Featured in The Copper Press, 22 September, 2157 A.M.

If you’ve never tasted the air over Giles, imagine sucking breath through a damp chimney flue while someone sprinkles powdered copper on your tongue. The dump squats in London’s western shadow like a rust-gutted leviathan, coughing fumes of charred ironworks and spoiled lard into skies that haven’t been truly blue since the Choir first sang among the clouds. Nobody ventures there after twilight—nobody but rag-pickers too desperate to fear Shard Blight, and muck-spies like me who make a living poking sticks into corporate graves.

I’m Beau Silversmith, staff reporter for The Times. Well, I was, until my editor discovered my fondness for uncompensated lunches and reassigned me to the “regional color” desk. That meant printing puff pieces on fishmongers and flower festivals. So when a half-clocked trinket-trader nicknamed “Gearbox” Juno slid onto my barstool whispering about corpses glowing green in Giles, I smelled the kind of story that gets a man promoted…

…or buried.

“Bodies, Beau,” Juno rasped, wiping oil from her cheek with a gasket rag. “Dead, pricey, and humming like choirboys after vespers. Somebody’s stirring crystal in the filth heaps.”

I paid our tab with my last silver and followed her into the night.

Giles by lantern-light is a nightmare done in charcoal and jade. Mountains of twisted iron and soot-slick glass cast black steeples against a jaundiced moon. Between them, strange veins of discarded shardisite waste-products pulse faint mint green, like the heartbeat of a sick giant.

Juno led me to a ravine where city disposals dump the “wet trash”. Meat scraps, failed homunculi, and anything too toxic for polite landfills. There, half submerged in congealed tallow, lay three cadavers. Human shape, but wrong: limbs distended asymmetrically, teeth fused into ceramic beaks, skin marbled with luminous liths of raw shardisite exposure.

I knelt, notebook shaking. The corpses weren’t scavenged; they’d exploded from within, ribcages peeled outward like iron flowers. No scav marks, no valuables missing. None except the craniums, which had been opened pristinely and scooped hollow.

Juno muttered a prayer to Angel Caris and pointed. Nestled inside one corpse’s sternum cage sat a glass ampoule, stoppered with lead and etched in Draconic runes:

“A-606 - PROPERTY OF VIROC INDUSTRIES - RESEARCH DIVISION - BIO-ALCHEMY.”

Corporate evidence in a city dump is scripture for an ambitious journalist. I pocketed the vial, and that’s when the wind shifted. From deeper in the hollow came a keening. Animalistic, but articulate, syllables stretched by agony.

“That ain’t wind,” Juno whispered. “That’s a man stuck halfway to demon.”

But I was already moving, lantern raised, tracking bootprints in the muck.

The prints dipped into a collapsed tram tunnel. It was pre-meteor, brick-lined, and strung with decayed but functional spirit lamps that somebody had rekindled. Every twenty paces a portable sigil projector hummed, latticing the walls with ward-glyphs to corral wayward shard arcana. Whoever set this place up expected leakage—and believed they could tame it.

We crept until the tunnel widened into an underground foundry. Conveyors rattled overhead, feeding slag to crucibles that belched green flame. Crates bearing Viroc’s insignia lined catwalks. And at the center, robed technicians in leaded aprons tended rows of glass coffins, each containing a “patient” or a specimen. Tubes syphoned glowing viridian solution from their spinal columns into distillers labeled *GLØW*.

Someone had found a perfect pulp name for the newest street poison. Rumor said a drop of the stuff let you hear to the other side. That your mind fills with angelic hymns or the Legion’s whispers. Depending on your sins.

At a control dais loomed a tall woman of obvious Guinnean descent, hair shaved to the scalp except a single braid threaded with gold wire. Dr. Velka Noor, exiled Viroc alchemist if scuttlebutt was to be trusted. She oversaw an assistant prying the skullplate from a still-breathing subject, chanting numbers as crystalline probes measured unknowable metrics.

My lantern clinked against a railing. Velka’s head snapped up. Her eyes, back-lit by shard fluoresce, fixed on me with clinical detachment.

“Trespassers,” she called, voice amplified through some arcane thaumaturgy. “Dispose of them. Harvest usable tissue.”

Steel shutters slammed behind us. Juno cursed and drew an electropick. Good for scrapping junk, less good for combat. I grabbed a length of rebar and we braced, as two of Velka's “thralls” lurched from behind crates. They were men once, now marionettes of scrap armor and filled with pumping conduits of shard-laced fluid. Their breath vented as an emerald mist in the damp air. Each puppet bore a branded rune of the demon *GOSTER*. The glowing essence of disgust and filth seeped out from behind stretched flesh.

