

  The doors sighed shut behind.

  Kirom stepped into a narrow chamber, fnked by dark walls that drank the air itself. The mist hissed from the bckened surface, curling outward before thickening into a dense fog. It clung to his skin, stung his eyes, seeped into the fibers of his clothes, heavy as if it carried weight. The ground beneath him darkened as the mist settled, pressing down with invisible force. The mud on his boots thinned, liquefied, then vanished, sinking into the porous floor. Tiny things, the stray maggot, the earthworm, the st remnants of the vilge, fttened under its weight, crushed, absorbed, erased.

  Then light swept over him from head to toe, lingering on his fingertips, his throat, the space behind his ears. A low, mechanical hum vibrated through the chamber walls, dissecting his existence, verifying, confirming.

  And the inner door clicked open as if satisfied.

  The air changed the instant he walked in. Cold. Processed. Artificial. It moved without weight, circuting in perfected, calcuted currents. Above him, the ceiling stood impossibly high, curving into a vast, circur vault. No beams. No visible supports. Just a continuous sweep of bckened stone and seamless alloy, smooth as if carved from a single monolithic shell. Light poured from thin, precise slits between the curved panels, casting a stark pattern of endless bck and white, bleeding downward in sharp gradients. It clung to the walls in cascading bands, fading as it reached the lower levels, dissolving into shadow. Massive sbs of dark stone floated in rigid formation. They hung in the air, stopped in motion like a snapshot of a meteor rain. The floor expanded beneath them, a matte expanse without a single seam, absorbing light instead of reflecting it.

  A chasm led ahead, wide enough to swallow entire structures, its edges sharp as if the building had simply opened its mouth. But only darkness loomed ahead.

  Then. Movement.

  The walls pulsed. A deep, grinding resonance rippled through the hall, low enough to be felt in the bones, as if the building was thinking. And from darkness, a path unfolded before him. Kirom walked forward. The ground solidified as he moved. The sensation was not walking on something, but rather the absence of falling.

  He then reached his destination. A room. A long desk. One chair. And light from above. Harun stood behind the desk. He did not sit. Never did. The cold, filtered sunlight shone across his tanned features, sharpening the lines of his face. His uniform precise grey. His head smooth, hairless. Not just balding, but bare.

  He was already watching Kirom.

  “You are te,” Harun said.

  Kirom exhaled. “The building moves when it wants.”

  Harun stared. “It does. And you move when you are told.”

  Silence. His gaze moved to Kirom’s grey uniform. “So,” Harun said “You made it.”

  “So it seems.”

  Harun leaned back slightly, tapping a command on his desk. The bck surface flickered, and the exact live footage of Kirom in the room appeared.

  “Clearance confirmed,” Harun said. “You have been authorized for Power. Effective immediately.”

  The words settled in Kirom’s chest. Before, Power had only been borrowed. Used under another’s will, restrained by commands. A force he could touch, but never hold.

  Now, that changed.

  “You have experience as an Accept already,” Harun continued. “Basic handling, limited application as cleared and directed by your superior. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  Harun tapped again. And the footage changed. A record. A testing facility. At its center lied a single gigantic monolith, dark, dense, and impaled to the ground.

  Kirom watched his past self in the footage. Young, and in white.

  The footage pyed.

  Kirom in the past stood before the stone. A light fshed. The command to act was given. Kirom accepted. His hands steady. The stone trembled. A vibration, barely perceptible. Then, it floated. A fraction of an inch, an impossibility of something so heavy.

  Harun shut the footage off. “Barely above threshold,” he said.

  Kirom met his gaze. “And yet, I was the only one.”

  A pause.

  Harun smiled. It did not reached his eyes.

  Then Harun tapped one st command. A new feed. A map with greyed-out paths marked in dull red. “Your first directive,” Harun said. “Routine inspection. Advance wants to expand deeper survey points beneath the cave.”

  Kirom studied the map. “Routine.”

  “Don’t ask questions.” Harun moved. “Be grateful you are getting directives at all. Advance has their priority filled with actual threats. We are lucky they assigned us two Executives.”

  “You meant you are lucky.”

  Harun looked at him again. Studied him.

  “The Court of Grace also expects you,” Harun said.

  “Is that a directive?” Kirom asked.

  Harun dismissed the map. The desk surface went dark.

  “It is now.”

  Kirom didn’t react.

  “The city still values merit,” Harun continued. “Your ascension to Execute will be formally honored by the City of Grace and its people. The first in years.”

  The weight of it settled.

  The Court of Grace, the old structure standing at the center of the grand circur reservoir that once held the lifeblood of the inner city and the outer vilges — the water that had given the city its grace. Now empty. The dam, cracked. The riverbed, dried. All in the name of Advancement from higher up in the West.

  Kirom would stand there.

  “They will reward you for your merit. They will call it honor,” Harun said. “You are the only one that made Execute after all.”

  Kirom didn’t answer.

  “You will attend.”

  Silence.

  “While you are out there,” Harun finally said. “Stop wasting time on detours.”

  Kirom stared.

  “Useless rituals,” Harun continued. “Let it die with her.”

  The silence lingered.

  And like that. The meeting ended. Kirom turned. Walked away.

  *Mar 18, 2025: Added the part where Harun mentioned the Ceremony.