The city of Aethelburg always smelled of coal smoke and wet cobblestone, but inside Locke & Son Automata, the air was different. It smelled of clean machine oil, hot brass, and the faint, sharp scent of ozone that clung to Julian Locke's creations. The shop was a place of ordered chaos. Walls were lined with glass-fronted cabinets showcasing gleaming gears, tightly coiled springs, and delicate clockwork components. On oaken tables sat automaton birds with jeweled eyes, intricate puzzle boxes, and the occasional custom-built prosthetic limb, polished to a mirror shine.
To the casual observer, it was one of the finest mechanic shops in the city. To the initiated, it was a place of quiet miracles.
Julian Locke sat at his workbench, the afternoon light from the tall front window illuminating the dust motes dancing around him. In his hands was an automaton songbird, its chest cavity open. His father could make it sing; Julian could make it feel. With tools of his own design—tools impossibly fine and precise for the era—he made a micro-adjustment to a central gear cluster, twisting a filament wire a fraction of a degree. He wasn't just repairing it; he was restructuring its logic, teaching it a new, more complex melody he'd heard in a dream.
"You know," a cheerful voice mused from beside him, "if you keep that up, you'll have it composing its own symphonies. Then what will the chaps at the Royal Conservatory do?"
Julian didn't look up, a small smile touching his lips. "They'll adapt, Elias. Or they'll become obsolete. That's the nature of things."
Elias Crowe, leaning with his back against the counter, grinned and tossed a small, un-sprung gear in the air. He was dressed in his usual comfortable disarray—a patched coat and a colorful scarf—that stood in stark contrast to the shop's meticulous order. "Obsolete. A fine word for 'out of a job.' At least your family only deals in things, not careers."
The bell above the shop door chimed, announcing new arrivals with a cheerful jingle that cut through the quiet ticking of a dozen clocks. Victor Thorne and Josephine Hale stepped inside, bringing the city's chill in with them. Victor, tall and ramrod straight in his tailored coat, gave a curt nod, his eyes sweeping the room with disciplined efficiency. Josephine followed, gracefully closing the door behind them and shaking a few drops of rain from her own practical, yet elegant, coat.
"Julian. Elias," she greeted them, her voice clear and composed. Her sharp eyes landed on the delicate work in Julian's hands. "Giving life to the lifeless again, I see."
"He's putting us all to shame, Jo," Elias said brightly. "This little bird is now more clever than half the constables in our precinct."
Victor's gaze settled on Julian, a flicker of something that might have been warmth in his otherwise stoic expression. "We were passing on patrol. Thought we'd see if your father had finished calibrating my timepiece."
"He did. It's on the counter," Julian said, finally setting the automaton down and closing its chest plate with a satisfying click. "It's now accurate to within a tenth of a second per year. Try not to break it this time."
Victor simply nodded his thanks, picking up the heavy silver watch. As the four of them stood in the comfortable silence of old friendship, Elias fished a half-eaten scone from his pocket.
"Speaking of strange things," he said between bites, "saw the oddest bit of rubbish today on a petty theft case down by the wharf. A broken pocket watch. Nothing special. Except… the gears weren't made of brass or steel."
"Ceramic?" Josephine offered, ever the analyst.
"No," Elias said, his usual levity fading slightly as he recalled the detail. "Something else. Dark. Almost like polished stone, but lighter. And it felt… warm. The thief had no idea what it was, just snatched it."
The casual observation hung in the air. Victor and Josephine dismissed it as another piece of city strangeness. But Julian froze. His head snapped up, his eyes locking onto Elias. The quiet, light atmosphere of the shop evaporated in an instant, replaced by the intense focus of an engineer who had just heard an impossible variable.
"Warm?" Julian asked, his voice low and serious. "What was the gear ratio?".
Elias, still holding his half-eaten scone, blinked. "The what? Julian, it was a piece of junk from a pickpocket's haul. I didn't take schematics."
