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Chapter 89 – Fault Lines

Author: JDHWS
last update Last Updated: 2025-10-27 05:15:08

The city woke slower these days. It wasn’t the kind of stillness that came with peace, but the uneasy quiet of something trying to decide what it wanted to be.

Elara could feel it even before she stepped outside. The air carried a weight that wasn’t storm or fear anymore — something in between. A shift. A pause before the next turn. She had seen this kind of silence before on smaller scales: in bruised people just before they either healed or broke again. Now, the entire city felt like that.

She left the estate early that morning. Lena accompanied her down the main road, their boots splashing softly through puddles left from the night rain. Garden Metro still looked the same — crooked street lamps, market stalls, carriages rattling down the cobblestones — but something in the way people moved had changed.

Vendors who used to turn their backs now followed her with cautious eyes. A group of students she passed whispered among themselves, but not in the sharp, mocking way they once had.
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  • Wounded Rose of Garden Metro   Chapter 117 – The Day Before the Choice

    The city did not sleep.Garden Metro had known nights of violence, nights of curfews and sirens and whispered prayers behind locked doors. This was different. This was a city awake with itself—arguing, calculating, remembering.Lena watched it from the council hall balcony long after midnight.Below her, lanterns burned late in taverns and communal halls. Circles of people gathered on street corners, voices rising and falling as if the city were breathing through a thousand mouths. Some spoke in anger. Some in fear. Some in careful, quiet hope.Tomorrow, they would vote.And tonight, Garden Metro was deciding what kind of city it believed it was.Inside the council hall, the Stability Bloc worked just as hard.Reiss stood at the head of a private chamber borrowed from a merchant guild—wide oak table, polished cups, guards at the door. Around him sat the Bloc’s inner circle: councilors, supply-chain overseers, transport guild leaders, and a handful of figures who didn’t officially exis

  • Wounded Rose of Garden Metro   Happy Holidays

    Hi Everyone.I hope you are enjoying the second volume of the Who's The Loser Series.I will be taking the rest of the year off to celebrate the holiday season.Rest assured, I will be back at the new year to continue writing this book, among others.There will be more twists and turns along the way.And as always, your support, comments and feedback are always appreciated. Please leave a comment to let me know how I am doing with the story and how I can improve in the future.So until then, I wish you one and all a very blessed Christmas and a Happy New Year.Love,JDHWS

  • Wounded Rose of Garden Metro   Chapter 116 – The Truth No One Wanted

    Morning did not bring calm. It brought reckoning.The plaza outside the council hall filled before sunrise, not because of announcements or posters, but because something deeper had shifted. Word of the northern refugees had spread through the night—how the gates had opened, how children had been carried inside instead of left to freeze, how Reiss had walked away with a smile sharp enough to cut.By the time Lena arrived, the square was already packed. Workers with soot-stained hands stood shoulder to shoulder with merchants in pressed coats. Mothers held children close. Guards lined the edges, not to intimidate, but to keep the mass from folding in on itself.No banners today. No slogans.Just waiting.Lena paused at the edge of the steps, taking in the crowd. This was not the angry noise of yesterday. This was something heavier—anticipation mixed with fear, the kind that came when people sensed a truth was coming whether they wanted it or not.Vincent stood beside her. Damien ling

  • Wounded Rose of Garden Metro   Chapter 115 – The Gate That Wouldn’t Open

    The northern gate loomed like a wounded giant when Lena arrived—massive stone pillars casting long shadows across a scene on the verge of tearing itself apart.Shouts collided in the cold morning air. Torches blazed where there should have been lanterns. The smell of sweat and fear clung to everything.Hundreds—no, nearly a thousand—people crowded the road outside the gate. Families with carts stacked with blankets. Children clinging to parents’ sleeves. Elderly men leaning on cracked canes. Their faces were gaunt, hollowed by hunger and loss. They had marched for days, maybe weeks.Banners made of tattered cloth fluttered weakly above the crowd. Not political banners—signs of desperation.“HELP US.” “WE LOST OUR HOME.” “NO WATER, NO FOOD.”At the front of the line, Civic Guard officers formed a barricade—not with weapons drawn, but with shields locked together in a line meant to contain panic.Lena pushed her way through the growing tension, Vincent and Damien at her side.“Report,

  • Wounded Rose of Garden Metro   Chapter 114 – Sparks Under the Floorboards

    The storm did not arrive all at once. It crept slowly—quiet like mold, patient like rust—slipping into the cracks of Garden Metro while the city pretended to debate futures it didn’t fully understand.A week. They had one week before the vote that would decide whether Lena Quinn remained Speaker.A week was an eternity for anger. A week was a heartbeat for disaster.By dawn of the second day, the city’s fractures became visible.The market square, which usually smelled of bread and smoke, now smelled of ink and damp paper. Merchants pasted Stability Bloc posters on their stalls between customers. Children tugged them down and tore them into confetti only for new ones to appear an hour later.At the tram junction, two men nearly came to blows—one shouting that Lena had saved them from invisible chains, the other insisting she’d doomed them all by destroying “the only damn thing that knew what was coming.”Meanwhile, at the river docks, fishermen argued over the rumors spreading like

  • Wounded Rose of Garden Metro   Chapter 113 – The Line in the Water

    The first posters went up overnight.They appeared on brick walls and lamp posts, pasted in corners where rain couldn’t reach, layered over old slogans from the war years. Lena saw one on her way to the council hall the next morning, the glue still damp, the ink sharp and dark.A stylized tower. A circle around it. Beneath, three words in bold, block letters:BRING BACK ORDERDamien ripped it down before she could touch it. “They’re everywhere,” he muttered, crumpling it in his fist. “Markets, tram stops, dock warehouses. Reiss has been busy.”“Or someone working for him,” Lena said, but the distinction felt thin. The message was the same.As they walked, she saw more. Variants. Some with slogans beneath the main line.NO MORE GAMBLING WITH OUR FUTURE WE CAN’T EAT PRINCIPLES QUINN BROKE THE MACHINE – WHO FIXES IT?A few had her face roughly sketched beneath the text. In some, the eyes were scratched out.Vincent met them at the council entrance, a folded leaflet in his hand.“New

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