Before he was a ghost in black robes, Lucien was a boy who bled beneath golden ceilings. This is how he became the man who sees through illusions.
The crash of stone still echoed in their minds. Hours after the Hollow Bastion vanished behind them, Asher's group had taken uneasy shelter in an abandoned transit tower carved into the southern cliffs of Velvora — one of the few high places left untouched by the city's spreading corruption.
The wind outside hissed like a warning. Inside, the air was still, dry, and too quiet.
Mia was curled in a corner, asleep under Asher's coat. Rosa stood watch near the jagged window, gun resting on her lap, her eyes never still.
Lucien sat cross-legged across from Asher, back against rusted machinery. He wasn't meditating. Just... remembering. His face was unreadable, but the silence around him was heavy, coiled.
Asher broke it first."What was that place to you?"
Lucien didn't answer right away. When he finally did, his voice was hollow."Home. Before I learned the truth."
The shadows flickered. And slowly, the room dissolved into memory.
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Flashback: A Boy Named Lucien
Fifteen years ago.
Velvora was sharper then. Brighter. Neon signs shone without static. The skyline was clean. Crime was low. Order was enforced. The illusion was perfect.
In the heart of the city, cloistered behind gold-trimmed gates, stood the House of Pure Insight — the state-sanctioned mystic academy responsible for interpreting celestial patterns and protecting the city's spiritual symmetry.
Lucien was one of its orphans. Gifted. Too gifted.
While other children were molded into quiet analysts and ceremonial scryers, Lucien dreamt of things he wasn't supposed to: falling towers, masked gods, mirrors that bled.
They trained the orphans to speak glyph-script fluently, to suppress attachments, to treat pain as sacred. But Lucien clung to memory. To emotion. To wonder.
He had questions no one liked answering.
And dreams that refused to fade.
At age twelve, something called to him.
During evening silence, he slipped away from the dormitories, ducked past two blindfolded caretakers, and found a narrow spiral staircase under the west altar of the cathedral.
It led to a sealed library — the Vault of Masks. A place forbidden even to advanced initiates.
Inside, it was cold and dry. Dust froze in place mid-air.
And at the center of the vault was a pulsing scroll — a Mirror Scroll, suspended mid-air, ink shifting like liquid starlight.
When Lucien touched it, the world cracked.
He saw memories not his own:— A silver-eyed girl screaming under a sacrificial blade.— A city growing around a chained, sleeping god.— A ring of five thrones, one of them broken.— And five locks — five cities. One of them glowing.
A voice — velvet and venom — echoed from the scroll:"You are not supposed to see. Yet you did. Now you can't go back."
They caught him the next morning.
The punishment was swift and deliberate. He was dragged before the Council of Eyes and branded with a Sealing Sigil across his back — a curse meant to bind memory, emotion, and will.
But it didn't work.
Lucien still remembered. Still dreamed.The glyph twisted over time. The sigil meant to silence him began whispering instead.
He began speaking in mask-tongue during his sleep — a forbidden dialect of prophecy.
He had become what the Order feared most:A rogue seer. Uncontrollable. Uncontainable.
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Meeting Rosa for the First Time
Two years passed. Lucien grew quiet. Calculating. But not broken.
At sixteen, during a routine field survey of the Clocktower District — part of his mandatory "humility outreach" training — Lucien slipped away.
There, in the shadows of the market, he saw her.
A girl with half-shaved hair and quick fingers. She swiped food from a vendor, ducked a pursuing patrol, and practically danced across the rooftops.
Before Lucien could stop her, she had snatched his glyph-satchel.And winked.
She left behind only a torn note inside the satchel:
"You don't belong in cages. Come find me when you remember why."
That was the first time in years that Lucien smiled.
And something inside him — something long frozen — shifted.
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The First Death
At seventeen, the purge came.
The Council of Eyes declared a secret "Echo Cleansing" — an execution order for students displaying instability, rogue dreams, or glyph feedback patterns. A quiet culling.
Lucien's name was at the top of the list.
He didn't wait.
He lured the Council's highest speaker — Master Isheriel — into the dream mirror vault with a false prophecy.
And then he triggered a forbidden collapse sigil — destroying half the cathedral.
Lucien didn't look back.
That night, with torn robes and glowing glyph-burns across his arms, he made his way to the Phantom Regulation Unit — and traded everything he knew in exchange for asylum, a new name, and one promise:
He would never be silent again.
He burned his old mask.And became Phantom Lucien.
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Return to the Present
The wind howled again, dragging the past back into the silence.
Lucien opened his eyes.
Mia still slept. Rosa sat near the door, still pretending she hadn't been crying.
Asher, seated across from him, simply nodded once. No judgment. No pity. Just... understanding.
Lucien's voice was steady now."The Order wanted a prophet.They got me instead."
Asher leaned forward."You think all this was fate?"
Lucien shook his head."No. I think fate was locked in a room.And we just picked the door."
Outside, the wind carried distant sounds — echoes of something stirring in the city below.
Velvora wasn't done remembering.
And neither was Lucien.
[End of Chapter 103]
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Chapter 104 – Rosa: When the Bells FellBefore she was a rebel, Rosa was the daughter of a forbidden engineer and a mother who vanished into ash. Her story begins with the collapse of the Clocktower — and the first chime of war.