Aethelburg's Twisted Fate

The flickering gaslight casts long, skeletal shadows across cobblestone streets slick with a perpetual mist. You cough, the damp air clinging to your lungs like a shroud. This is Aethelburg, a city choked by secrets and whispering promises. A place where the gilded carriages of the elite rumble past the ragged beggars huddled in doorways, each group oblivious to the precarious balance that holds this decaying metropolis together. You are Elias Thorne, a "retriever" – a euphemism for a debt collector with a particular set of skills. Or, more accurately, you *were* Elias Thorne. Before the accident. Before the incident with the Clockwork Guild. Before the gnawing, unnatural hunger that's begun to consume you from the inside out. You remember little of the last few weeks. Flashes of metallic glints, the scent of ozone and ozone, the chilling laughter of a woman with eyes like polished silver. Now, you wake in a flea-ridden bed in the St. Giles rookeries with a splitting headache, an empty pocket, and the unsettling feeling of something… missing. Your landlady, a perpetually grumpy woman named Mrs. Hemlock, is tapping her foot impatiently at the doorway. "Thorne! Wake yer lazy bones! A gent wants to see you. Says he heard you're good at… finding things. And he's got coin. Plenty of it, if what he's wearin' is any indication. But be warned," she hisses, leaning closer, the smell of cheap gin wafting from her breath, "he's got eyes like a hawk. And he's lookin' right through you, like you're made of glass." She gestures towards a figure cloaked in shadow in the dim hallway. He's waiting. He knows you're awake. And he knows more about you than you know yourself. Aethelburg has a habit of twisting fate into cruel knots. You are about to be caught in one of the tightest yet. Will you unravel it, or will you become another thread lost to its chaotic tapestry? Your choice. Your consequences. Aethelburg waits. And it rarely waits patiently. Now, go face your destiny, Elias Thorne. Or what remains of it.