"He means the number of teeth on the driving gear versus the driven gear," Josephine clarified, her sharp eyes watching Julian not as a friend, but as an analyst studying a fascinating reaction. She had seen him intrigued before, but this was different. This was the sharp, dangerous focus he usually reserved for his most complex, esoteric projects. "You've gone pale, Julian. What is it?"
"It's nothing," Julian said, a little too quickly. He forced his hands to relax, turning away from them to busy himself at his workbench, arranging tools that were already perfectly arranged. It was a tell, and he knew they'd see it. He was the brilliant engineer, the eccentric genius; his curiosity was explainable. But the cold dread coiling in his gut belonged to The Veilwalker. Warm stone. A gear that feels warm. It was a violation of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics as he knew them, a concept so far beyond Aethelburg's steam-and-steel science it felt like a contagion.
Victor Thorne, who had been silently observing, set his newly calibrated watch down on the counter with a soft click. His voice was calm, cutting through the burgeoning tension. "Elias. You said the watch is at the Watch House in Caerminster?"
"Yes, in the sundry evidence locker. Slated for the smelter at the end of the week," Elias replied, finally catching on that this was more than a flight of Julian's fancy.
"Go and get it," Victor commanded simply. "Use my authority. Tell the clerk it's pertinent to an ongoing investigation."
"Which investigation?"
"This one," Victor said, his gaze fixed on Julian's back.
Elias, ever the man for action and sensing a mystery far more interesting than petty theft, gave a mock salute. "Right then. Back in a flash." He grabbed his coat, gave Josephine a quick wink, and vanished back into the drizzling evening, the shop's bell announcing his departure.
An awkward silence settled, filled only by the ticking of the clocks. Josephine wandered deeper into the shop, her gloved fingers ghosting over a silver puzzle box on a shelf.
"It's been a quiet week," she remarked, her tone conversational but her intent pointed. "A few burglaries in Silverspire, a counterfeiting ring passing brass shillings in Brasshollow. Nothing that would warrant this… intensity. Is there something you're not telling us, Julian?"
This was the dance he always had to perform. The careful balance of truth and omission. He couldn't tell them that for the past month, The Veilwalker had been tracking a series of whispers in the criminal underworld of Crow's Hollow and Blackglen—rumors of a new player, someone the gangs called 'The Organ Grinder.' Not because of music, but because he paid for fresh corpses, and was rumored to replace the organs with clockwork. Julian had dismissed it as a grotesque ghost story meant to frighten rivals. But a warm gear made of an impossible material… the story suddenly felt horribly plausible.
"It's the physics of it, Jo," he said, turning back to them, his face a carefully constructed mask of academic curiosity. "For a material to generate heat without a clear energy source—combustion, friction, voltaic current—it defies everything we know. It's like finding a bird that can swim through solid stone. It's a detail that doesn't fit the shape of the world."
Victor, who had little patience for theoretical physics, crossed his arms. "Can it be weaponized?"
The question was so quintessentially Victor. Practical. Direct. Threat-focused. And it was exactly the question The Hollow was asking himself.
"Anything can be weaponized, Victor," Julian replied quietly. "A pen, a word, a secret. But something that generates limitless energy? That wouldn't just be a weapon. It would be a new god for an age of machines."
Before the weight of that statement could fully settle, the bell chimed again. Elias returned, shaking the rain from his coat like a wet dog. In his hand was a small, oilskin pouch.
"The evidence master grumbled, but the Thorne family crest still opens doors," he said, placing the pouch on the workbench with a flourish. "One impossible pocket watch, as requested."
Julian's hands almost trembled as he opened the drawstring. He didn't tip the contents out. Instead, he reached in with two fingers and carefully retrieved a single, small gear. It was exactly as Elias had described. Matte black, like basalt or onyx, yet it weighed almost nothing. And as it sat in his palm, a distinct, unnatural warmth began to seep into his skin. It felt… alive.
His friends leaned in, their faces reflecting a mixture of curiosity and apprehension.
