The shriek of the alarm was a physical blow, a high-frequency spike that vibrated in Sineus’s teeth. He was already moving, his boots pounding on the polished concrete of the main artery corridor. The sound was wrong. Not the rhythmic pulse of a systems drill or the low thrum of a containment failure. This was the sound of catastrophic, structural collapse. A sound Monolit was never supposed to make. He ran toward the Western Gate, his body a simple machine set to a single purpose: observe, understand, act.
The air, usually tasting of scrubbed ozone and hot metal from the Mnemonic Chorus, was now sharp with something else. A discordant hum that set his nerves on edge, a frequency fighting the city’s steady song of existence. He burst through the final blast door onto the upper parapet of the Western Gate. Below, chaos was a living thing. Sentry teams scrambled along the twenty-meter-thick wall, shouting orders that were swallowed by the alarm. Amber emergency lights pulsed, casting long, dancing shadows.
Then he saw them.
They were not coming over the wall, or through the gate. They were simply on the wall, having phased through the outer layers of ferro-concrete as if it were smoke. There were twelve of them. They were not creatures of flesh, but man-sized distortions in the air, shimmering heat-hazes that coalesced into the vague, predatory shape of vultures. They were holes in the world, patches of fractured light and shadow that seemed to swallow the amber glow of the alarms.
— What are they? — a young sentry yelled, his voice cracking.
— Does it matter? Fire! — an older sergeant barked, his own rifle already up and spitting rounds.
The sentries opened fire. The sharp crack of their rifles was a familiar, comforting sound of order pushing back against chaos. But the comfort was a lie. The projectiles passed through the shimmering forms without effect, striking the opposite wall in a shower of sparks. The Mnemonic Vultures did not flinch. They did not bleed. They did not seem to notice the attack at all. Two hundred and forty rounds spent for nothing but noise and wasted ammunition.
Panic began to set in, a cold tide rising against the hot discipline of the Federation. The sentries’ fire became ragged, then faltered. The creatures were not there to fight them. They ignored the soldiers completely, their movements fluid and purposeful as they drifted over the heads of the defenders. They were not interested in men. They were interested in the pylons.
The Mnemonic Anchors. Four massive pylons, each as thick as an ancient tree, were embedded in the wall. They were the broadcast towers for this section of the Citadel, the source of the reinforcing hum that kept the wall’s structural memory strong. The Vultures swarmed them, their shimmering forms circling the pylons like true carrion birds circling a kill.
Sineus raised his high-magnification optics, his hands steady. He pushed past the fear, the raw impossibility of it, and focused on the facts. He was two hundred meters away, on the upper parapet, with a clear line of sight. The Vultures were not touching the pylons. There was a space of a few centimeters between their distorted forms and the concrete skin of the anchors. They were not tearing or breaking. They were doing something else.
He watched one of the creatures. It dipped its head in a pecking motion, and the air around the pylon wavered. A low, dissonant hum began to emanate from the concrete, a sick counter-frequency to the Mnemonic Chorus. The Vulture was not eating flesh. It was eating a concept. It was pecking at the memory of the pylon’s function, consuming the idea of ‘reinforcement’ and ‘stability’.
— They’re killing the wall, — Sineus whispered, the words a cold knot in his gut.
He saw it happen. The attack was metaphysical, but the result was brutally physical. The memory of ‘ferro-concrete’ began to fray. The complex matrix of chemical bonds that held the aggregate and steel together was being forgotten. The wall itself was forgetting how to be a wall. The surface of the concrete began to sweat a fine grey dust. Hairline cracks appeared, spreading like a web.
The low, grinding sound started then, the sound of a mountain turning to sand. The ferro-concrete de-bonded. The stone and sand that made it up simply fell away from each other, their purpose as a unified whole erased. The rebar skeleton within, its memory of tensile strength consumed, crumbled into cascades of red rust. A twenty-meter section of the Western Gate, a structure that had stood for a century, ceased to exist. It did not explode. It did not break. It dissolved.
It became a waterfall of dust and aggregate, pouring into the lower levels of the Citadel with a sound like a giant emptying an hourglass. The Mnemonic Anchor pylon at the center of the breach, its own memory eaten away, simply disintegrated, its component parts raining down into the growing cloud of ruin. The price of the attack was not just a hole in the wall; it was the lives of the sentries stationed on that section, their screams swallowed by the roar of unmaking.
The remaining sentries ceased fire. They stood in stunned, horrified silence, their rifles hanging uselessly in their hands. Their faces were blank with a shock that went deeper than fear. They were soldiers of the Eurasian Federation Successors. They fought raiders and mutants. They understood ballistics and armor. They did not understand this. Their entire reality, their entire doctrine of warfare, had been rendered obsolete in the space of a few minutes. Their morale, once as solid as the wall they stood on, had crumbled into a fragile shell of discipline over a core of pure terror.
Sineus lowered his optics. The dust began to settle, revealing a clean, impossible wound in the side of Monolit. The toxic wind of the wastes whistled through the new gap, a mournful, alien sound inside the city’s sterile perfection. He saw a piece of fallen concrete, a jagged slab half-buried in the dust. On it was the faint outline of the tri-spoke symbol, the emblem of order, duty, and memory. Now it was just a carving on a broken stone.
The truth settled on him, cold and heavy as a block of lead. This was not a freak anomaly. This was not a new form of the Unraveling. The precision, the choice of target, the clear and undeniable intelligence behind it—it was all there. This was a weapon. The Unraveling, the slow, passive decay of the world, had been weaponized. Someone, somewhere, had learned how to aim the void.
The alarm finally died, its shriek replaced by an echoing silence that was somehow worse. The only sounds were the wind and the distant, panicked shouts from the levels below. The war had changed. The enemy was not at the gate. The enemy was rewriting the rules of existence, and Monolit, for all its strength and order, was a fortress built on a foundation of sand.
He had to warn the council. He had to make them understand that their patrols, their walls, their entire strategy of holding the line was a child’s game against this new threat.
And as the thought formed, a cold certainty followed it. He knew they would not listen.
