The story
The Filament
There is no sky over the Filament. There is a street — one street, folded and stacked and run back through itself until it becomes a city — and every metre of it is lit.
Everything in it runs on flux: raw energy, grown and held in crystal. Cut the crystal and the lights go out. Nobody in the Filament has ever seen that last longer than a night, and nobody wants to find out what happens if it does.
The Brownout Wars
The whole city drinks from one crystal seam. Blue Side holds one end of it. Red Side holds the other.
They fought over it for fourteen years. Not for ground, in the end — for the seam itself, which both Sides kept cutting into faster than it could grow back. By the last winter of the war the street was browning out block by block, and the two Sides finally worked out that the thing they were fighting over was the thing they were killing.
The Flux Accord
The Accord ended the war with a single clause: the Sides may still fight — but only in the arena, and only over the thing actually in dispute.
Each Side charges a core with what it stands to lose: a district, a power ration, a name. The match runs live, in front of the whole city. Break the other Side's core and the matter is settled — by the terms the loser agreed to before the first shot.
No disputes.
Only the outcome.
No cheats
Every match is certified end to end. The result the city sees is the result that happened.
No disputes
What was staked changes hands. There is no appeal above the arena.
Only the outcome
No draws. The core falls — or overtime ends it, and the Side that did more takes it.
Blue Side, Red Side
Two halves of one city, one at each end of the seam. Neither is the villain of this story; both of them nearly switched the lights off.
Blue Side
Upper seam. Charges its cores cold and defends long.
Red Side
Lower seam. Charges hot and comes forward early.
The Charged
Flux does not only run machines. Enough of it, close enough, for long enough, and it changes what it touches. The city calls them the Charged.
A furnace-tender who walked out of the fire still carrying it. A capacitor that woke up angry. A siege platform that read its own decommission papers and disagreed. A forest that got up. Whatever the flux takes, it gives back on two legs. Fifty-six of them hold a league licence, and every one of them fights for a Side, not against a person.
Licence grades
Every licence runs the same ladder, and the grade is public — it is printed on the licence, and the city reads it before it reads your name.
Omega
Omega Warden
Nobody built Omega for the arena. The Warden is a Brownout relic — a crowned siege machine that outlived the war it was made for, still walking the seam, still scanning for something to shoot.
The league leaves it on the map on purpose. Put it down and the charge it was hoarding goes to your Side: ninety seconds where your whole team runs hot. Try it alone and it will read you the way it reads everything else.
1,000
8,000
