Chapter 6 — Occult Networks
The feather rain had stopped, but Vetranta had not regained its calm. The cobblestones remained littered with white down, and under the soles of passersby, each feather crackled like dry paper. The city sweepers, dressed in yellow slickers, pushed their carts methodically. But they didn’t collect the feathers like ordinary trash: they wore copper gloves, opaque goggles, and treated each fragment like unstable matter. Some burst into clouds of pollen, others whistled an obsessive melody, still others dissolved into numbers.
In an old utility room beneath the highway, a boy watched the scene through a hacked-together webcam. His name was Nadir. Hoodie pulled over his head, eyes gleaming with insomnia, he typed relentlessly on a patched-up keyboard. His lair looked like an electric hive: Ethernet cables hanging like vines, runes painted in silver on the walls, quartz crystals wired to battered motherboards. Neighbors thought the place stored roadwork gear. No one would have guessed it was one of the most dangerous pirate nodes in Vetranta.
The guilds of mages believed they controlled the flow of spells. The Dark Backbone especially ruled supreme: it issued licenses for incantations, taxed every blessing, monitored curses as if they were just torrent files. But the feather rain had scrambled everything. The network was saturated, encryptions cracked open, and Nadir had sniffed the opening.
He wore headphones. Through them, he didn’t hear music, but decrypted magical streams. Fragments of prayers, whispered wishes, barely murmured threats: all of it flowed through the city’s invisible veins, like a vast P2P traffic. Nadir grinned. He never believed in gods, but he believed in system vulnerabilities. And magic here was nothing more than another system.
A script flashed on his screen: FeatherSniff. His own invention. The program captured the vibrations of feathers and translated them into routing keys. Each feather that fell from the sky wasn’t a miracle, but a DNS packet, an entry point into Vetranta’s magical infrastructure. He reached for a feather stuck in his cables: it vibrated slightly, like an antenna. Instantly, a downpour of data filled his screen.
Spells appeared as lines of code. A love blessing sent by a student above the northern quarter translated into a sixty-four-byte ping. A curse of sterility showed up as a DROP TABLE request. Whole prayers appeared like compressed files, crammed with archaic symbols. Nadir burst out laughing. All of it—just traffic.
He decided to test his find. In a nearby neighborhood, a group of teenagers had bought themselves a drizzle of love charms. Little phosphorescent hearts floated in the air, ready to stick to the first cheek they found. Nadir intercepted the request, rerouted the line, and the hearts slammed right into his screen. The image filled with throbbing red, as if the computer itself had fallen in love.
“First step toward open-source magic,” he muttered.
But Vetranta doesn’t like anyone tinkering with its nerves. Barely an hour later, the ground trembled beneath his feet. Three silhouettes appeared at the entrance of the hideout. The Watchers of the Backbone. Their long coats shimmered with glowing glyphs, and each step they took made the streetlamps outside crackle.
“We’ve detected unauthorized traffic,” one said in a metallic voice.
“This is a free network,” Nadir replied without looking up.
“There is no such thing as a free network,” the Watcher said.
They raised their hands. A violet dome crashed down on the hideout, locking Nadir in an occult firewall. The boy smiled. He’d been waiting for this. His fingers flew across the keyboard, and FeatherSniff v2 came alive. The feathers dangling from his cables quivered, then exploded in a shower of glowing digits. The dome cracked, inverted, and sealed shut around the three Watchers. Trapped in their own spell, they froze into translucent statues.
Nadir shrugged.
“Always check your open ports, guys.”
He leaned back in his chair, triumphant. But triumph lasted little. In a corner of the hideout, he noticed something off: his shadow. It was no longer in sync. When he moved his hands, the shadow lagged by a second. Then two. And suddenly, it began to write on its own. On the floor, the shadow traced shifting black letters: Vetranta. Then it erased them and rewrote them backwards: Anatretv.
Nadir’s blood ran cold.
“What the hell…?”
The shadow raised a hand. Not a simple gesture: a salute. As if it recognized someone he had not yet met.
At that moment, his screen lit up by itself. A notification appeared: New incoming connection — Inspector Serra. The face of a man emerged, blurred by unstable flux. A rain-soaked coat, deep eye bags, and a notebook open on the table.
“Nadir?” asked the voice.
“Inspector?”
The boy straightened. He had never heard of me, and yet he knew my name.
“We need to talk,” I continued. “The feathers aren’t just a bug. They’re a protocol.”
“I know,” Nadir replied. “And I’ve got bad news: someone’s already trying to hijack them.”
Silence hung for a second. Then the entire network shuddered. In the city’s sewers, the Dark Backbone was reorganizing. The three captive Watchers dissolved into vapor. And above us, in the sky, already oversaturated, a new rain was gathering. Not feathers this time. Something heavier.
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