Within the heart of a mighty canyon lay the narrow city of Mercury.

Furthest back, a Gold District consisting solely of domed palaces lay.

Furthest forward, a Bronze District of gates fences, minecarts and tired workmen stay.

Tunnels littered the landscape to be hollowed day by day, but the mines had dried up, withered away.

The lord of this city sighed in misery as document by document littered his desk.

Injury reports, illnesses even the superhuman bodies of the Bronze Class couldn’t stave off. Starvation and dehydration, it was a terrible place to live. The downtrodden, the miners who lay down their lives to bring metal to the surface had been dying here for an age, and now the mines were empty, their livelihood dried up.

“This is all they found after a month’s work?” He muttered. One cart only half full lay before his chamber door. What they’d feared for half an age had now come to pass. They’d lost their means of support, and Julius was still in charge.

His father, Avance, had stood in Jupiter as a silent threat all these years, a means to stave off the tyrant’s abandonment, but now he was gone, and so to was his threat.

Without Avance, well and true, their fears would come to pass someday soon.

Mourn leaned back in his seat as he pondered this truth. What was it that had motivated him to turn coat? Greed? Frustration? Maybe some of the latter aimed squarely at the tyrant’s former?

He flipped the metal ore up in his grip, a long and tired gaze soon fell upon it. His father’s plan had been to wait out Julius’ lifespan, but was that doable? Was that a viable plan? Platinum Class, at most, should never live past forty, yet Julius was pushing well into his late seventies. There was something suspicious about that, something that irked him.

What made him turn traitor was one simple question: “Will that man really die?” He muttered to himself as he glanced upon the dark night sky.

The gargantuan moon, Hati, rained its light down upon the canyon bound little mining town and illuminated a figure. Mourn glanced towards Uriel as she flew towards her chamber.

His heart was bitter, he couldn’t help but admit it. Who had it been who convinced him to turn traitor? Who had it been who had told him they had to kill his father? Who had it been who told him tales of immortals and who had it been who told him Sovereign Julius was such a being?

He flipped the metal ore once more and sighed. He believed her, he let her convince him, and he took action, there was no room for hesitation, no way to go back. What was done could not be undone.

“That’s right,” he muttered, “in the end, dad chose to leave Jupiter to go fetch his lover and flee, he abandoned us, abandoned me.” His heart ached a little as he said those words aloud.

He went over that day in his mind a thousand times, thrice a day he’d recall the moment his father departed on Fafnir’s back. Yet, on this day, as he glanced outside of his window, as he thought of Uriel, something else popped into his tired mind.

Metatron’s words, the words he’d left with that day, words which said that Uriel, like many in Cain, was in no small way a slave. Her mind had been imbued with the memories of her ancestors, her mother, grandmother, and many others both male and female, all the way back to the godly age. How then, could she be blamed?

He rose from his seat and turned to face the door. What pushed him forward, this day, was not sense, nor logic, but pure, unmasked, emotion.

___________________________________________________

The eclipse fell and darkness once more cradled the world. Amid candle light, sitting in a lavish bedroom in Mercury City’s central manor, was a young girl praying before an ancient scripture. She was Uriel, the girl to whom Metatron answered, the mastermind behind Cain’s activities in these lands.

She ceased to pray, opened her eyes and then let loose a bitter sigh. Metatron’s matter still weighed on her mind. He was as a father to her, in this life and all those she’d lived before it.

After all, it had been him who ripped her and the other three from the rubble that day, a thousand years ago. She had seen, time and time again, his death and the deaths of her three fellow pillars.

The truth had to be said that it all weighed heavy in her heart, his death seeking and her banishment both. Thus she wondered aloud,

“How much longer must I stay in this backwater?” A sound, like a man’s boots clapping down on a wooden surface, then drew her focus and caused her to face the door. She found Mourn leaning there, arms crossed, back against the frame, looking at her and standing tall.

“What do you want?” She asked snappishly. The youth scowled at her and then walked into the room. His glaring eyes fell upon the scripture. There was plenty of history depicted there, Cain’s history specifically.

“I guess what goes around comes around,” He mused to himself aloud.

“Pardon?” Uriel inquired.

“Two centuries ago a branch of the Immortal Clan seized the Northern Alfheim city of Taurus and renamed it Loki. In response to that Abel sent a force to exterminate them. They seized the city and renamed it Cain while the Immortals fled. The Immortals then seized three other cities and renamed them Fenrir, Jormungand and Hel.

Two hundred years later and the conflict still rages on. Abel promised to return Taurus but Cain refused to relinquish it until the job was done, thus Abel deemed Cain a splinter cell. They called you a batch of extremists and washed their hands of you lot.”

Uriel scoffed at his words. This history was something she remembered all too well, she didn’t need to hear it from him. Even though the current incarnations of Abel’s founder, Metatron and four pillars, including herself, had been in Cain at the time, Abel washed their hands of them. This was no surprise really, after all values can change over a few hundred years of time.

She felt it no surprise that the newer members of Abel considered the founder’s ideals archaic, extremist and dangerous.

After all, unlike Metatron, they had not been forced to watch as Grimnir burned the city of his birth to the ground a thousand years ago. Unlike her, and the other three pillars, none of Abel’s later generations had been fished from the rubble of that burning city by Metatron’s sturdy hand either. She understood this, she did not need Mourn to say it.

She ignored him, or she tried to, but his next words cut deep, very deep indeed.

“Now Cain washes its hands of you just the same.” Her frown turned into a hostile glare. Mourn knew he’d struck a nerve. He’d come to know most of the full picture over the passage of time, the reason Uriel was here in these lands, as well as the history of her kin.

“What do you know?” She coldly shouted back at him.

“Only what I’ve heard,” Mourn replied. Uriel rose to her feet, her gaze bloody and cold. She walked towards the boy before her and looked up into his eyes. She smiled, but her anger had not gone away, in fact she cursed him with that smile.

“Go to hell,” She said to him, and then she passed him by. She didn’t wish to speak with him, she didn’t even want to look at him. Mourn never turned to face her, nor did she turn to face him, but his words gave pause to her steps regardless.

“Answer me this. If someone took the pages from an old book and glued them onto the pages of a new one...what’s the result? Is the new book now the same as the old one? Or, perhaps, is it still its own story but the pages of the old book have covered it up and ruined it before it could ever be read?” Uriel didn’t grasp his meaning, nor did she hold any intention of giving him an answer. Yet she paused. She paused in place, frozen by thought.

Uriel was a smart child, even if at first she did not want to realise the meaning of Mourn’s question, she couldn't help but do a moment later. She realised it, that she herself was the book he spoke of and that her precursor’s memories were an analogy for the glued in pages.

She lost her calm, her tranquility was forever disrupted by a stormy sea, a nagging feeling, a simple but lethal thing called doubt was born into her mind.

_________________________________________________

Rudolph leaned back in his seat, he was alone now, filling in the last papers of the day. Just then, perhaps by a trick of fate, his gaze fell upon a certain withered scroll. The scroll told of the legend everyone knew, but few knew what this scroll did. He glanced at it with an eerie look. How had he never noticed this?

“Year 4323...The God, Grimnir, beset upon the city of Eve...and reduced her, and her army, to ashes.” He pondered, if one looked at a map, the city of Eve once stood where the city of Taurus later would.

He could not help but lean back in his seat. To the survivors of Eve, the founders of Abel and later leaders of Cain, the Immortal Tribe who took the city built upon her ashes must have been far more than just a mere eyesore. He could almost even sympathise with them.

“It’s a pretty small world after all, if you really stop and think about it.”