"Extraordinary," Josephine whispered.
"It feels wrong," Victor stated flatly.
Julian didn't respond. He was already moving, placing the gear onto the crystal plate of a large, brass-ringed analysis engine of his own design. He flipped a switch, and a series of lenses descended, bathing the gear in focused beams of light. He peered into the eyepiece, his breath fogging the brass.
What he saw made the blood run cold in his veins. The surface, which looked smooth to the naked eye, was a fractal landscape of microscopic, interlocking components. They were shifting. Rearranging themselves. It wasn't a solid object. It was a machine made of millions of smaller machines, a self-perpetuating engine the size of his thumbnail. This wasn't just advanced; it was from a future he couldn't even comprehend. It was alien.
He pulled back from the eyepiece, his face pale.
"This isn't a gear," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "It's a colony."
He looked from the object to the concerned faces of his friends. He wanted to tell them to burn it, to throw it in the deepest part of the sea, to warn the city. But the engineer in him was captivated, and The Veilwalker recognized a threat that needed to be understood before it could be fought. He had to maintain his cover.
"I need to run some more tests," he said, his voice regaining its composure. "I need to determine its composition, its energy output, its origin. This… this is the most important discovery of the century."
Elias grinned, sensing a return to familiar ground. "So, we're dealing with a scientific marvel, not a ghoulie from Ebon Hollow?"
"The two aren't mutually exclusive," Julian replied grimly, his eyes still fixed on the gear as it pulsed with its gentle, impossible heat. "The man who stole this—where is he now?"
"City holding cell down at the Caerminster precinct," Victor answered. "A low-life named Finn. Why?"
Julian looked up, and for a fleeting second, his friends didn't see the gentle, brilliant Julian Locke. They saw something colder, sharper, and far more dangerous. They saw The Hollow.
"Because whoever made this," Julian said, his voice dropping to an icy calm, "will want it back. And they won't care who they have to dismantle to get it".
Julian's chilling pronouncement—that the artifact's creators would dismantle anyone in their way—sucked the last of the warmth from the workshop. The ticking of the dozen clocks on the walls seemed to grow louder, each second a step closer to an unknown deadline.
Victor, ever the pragmatist, immediately took charge. "Right. Elias, you and I will head to the Caerminster precinct. We'll put the fear of God into Finn and see what he knows. Josephine, stay with Julian. Two sets of eyes on that… thing."
"No," Julian and Elias said in near-perfect unison.
Victor's head snapped towards Elias, his eyebrows arching in surprise. It was rare for the easygoing wildcard to flatly contradict a direct plan.
Elias stepped forward, wiping the last of the scone crumbs from his fingers. His usual bright demeanor was gone, replaced by a street-smart seriousness they seldom saw. "Victor, with all respect, Finn is a nobody. He's a gutter-rat who got lucky. He's the end of the trail, not the start of it. Sending uniformed Watch officers to his cell will just announce our interest to anyone who might be watching. It's loud, it's clumsy, and it won't get us what we need."
"What we need," Elias continued, his gaze sweeping over the impossible gear on Julian's analysis engine, "is someone who understands the currency of secrets, not the letter of the law. This thing came from the streets. The answer is still on the streets."
Josephine, who had been watching the exchange intently, saw the logic. "You have someone in mind." It wasn't a question.
"Old Man Hemlock," Elias said, a name that seemed to coat the refined air of Rosefen Row with a layer of grime. "He runs a 'curiosity shop' over in Blackglen. It's a magpie's nest for anything stolen, strange, or forbidden. If a piece of tech that weird is being passed around, he'll have either seen it, heard of it, or will know who to ask. He's been trading in the city's secrets since before my father was born."
Victor's expression hardened. "Blackglen is outside our jurisdiction without a formal writ. And Hemlock is a known fence, a criminal."
"Which is why I'm the one who should talk to him," Elias countered smoothly. "He doesn't see me as the Watch. He just sees the curious kid who used to run errands for him. He'll talk to me."
