Back when the world still belonged to old men in glass towers, Vox was just a rumor.

For months, the air smelled rank and hung thick in your lungs. A faint, metallic scent that told you that something, somewhere, was burning. It was more than just the usual protests or police sweeps. Whole districts were on fire. Entire neighborhoods had been wiped clean just because Solen’s data analysts had flagged them as “breeding grounds for unrest.”

The city’s eyes — hundreds of them — tracked from above in the form of silent hover drones. Drones the size of dinner plates, hovering over intersections, their lenses gleaming like the multisighted eyes of an insect. 

Giant billboard screens bolted to building facades spat the same message. Security Is Freedom. Trust Your Leaders. But nobody believed that anymore. Not when “security” meant bodies in the street and every choice stripped down to protocol. Even the mouths paid to preach it had stopped believing.

The old democracy had rotted slowly, like a body contained in glass. Corporate mergers were the first sign that individual freedoms were a luxury of the past. Then without preamble came the Emergency Stability Act that allowed indefinite detention without trial. Not just of the metahumans, but of civilians that had little to call their own outside of their own name. 

Surveillance became a constant. It was sold merely as a precaution, with armed patrols as a deterrent. Everyone knew it was more than that. It was just a way to force control, and to disarm any defiance. Now, no one dared to question it. It became the simple reality of life. Curfews, rationing, and armored vehicles moving at every border crossing. Just a typical Monday morning. 

On a good day, you kept your head down and didn’t draw the wrong kind of attention. On a bad day, your building was surrounded by riot police before you finished your morning coffee.

The night it started to change wasn’t a good day or a bad one. It was something typical.

The first blackout hit at 19:03. Lights died across three districts in a wave, plunging skyscrapers and slums alike into the same thick darkness. The drones fell from the sky like stones, shattering onto the sidewalk. Public broadcasts cut to static. For two full minutes, the city was a dead thing.

Then the sky lit up. Not with the cold glare of a police floodlight, but with something electric and otherworldly. Arcs of white-blue lightning dancing from tower to tower, filling the skyline with veins of light. People poured into the streets, craning their necks to see. 

Standing on the edge of a Unified broadcast tower, was a man. His cloak snapping in the wind, with sharp eyes that caught the light like molten silver. He held no weapon. The storm wrapped around him like a crown.

The blackout ended in the next heartbeat — but the broadcast stayed off the air. Solen’s cronies skittered around in the chaos, trying to whitewash the disruption with their typical nonsense and distractions. 

For the first time in years, the city was quiet. 

The government tried to say it was an unexpected weather event—something nonconfrontational or inciting. Something that wouldn’t stoke the flames of a fledgling revolution.

But it was a pitiful explanation. Everyone knew what they’d seen. And for the first time in years, everyone was saying the same thing.

Vox.

Nobody fully agreed on where he came from. 

Metahumans weren’t new. The first documented cases had started cropping up more than a century ago. These people had been born with mutations that altered their physiology, or sharpened their senses. Some had abilities science had no polite name for. Most were harmless, with powers that seemed more like fun party tricks than mitochondrial altering abilities. Others were catastrophic—with control of electromagnetic fields, gravitational manipulation, bioelectric discharge, or worse. The ability to shape reality with their minds alone.

At first, the governments called them “evolutionary anomalies.” Something they could control. Then they started calling them “weapons.” Something they could wield. 

When Solen saw he couldn’t stop metahumans from being born, he moved to own them instead. He passed bills to register them all as if they were objects, stripping them of their humanity. The precipice of his cruelty came when the Registration Act was passed—requiring every metahuman to be cataloged, and ranked by threat level. They were either released under strict surveillance or detained indefinitely. 

For metas, true freedom was a thing of the past. The high-tier cases — the ones capable of affecting whole city blocks — never saw the outside world again.

Vox had been one of those. Hooked to machines that mapped every spark in his nervous system, and every fluctuation in his brainwaves. He was just a boy in a white cell, with eyes too bright, flinching as doctors in hazmat suits approached him.

They’d taken him before he was old enough to understand what the word freedom meant. He’d been confined to high-security research facilities. For the public’s safety, they said. Godlike power in the hands of a child was too dangerous to be left unchecked. And—maybe they were right—but it didn’t mean it was just.

They didn’t mention the experiments, or the restraints that left welts on his wrists. On paper, it was framed as threat containment. He was a danger to society, and people cheered for it. Even felt safer because of it. 

By the time he was sixteen, the boy in the footage had vanished. What came out of those walls was a man shaped by isolation, sharpened by cruelty. Filled with the kind of cold, deliberate rage that doesn’t burn out.

The first rumors started around five years ago — whispers of a figure appearing in the middle of government raids, tearing apart armored vehicles without touching them. Able to turn police weapons into slag. Leaving a line of gore in his wake.

At first, the state denied it. It was easier that way. Then, when the stories came faster than they could contain, they blamed it on a rogue metahuman cell. Labeled them as terrorists with stolen tech. But the same description came through each incident—a tall, slender man with eyes like molten silver, and a voice that could cut through the noise of gunfire like it was the only sound in the world.

