My name is Aria Thorne, and I live in a world of glass and steel, a world I built to replace the one that tried to burn me alive. My office, situated on the forty-second floor of a monolith in the heart of Chicago, is a sanctuary of obsidian and light. From here, the city looks like a blueprint of human ambition, and I am the one who draws the lines.

I sat at my drafting table today, the skyline bleeding into a bruised purple dusk outside. I’ve always found the digital world too clean, too sterile for the birth of a building. I prefer the tactile resistance of graphite on vellum. I held the charcoal pencil in my left hand, my strokes fluid, sharp, and defiant. Every line I drew was a jagged angle, a beautiful asymmetry that had become my signature. In the architectural world, they call it “The Thorne Edge.” They don’t know it’s actually the shape of my trauma.

I paused, my eyes drifting to the back of my own hand. A jagged, silver scar—raised and translucent—ran from my wrist up to the base of my middle finger. Even after eighteen years, the skin there feels tight. It is a permanent map of a fire that hadn’t just scorched my flesh; it had forged my soul into a blade.

I closed my eyes, and the sterile smell of my office was replaced by the cloying scent of beeswax and leek soup.

I was ten years old. The dining room of the Vance Estate was silent, save for the ticking of a grandfather clock that sounded like a judge’s gavel. My left hand was tied behind my back with a rough, coarse hemp rope. It was my father’s “remedy” for my “sinister” inclination.

“The left hand is the devil’s tool, Aria,” Silas Vance had whispered, his voice thick with a terrifying, righteous fervor. “If you won’t learn through the Word, you will learn through the Flesh.”