THE ASHFALL BREACH

The Breach nearly killed Varris Kane, but what it left inside him may have been far more dangerous.

Mechanica had built an empire on the belief that nothing was unknowable. The Golden Engine had transformed Caldra's naturally occurring Luminance into a source of limitless industrial power, and the engineers of Ironhold had spent generations turning magic into machinery. Every mystery was simply an engineering problem that had not yet been solved. The Ashfall reactor was no exception. 

When an anomaly appeared above the facility, the Ashfall guild began studying it as they would any other phenomenon. Their experiments quickly produced results that should have been impossible. Production lines began manufacturing machines no engineer had designed, power regulators registered surges far beyond their limits, and failures spread through the Wellspring network into Ironhold's entire grid. For the first time, Mechanica encountered something that did not seem to obey the rules it had spent centuries establishing.

Varris Kane was conducting research on uncharged Luminant drones when the Breach opened. The resulting rupture nearly tore him apart, leaving him mortally wounded inside the failing reactor complex. With no other means of survival, Varris tore the half-charged core from the Luminant he had been studying and forced it into his chest. The Luminance kept him alive, but his body could not contain it. Over the months that followed, flesh was replaced with metal alloy and the systems necessary to sustain him became increasingly mechanical. Varris had survived, but he was now sustained by the same force that gave life to the Luminant automata.

He had become more machine than man.

But the changes did not end with his physical form. Varris began perceiving things no Caldran instrument could detect: unseen currents moving through the air, patterns hidden surfaces, and fleeting visions of futures that might never occur. He eventually came to understand that the Breach had also somehow altered his conciousness in a way he could not accurately describe. Eventually, it would come to light that he was Imprinted by the Nexus.

The Ashfall disaster shattered Mechanica's certainty, but it also created an irresistible new possibility. Researchers now believe the Breach may provide access to a source of power beyond even Luminance. For Varris, however, the experience revealed something more troubling: if the Nexus could reach into their world, then perhaps the greatest danger was not what the engineers of Mechanica might discover beyond the Breach, but what might discover them first.