Julian, who had remained silent during the debate, finally spoke, lending his quiet weight to Elias's argument. His mind was racing. This was the perfect move. It kept Victor's official, and very noticeable, presence at a distance. It allowed Julian to observe the criminal ecosystem connected to this new threat without showing his own hand. The Veilwalker could learn much by simply watching a master like Hemlock work.
"Elias is right, Victor," Julian said. "The nature of this object… it's not police business yet. It's an information problem. We need whispers, not confessions."
The unified front of his three friends was something Victor Thorne rarely argued against. He let out a slow, frustrated breath, the discipline of a lifetime warring with the undeniable truth that this situation was far outside the neat lines of his rulebook. "Fine," he conceded, the word tasting like defeat. "We go to Blackglen. All of us. I won't have any of you walking into that pit alone."
"Then you'll have to learn to look like you belong there," Josephine said with a wry smile, already mentally planning how to tone down Victor's stiff, military bearing.
An hour later, the four of them stepped out of a steam-cab into a different world. The elegant facades and bright gaslamps of Rosefen Row were a distant memory. Here in Blackglen, the fog was a thick, yellow soup, clinging to the grimy brickwork and muffling sound. The air was a cocktail of factory smoke from nearby Ironstead, salt from the river, and something vaguely rotten from the clogged gutters. Buildings leaned against each other for support, their upper floors blotting out the sky. Ragged figures lurked in shadowed doorways, their faces pale and hungry in the intermittent glow of flickering, low-pressure gaslights.
Victor, now dressed down in a borrowed, ill-fitting tweed coat, looked profoundly uncomfortable, his hand never straying far from the revolver hidden beneath it. Josephine moved with a quiet confidence, her noble bearing replaced by a wary, street-smart posture. She saw everything, cataloging threats and escape routes with a glance. Julian, however, felt a strange sense of coming home. This was the Veilwalker's territory. The shadows were familiar, the desperation was a language he understood.
Elias led them through a labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, the names of which appeared on no official city map. Finally, he stopped before a grimy, soot-blackened shopfront. The words "HEMLOCK'S CURIOS & SALVAGE" were barely visible on the fog-dampened glass. The shop was dark, but a thin sliver of light bled from beneath the door.
"Alright," Elias murmured, turning to the group. "Let me do the talking. Don't volunteer anything. And for God's sake, Victor, try not to look like you're about to arrest him for breathing."
He pushed the door open. A small, rusty bell clanked discordantly.
The inside of the shop was a hoarder's dream and a fire marshal's nightmare. Piles of junk rose from floor to ceiling—rusted automaton parts, tarnished silver, stacks of yellowed books, taxidermied animals with missing eyes, and medical equipment of dubious origin. The air was stale, thick with dust and the cloying sweetness of decay.
Behind a counter made of stacked, coffin-like crates sat the man himself. Old Man Hemlock was ancient, thin as a rail, with skin like stretched parchment over a skull. A pair of thick, multi-lensed spectacles were perched on his nose, and a single, long strand of white hair grew defiantly from a mole on his chin. He didn't look up from the tarnished locket he was examining with a jeweler's loupe.
"Shop's closed, Elias," he rasped, his voice like grinding stones. "And you've brought strays."
"Evening, Hemlock," Elias said cheerfully, leaning against the counter as if he were a regular customer. "Just seeking a bit of your wisdom. My friends are just here to admire your collection."
Hemlock finally looked up, his magnified eyes drifting over Victor, Josephine, and finally, Julian. His gaze lingered on Julian for a second longer than the others, a flicker of shrewd analysis in their depths before he dismissed them. "The Watch and the Nobility," he croaked. "An interesting collection for a boy like you. You're moving up in the world, or down."
"A bit of both," Elias said, never losing his smile. He slid a small object, wrapped in a handkerchief, onto the counter. It wasn't the gear itself—Julian had insisted on keeping it—but a meticulously detailed sketch Julian had drawn of it in charcoal, capturing its texture and shape perfectly. "Ever seen anything like this? A gear. From a watch, supposedly. Picked up in Crow's Hollow."