People weren’t walking blind anymore. They’d started paying attention.

Not just because he saved lives — though he did. He’d intervene when soldiers turned their rifles on unarmed crowds, when patrols raided markets for “tax violations,” or when security drones opened fire on protestors. But also because he spoke truth, unafraid to criticize Solen and his fascist state. Not in the mealy platitudes of politicians, but with the kind of language that made you feel like you’d been waiting your whole life for someone to put your anger into words.

You are not free. They tell you who to love, what to own, where to stand, when to speak, how to die. They feed you lies until you are too tired to choke them back. But I am not tired. And I am not here to ask.

To some, he was the answer — the living embodiment of justice, and proof that the old order could be broken. To others, he was the enemy Solen had made him out to be. A single man with the power to bend the world to his will.

But even those who feared him had to admit the truth: for all the government’s talk of control, no one could stand against him.

The old world was crumbling, and for the first time in years, there was someone standing in the rubble who didn’t look afraid.

People argued about why he called himself Vox. The official state line was that it meant “voice,” as in “the voice of treason.” His supporters said it was because he spoke for those the government had silenced. Others thought it was a challenge to Solen himself. A declaration that his voice would be the last thing the old world ever heard.

But the name was only part of the myth. And the more the government tried to suppress footage of him, the faster it spread. He became a phantom on every black market newsfeed — striding through tear gas as if it were mist, scattering riot troops with a flick of his hand, standing unmoving as bullets veered off course and clattered harmlessly to the ground.

It was hard to tell what was real and what had been embellished. But the blackout had proven one thing: whatever else he was, Vox was the answer to bring the entire system to its knees.

Toric Draeven had seen enough “answers” to know how quickly they could turn into problems.

He’d grown up inside the marble-and-glass world of the Capital District — Omnistad — the kind of place where the streets were scrubbed at dawn, the grocery shelves never emptied, and the police smiled because they already had your name, your address, and a full scan of your genome on file.

His father had been a senator for twelve years, one of the faces that fronted the slow, quiet gutting of democracy. Toric had watched him shake hands with corporate donors, sit through dinner parties where billionaires joked about curfew raids like they were weather reports. The Capital kids went to private academies behind walls. They didn’t see the street protests, the drone sweeps, the ration lines.

Toric had.

He was sixteen the first time he snuck out of the District with friends, looking for something real. What he found were streets patrolled by armored trucks, and checkpoints where civilians were made to kneel in the dust.

By the time he was eighteen, he’d walked away from his father’s world entirely. 

He wasn’t a strategist in the way Vox was. He didn’t see fifty moves ahead on a board only he could visualize. His strength was simpler, but more dangerous in its own way.

He moved people. Rallied strength and courage. Not with speeches, but with a voice that carried and a presence that demanded attention. He could walk into a fractured, half-starved resistance cell and have them marching in formation within an hour. He fought on instinct, learned fast, and never asked someone to take a risk he wouldn’t take himself.

He bled for his people, and they followed him for it.

In the years after leaving the Capital, Toric built a reputation in the underground as the man you wanted in front when the doors blew open. He had the scars to prove it — knife lines on his ribs, a gunshot through his left shoulder, a shattered elbow that never set quite right.

By twenty-two, he was a commander in the Bloodsparrow Rebellion. The only organized force of retaliation that had managed to survive the silencing executions of Solen and his Unified forces. 

Toric didn’t sit on the Sparrow council — he hated sitting behind a desk — but he was the one they called when a situation went to hell and needed a man who could walk into the fire without blinking.

He had fought alongside metahumans before, though he’d never trusted them entirely. Not because of what they were, but because of how they had been used by Solen. 

The government’s leash was ironclad. Those they couldn’t cage, were coerced into submission. And if that didn’t work, they were killed. Simple as that.

It bred paranoia on both sides. 

Metahumans often saw regular soldiers as dead weight. Soldiers saw metas as potential traitors.

He’d seen both be right.

So when the name Vox started circling the rebel channels, Toric’s gut tightened. Another metahuman playing hero? Maybe. Or maybe just another tyrant waiting to crown himself.

And Toric had lived long enough to know that sometimes the devil you knew was safer than the god you didn’t.

When the blackout footage reached him, Toric didn’t look impressed. He looked… wary.

Around him, the room was already alive with chatter. This could be it. This could change everything. We should reach out to him.

Toric leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest. “Or it could be the fastest way to lose everything we’ve built. A man with that kind of power doesn’t need allies. He needs yes men. The kind that don’t stop to ask questions.”

No one argued with him. But the name kept coming back. Vox was hitting military convoys, disabling surveillance grids, freeing political prisoners before they could be relocated.

And every time, more of Toric’s people started to wonder if maybe  this was the sign they’d been waiting for.

Toric told himself that he wouldn’t fall for it. That men like Vox were dangerous not just because of what they could do, but because of how good they were at making you believe you wanted them to do it. 

He believed that. 

Right up until they met.