Veltrin's underworld didn't hold elections, but tonight, power changed hands.
The Syndicate's core was a vault beneath the ledger stacks—twelve floors deep, sealed in reinforced shadow-code and memory suppression glyphs. Access was granted not by key, but by recall. If your mind couldn't conjure the door, you didn't belong there.
And tonight, the door opened wide.
Not for a thief.
Not for an heir.
But for a witness.
Killmark entered in silence. The council was already seated—seven figures in red silks, each marked with identical tattoos: a single black line across the mouth.
They listened.
They always listened.
He dropped a single feather onto the obsidian table.
It hissed like acid.
Not burned. Not rejected.
But recognized.
"Article VI is real," Killmark said. "He's bending the valuation structure. The System is folding around him, not against him."
One of the red-silks, the eldest, leaned forward.
"How long until it collapses?"
Killmark's voice never rose. "It won't. That's the problem. He's not building a rebellion. He's writing a contagion."
The room fell still.
Then the youngest spoke, voice like a cracked bell.
"Then reconcile the infection."
Reconciliation. Not assassination.
This was worse.
It meant integration.
Back at the shop, Sykaion leaned against the vault door, eyes closed. He hadn't slept since the override. The System no longer whispered—it watched. And each new entry he wrote echoed louder than the last.
Zeraphine brought him water. Her hands trembled slightly. Not from fear—but from weight.
"You can't stop now," she said. "If you leave the Articles incomplete, the System might collapse them back into myth."
He took the glass. Didn't drink.
"Maybe myth is safer."
Arlyss scoffed from the stairwell. "Safer doesn't mean truer."
He opened his eyes. "And truth doesn't always protect the people who need it."
Zeraphine sat beside him.
"What do you need, Sykaion?"
He didn't answer.
Not because he didn't know.
Because the answer was selfish.
"I need time."
Outside, the streets changed. Not visually. Socially. People who once feared the Articles now carried them. Not in hands—in posture, in tone, in the way they asked permission instead of forgiveness.
But the Syndicate adapted too.
Whispers of a new group—Red Echo—spread fast. They didn't kill. They infiltrated. Their goal wasn't to erase Sykaion.
It was to use him.
By sundown, a woman in red stood outside the shop.
She wore no insignia.
No weapon.
Only silence.
Zeraphine spotted her first. "We have a visitor."
Sykaion nodded. "Let her in."
Arlyss protested. "You don't even know who she is."
"I know what she's not doing. She's not hiding."
The woman entered like water. She moved past wards and trace-nets without resistance. As if belief itself opened the way.
She bowed.
"I speak for Red Echo. We no longer want to destroy the Articles."
Zeraphine frowned. "And what do you want?"
The woman smiled faintly.
"To franchise them."
Sykaion stared.
"That's not reconciliation. That's commodification."
The woman didn't flinch. "The System will absorb you if we don't. Our offer is structure. Protection. Continuity."
"Slavery," Arlyss spat.
"No," the woman said softly. "Stability."
Sykaion stepped forward.
"Tell your council this: belief doesn't scale. It lives or dies with the one who carries it. If they want structure, they build it without me."
The woman studied him.
"You'll regret that."
He nodded.
"I already do."
She left.
No threat.
No anger.
Just a silence that tasted like foregone war.
Later that night, Sykaion wrote another line in the vault.
> ARTICLE VII: No power may replicate belief without sacrifice.
And far below, in the Syndicate's core, Killmark watched the System blink again.
He didn't smile.
But he whispered one word:
"Good."