Chapter 1: The Tracks Beneath the Capital
"Every empire is built on forgotten backs. And sometimes, those backs remember."
The rain in Mandaraka never simply falls. It whispers. It grieves. It tells stories the skyscrapers pretend not to hear. Beneath the roaring towers and ceremonial halls of the capital, buried under glass mega structures and hollow speeches, lay the iron bones of a forgotten nation.
Faras Dewangga walked past the rusting steel of an abandoned rail yard in Sakala, once the beating heart of the archipelago's rail revolution, now a monument to broken promises. Her father's hands had once forged these very tracks, each bolt tightened with pride, each steel rail laid with the faith that it would carry the country forward.
But forward, it had not gone.
Not for men like her father.
Not for people who built nations but never got to live in the house.
When foreign boots arrived bearing shiny contracts and "strategic cooperation," local workers were dismissed with nothing but a handshake and a shadow. Her father, once a master engineer became a gardener in his own village, pruning what he once dreamed would be the garden of a new republic.
Farnas kept that memory like a dagger sheathed in her soul. She did not seek power for revenge, no, she aimed higher. To become a diplomat, not the kind who clinks glasses in palaces, but the kind who walks into fire for her people. The kind who could stitch what had been tom, who could speak to dragons without bowing.
But dragons were not mythical in Mandaraka.
They had names. Faces. Influence.
And their shadows stretched longer than the city's light,
Sull, the storm does not ask the tree if it is ready.
And she, born of steel and silence, had already begun to move.
In a quiet corner of the city, beneath the archives of the old Transport Ministry, she discovered a blueprint. Not just of the railways but of the system that buried them. She traced names, connections, donations, backroom meetings until nine sigils began to emerge like blood from paper. Nine entities. Nine powers. The Nine Dragons.
One controlled the nation's energy grid. Another owned the ports. One whispered through the television screens, while another pulled strings in the parliament's religious councils. Their empires were not built on thrones but on loopholes, leverage, and lies.
And in the margins of one document, a name recurred.
Gunawan Abimanyu.
The name clung to every network like mold on damp stone. He wasn't just one of the Nine, he was the center. A puppeteer with velvet gloves, hiding claws sharp enough to carve the constitution.
Faras felt the weight of this truth settle into her ribs like a stone.
But where most would falter, she steadied her breath. Because she knew:
"If you want to slay a dragon, don't just find its lair, learn its language."
And the first word in that language... was diplomacy.