The fight was messy. Pulp, sparks, pulverized mandibles, the taste of ozone as shard dust burst from body like overripe fruit. We won, but victory alarmed Velka more than delay. She triggered an evacuation protocol and her vats hissed, vents cycled, and sirens painted everything strobe-green.

A disembodied warding voice called out: “Containment failure imminent. All personnel evacuate.”

I wished I could be as calm as that ward-recording.

Velka fled through a reinforced hatch clutching a valise of ampoules. Juno and I, half-concussed, scrambled after her into an elevator that groaned up endless meters, finally disgorging us into a hillside facility with panoramic windows overlooking the Thames. Night stormed outside; lightning forked violet between black waves.

We’d ascended from rust to ivory—an abandoned Viroc laboratory still wired to the city's main leyline. Velka sprinted for a svelte airship tethered to a pad, but Caris blessed me with luck: a mooring line, snapped by wind, whipped across the pad and lay open the balloon’s silk. Hydrogas vented in a roar; the ship listed off its ropes.

Cornered, Velka dropped her valise, produced a wickedly polished shard-blade, and spoke with the fervor of the damned.

“You cannot stop evolution, meddler. The Choir stagnates and the Legion hungers. My Glow will bridge them. I'll force heaven and hell to negotiate inside the flesh of thier followers and I will be the mediator.”

Some villains monologue like amateur theater. Velka preached like a prophet. While she ranted, Juno kicked the valise to me. Inside: dozens of Glow ampoules and a single refined shardisite stone. A fragment so pure it refracted moonlight into halos and seemed to warp the ground it lay upon. Wrapped around it was a parchment sigil: the Seal of Amandine, Archangel of Love.

Why would a demon-doped alchemist carry an angelic favor?

Velka saw the shard in my grip and screamed, charging. I parried with rebar; steel rang against crystal blade. Sparks sprayed. Each clash cracked ampoules underfoot, releasing emerald vapors that coiled like serpents craving lungs. My head swam with the ringing voices of angelic choirs in a minor key.

She seized me by the lapels, eyes blazing. “The shard is the final reagent. Return it to me and I'll let you live.”

I picked a third option. I windmill slammed the shard into my wounded left palm. My flesh was sealed by crystal as I pulled Velka into a desperate headbutt.

Blinding white light detonated. Not blinding. Clarifying. As if every cell in my body sang its own individual name in unison. My pain vanished, replaced by a calm so fierce it compelled action.

“You cannot reconcile corruption by force,” I heard myself say. “Only through love can we find harmony.”

Light chased Glow fumes, burning them to clear air. Velka shrieked as Goster’s sigil clawed its way across her skin. A crack of thunder split the sky and hurled a lightning lance through the torn dirigible envelope. Hydrogas met electricity.

The explosion painted the office in sun-bright purples. The shockwave flung Velka across the pad; she landed amid shattered crates, unconscious. Somewhere below, containment sirens still wailed.

We had minutes to decide Velka’s fate and secure evidence before the lab’s reactors purged every trace. I found a console. Emergency override required a paired soul-key. Usually paired to the director of whatever installation it was assigned. Velka’s still body lay bleeding on the floor. This wouldn't work if she was already dead. I pressed her limp hand to the reader; runes cycled crimson, then green.

Alarms cut off mid-howl. Silence rushed in, broken only by distant rainfall and rolling thunder. That and Velka’s ragged breathing.

The shard stone in my palm cooled, its light fading to the slightest ember. I understood then that relics do not make saints. They only sharpen what they find. Or finds them.

By dawn, I had enough evidence to sink careers. The Times ran my article beneath the lurid headline:

GLOW LAB FOILED:
Rogue Alchemist Slain in Giles Death Pit!

Three thousand words of pulp righteousness, no names spared. Circulation tripled; Viroc threats flooded in. Two bishops of Amandine visited to verify my truthfulness. Both left unsure whether to canonize or shun me.

As for the relic, it sits in a lockbox beneath my bed, whispering softly whenever I stray too far toward cynicism. Some nights I swear I hear Amandine herself urging, “Expose them all.”

I will. Because London floats on secrets and sin, and the people deserve more than silence. They need pulp, ink, and stubborn fools wielding truth like a wildcard.