illphated
The Arcana Protocol
For illphated.com
They called it The Circuit of Miracles, a serpentine tower spiraling above the clouds of Neo Alexandria—a techno-metropolis stitched together from the ruins of fallen ideologies and forgotten broadband cables.
At the center stood Archmagus Kael V, draped in nano-silk robes laced with silicon runes, eyes glowing with the soft pulse of quantum computation. To the citizens below—many of whom still bartered in crypto-scrip and barely understood their own biometric leases—Kael was a god. Or worse, a wizard.
Because when your touchscreen barely works and the sky speaks only in encrypted frequencies, a man who can bend satellites to his will must be casting spells.
They whispered in back alleys and faulty chatrooms:
“He cured a pandemic by rewriting code in the rain.”
“He talks to machines the way saints once spoke to angels.”
“He doesn’t log in… the firewalls part for him.”
And yet, he was no mystic. Just a man burdened with understanding in an age that worshipped interface but feared source code. To him, their awe was quaint. Endearing even. For he knew what Arthur C. Clarke had written long before The Collapse:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
So Kael etched his glyphs not in stone, but in cascading light on titanium glass. He summoned not demons, but data. And he didn’t ride dragons—he piloted light-speed drones through dimensional rifts in the quantum foam.
Still, to the less knowledgeable, he was a sorcerer. A conjurer of digital phantoms. A modern Merlin in a city fueled by memory and myth.
And as the arcology pulsed with neon incantations, and an artificial aurora danced across the smog-choked sky, Kael V only smiled.
“Magic,” he whispered to the servers below, “is just a user interface for truth.”
illphated.com
—Because even technomancers need good lighting.