You want to know when this began?

  It wasn’t tonight.

  It wasn’t when we gathered in these tunnels.

  It wasn’t even when we decided to march on Virex.

  It began at dawn.

  I was a boy then.

  Every year, when the light was still thin and colorless, the runners came into Lowfall. They moved quickly, like the streets belonged to them. Like we were already accounted for.

  Evaluation day.

  Back then, I didn’t understand what that meant. I thought it was a test. A chance to prove something.

  It took me years to realize we weren’t being tested.

  We were being sorted.

  The nobles would stand in their clean boots at the edge of our broken streets and watch us line up. They spoke softly to one another, pointing, nodding. The wealthy chose first. Talent. Strength. Potential. Anything that might serve their houses.

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  Then came the officers, hunting for soldiers.

  And the rest of us?

  We were sent back to Lowfall with the understanding that we had not been valuable enough. Not yet.

  Above us, Virex gleamed. I remember staring up at it as a child, thinking it looked invincible. It sat on the ancient wells like a throne carved into the bones of the earth. The scholars called it progress. They said the aether drawn from below powered the future.

  But I watched the fields beyond our district turn gray.

  I watched the air thicken until the sky looked bruised even at noon.

  I watched the ground swallow homes I had played in the day before.

  The wells never stopped taking.

  Neither did the city.

  When streets collapsed, soldiers came to “secure the area.” When people protested ration cuts, someone disappeared. When families lost daughters during noble visits, no record was ever written.

  Lowfall learned to endure.

  We learned to share what little we had. To laugh when we could. To rebuild when the earth cracked open beneath us. But endurance is not the same as living.

  I was there the winter an entire row of houses fell into a sinkhole. I helped dig with my bare hands. We found three survivors.

  Three.

  That was the day I stopped believing Virex simply didn’t notice us.

  They knew.

  They just didn’t care.

  You see, I used to think the wells were the enemy. That if we could just shut them down, everything would heal.

  I was wrong.

  The wells are tools.

  The hunger above them is the problem.

  I stand before you now not as the boy who waited in line to be judged… but as a man who understands what we are worth.

  We are not inventory.

  We are not expendable.

  We are not the shadow beneath their city.

  Virex was built on our backs. Its towers rise because our land was drained. Its lights burn because our homes went dark.

  And tomorrow, when we march, it won’t be out of blind rage.

  It will be reclamation.

  Not for revenge.

  For balance.

  For every field that withered.

  For every house that fell.

  For every child who stood in line at dawn and learned what it meant to be measured and dismissed.

  My name is Raevess.

  I remember.

  And by the time the next dawn breaks over Virex, they will remember us too.