Hemlock glanced at the drawing, his expression unreadable. "Aethelburg is full of gears. Be more specific."
"It's made of a material that feels like stone, but it's light. And it's warm to the touch," Elias said, his voice dropping slightly. "Permanently warm."
The old man's hands, which had been perfectly steady, froze for a fraction of a second. It was a micro-reaction, one that only Julian and Josephine caught. Hemlock slowly pushed the drawing back across the counter.
"Never seen it," he rasped. "Junk. Get out."
"We could make it worth your while," Josephine interjected, her voice smooth and aristocratic.
Hemlock let out a dry, rattling laugh. "Your money's no good here, little bird. Some knowledge costs more than coin."
Julian had been silent, observing, letting his friends play their roles. He recognized this for what it was: a negotiation. Hemlock knew something. The fear, the immediate dismissal—it was the reaction of a man who had touched a hot stove and had no desire to do it again. It was time for a different kind of pressure.
"The man who had it was named Finn," Julian said quietly, speaking for the first time. His voice was calm, almost academic, but it cut through the musty air with precision. "He's in a holding cell in Caerminster. He'll be cold, hungry, and very willing to talk to whoever posts his bail."
Hemlock's head slowly turned, his magnified eyes fixing on Julian. The feigned disinterest was gone.
"The Organ Grinder pays better than you," he whispered, the name dropping into the room like a stone into a deep, dark well.
The confirmation hit them all like a physical blow.
"So you know him," Victor growled, taking a step forward.
"I know of him," Hemlock corrected, his voice a venomous hiss. He was looking at Julian, only at Julian. "I know that people who ask questions about him stop breathing. I know he deals in things that don't belong in this world. Things that… grow." He shuddered, a genuine, deep-seated tremor. "Now, take your drawing and your ghost story, and get out of my shop before you bring his attention down on me."
He pointed a trembling, skeletal finger at the door. "He's not the only one who harvests organs in Blackglen."
The oppressive silence that followed Hemlock's threat was broken by the distant, mournful horn of a cargo ship navigating the fog-bound river. The four of them stood on the slick, uneven cobblestones of the Blackglen alley, the shopkeeper's venomous words hanging between them like a shroud.
Victor was the first to move. He turned, not towards the alley's exit, but to face Julian directly. His broad shoulders blocked the faint light from a nearby gas lamp, casting Julian in shadow. His face, usually just stern, was now carved with an unyielding resolve.
"This ends here for you, Julian," Victor said. His voice was low, devoid of anger, but filled with the finality of a judge's sentence. "Hemlock is right. This is no place for a civilian. We crossed a line bringing you here. I crossed a line. It will not happen again."
Julian opened his mouth to protest, the perfect technical excuse already forming on his lips, but Victor raised a gloved hand.
"No," he stated, cutting off any argument. "There is no debate. This is no longer about a strange artifact. It's about a man Hemlock, a hardened criminal fence, is terrified of. A man connected to impossible technology and murder. This is official Watch business now, and it is too dangerous."
Elias stepped forward, his easygoing nature replaced with concern. "Victor, his insight just gave us our first real lead. He's the only one who understands the tech."
"And he will continue to do so, from the safety of his workshop in Rosefen Row," Victor countered, his gaze unwavering from Julian. "We will bring the evidence to you. We will bring you the reports. But you will not set foot in the field with us again. That is an order, Elias. And it is a promise to you, Julian. As your friend, I will not have your blood on my hands."
Josephine, who had been watching silently, finally spoke, her voice laced with a reluctant pragmatism. "He's right, Julian. We were reckless. Your value is in your mind, not in your proximity to danger."
Julian looked at their faces—Victor's rigid honor, Elias's conflicted loyalty, Josephine's cool, regretful logic. He couldn't fight them. To argue further would be to arouse suspicion. Why would a simple engineer be so desperate to chase monsters through the dark? He had to play the part they expected of him. He let his shoulders slump in a show of resigned disappointment.
"Alright, Victor," he said, his voice quiet. "I understand."
The tension broke, but a new, awkward distance replaced it. They were a unit just minutes ago, and now a wall stood between them.
"We need to move," Victor said, turning his attention back to the mission. "The Organ Grinder knows Finn was the thief. Hemlock knows. The whole bloody underworld might know by now. We need to get to the precinct and secure Finn."
"What if he sends someone?" Elias asked, the gravity of their situation settling in. "Someone like… whatever made that gear?"
"Then we will be there to meet them," Victor stated simply. He glanced at Julian one last time. "Get a steam-cab. Go straight home. Don't stop for anyone."
Julian nodded, pulling up the collar of his coat. He watched as his three friends, a tight, determined unit once more, turned and moved towards the main thoroughfare, their figures quickly becoming indistinct silhouettes in the oppressive fog of Blackglen. He was alone.
Just as The Veilwalker always was.
He didn't hail a cab. He waited, melting back into the deeper shadows of a recessed doorway, until the sound of his friends' footsteps had completely faded. He was not going back to Rosefen Row. The workshop his father ran, the place of bright brass and ordered genius, was a stage for Julian Locke. The Veilwalker required a different kind of theater.
He moved through the labyrinthine alleys with a silent, fluid grace that would have shocked his friends. This was his element. He navigated the darkness not with fear, but with an intimate familiarity. After fifteen minutes of walking, he stopped before a derelict tenement building, indistinguishable from the other rotting structures around it. He slipped into a side entrance, the door opening with a well-oiled click that defied its rusted exterior.
He climbed a set of creaking stairs to the top floor and unlocked a door that looked as if it hadn't been opened in a century.
The room inside was the antithesis of Locke & Son Automata. It was sparse, cold, and brutally functional. There were no decorative clocks, no silver puzzle boxes. One wall was covered not with schematics, but with a massive, detailed map of Aethelburg, crisscrossed with lines of colored string, connecting names, locations, and incident reports in a complex web of conspiracy. Another wall held a rack of equipment: modified grappling launchers, voltaic stun-gloves, gas-filter masks, and several firearms, all stripped down and customized with a futuristic, minimalist lethality. This was not a place for creation; it was a place for deconstruction.
Julian shed his public persona along with his coat. His movements became sharper, more economical. He lit a single, clean-burning oil lamp, its light casting long, dancing shadows. He walked to the map, his eyes tracing the lines connected to Crow's Hollow. There was already a small cluster of pins there, marking the locations of previous strange disappearances he had investigated in secret. And in the center of that cluster, he had written a name in stark, black ink: The Organ Grinder.
His friends thought they were chasing a man. Julian knew better. The gear wasn't a clue left by a man; it was a spore. A seed from a vast, alien intelligence, planted in the fertile decay of his city. The Organ Grinder was merely the gardener.
Victor had told him to go home, to be safe. He had drawn a line between the law and the layman. But The Veilwalker operated in the space between all lines. His friends would go to the precinct to protect one man. A noble, but futile gesture. They were trying to plug a leak with their finger when the entire dam was about to break.
He reached for a long, dark, tightly-woven coat, its fabric designed to absorb light and muffle sound. He strapped a sleek, custom-built revolver to his hip and a long, thin blade to his forearm.
The Veilwalker knew the Organ Grinder wouldn't send some thug to the jail cell. He would send something like the gear itself. Something that didn't need to pick a lock when it could simply become part of the wall.
He had to get to Finn first. Not to save him, necessarily. But to examine him. To see if the spore had taken root.
He pulled a simple, dark mask over the lower half of his face, his eyes becoming cold, analytical points of light in the gloom. His friends would follow the law. He would follow the truth, no matter how deep into the darkness it led him. He had a city to save from a future it couldn't even imagine.
And the hunt was on.