“What hath night to do with sleep?”

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

This part of the city was called the Crooks, there was a joke that went, that you became one if you lived there. The name was the result of the messy arrangement of streets that seemed as if they were planned by men who hated the concept of a straight line. The people who first settled here had found work in the shops and houses of the city proper but could not pay for a place to stay inside the walls. They took matters into their own hands so to say and build homes from flotsam, discarded trash, and the trees that happened to grow where they were building.

And the city officials turned a blind eye, each of them had either a servant or the relative of one forced to seek his lodging there. The small agglomeration of houses spilled along the river like the stain of ale on a tavern floor. And so the Crooks were born. Some said that the quarter was the place everyone else, even the lowest of the low could look down on. And there was some truth to that.

Clouds veiled the moon and the smoke hung thick over the dingy quarter, darkness reigned supreme. A thin man wearing leather gloves and a long oiled coat, shiny bald pate gleaming in the torchlight regarded a powerfully build dwarfen woman. She was wearing chain mail with a full helmet and carried a broad-bladed axe in her hands. They stood inside an alley only fit for foot traffic. Trash lined the walls and oily puddles squished underfoot. Rats scurried in the shadows.

“Garelline of the Axe, I need a better estimate than this. Where is my prey?” The thin man looked down his nose at her. Scars marred his pale features. He looked unhealthy but there was a burning, febrile energy in his gaze and in his jerky movements. He could not seem to keep still.

“Oswald.” A deep melodic contralto voice answered him. “The deepstone he gave me leads to the nearest concentration of nether energies. It is by no means a foolproof method to find someone in this dump.”

She tapped a cord hanging from her hip on which hung a dark crystal, big as a human fist, smaller than hers by a healthy margin.

“So we seek anew.” the one called Oswald nodded. “This way?” He pointed, she nodded. “Then let us be off.” They trudged away through the muddy alley.

Vanessa regarded the two from the shadows. She had felt the attention she had garnered as soon as she entered the city. There had been several small shadelings, beings from another plane that were easily controlled and enticed to serve, they were quite weak and could not kill an aggressive rat, but they were hard to spot and somewhat intelligent, they made good spies.

She had avoided them, not having wanted to give warning to their summoner, but with the passing of time, she wondered if she should have bothered. It seemed someone knew she was here. The deepstone was an unwelcome surprise, they were a condensation of void energies and resonated with other sources such as her unliving body. Graveyard keepers and witch hunters used them frequently. Sometimes they even accumulated in the bodies of greater undead or the users of void magic. She would bet that there were other sources of that in this big city, but if one mapped the known, the unknown could only be something interesting.

She spoke an incantation and the wind picked her up again carrying her to the rooftops. It was a good thing she was so small. The roof seemed less than reliable, there were holes where shingles went missing and some were mushy with rot. Her older sister had always joked that she weighed less than a wet cat. Even if the cats in the elven lands had been a bit bigger than the scrawny strays she had seen so far prowling the alleys.

Screams from the alley to her right drew her gaze and she saw three starved-looking boys kick a drunk dockworker. If he were sober it would have been another story but as it was he succumbed to the beating and was then robbed leaving only his underwear. The cries of a toddler rent the nights until angry bellows from someone in the house drowned out that noise. A woman cried. Smoke hung thick in the air, rank with pollution that oozed from crudely scratched gutters towards the glinting mass of the river.

The heavy beating of wooden wings along with the scream of tortured metal gears rumbled over the quarter as a balloon passed overhead. Thankfully it did not happen often in the hours of darkness.

Far off towards the upper parts of the city glow lamps lit the night, like stars struck from their perch in the sky and just as distant.

Vanessa jumped from roof to roof, crossing streets and blocks in the blink of an eye. The arcane measures she had taken to make herself hard to find seemed to pay off. But who would take such pains? A shadeling hung in the shadow of a chimney, six spindly arms like waving reeds, they had suction cups instead of hands and feet. They were about as large as a medium-sized dog but much less in terms of volume.

She slowly and stealthily neared her prey, then spoke a word to activate the spell she had prepared with the magic of time. A net of glinting fibers covered the small being, which began to violently but futilely struggle.

“Sh. I will take what I need and let you go, if you continue to struggle I will end you.” Vanessa said in an ancient dialect of the elemental speech. The shadelings one eye opened and looked at her. How something so grotesque could have such a beautiful eye never ceased to amaze her. The eye was like a pearl with a bluish light that served as its pupil.

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She stretched out her small hand, the claws safely retracted, and touched the small head. A mewling sound came from the little creature. She felt it shiver.

“Yes, yes I know. You want to go home. I will let you, but first…” She spoke another more complicated spell and an image appeared before her mind's eye. A summoning chamber, nothing else made sense, filled her vision. Dark slabs polished stone fitted with manacles lined the walls, crusted with old blood, the floor was a single great piece of granite, carved with a complicated warding circle. A fat man in a blue cavalry uniform, crusted with gems stared down on her, the shadeling, he had oiled dark hair, fashioned into ringlets which clung to his forehead. His broad face boasted an equally broad and flat nose with fleshy hanging jowls and thick red lips. Canines that spoke of a vampiric nature protruded past his upper lip, giving him a probably unintended grin. Energies wove around his hands as he deftly conjured another shadeling.

His voice echoed strangely in the remembrance of the shadelings non-material sensory organs. “Find the undead, find the vampire that entered this city this night.” The command settled like chains on the small creatures, who nodded their assent. The scene blurred and she lost control of the spell.

‘So that is the way it is. Thankfully he knows neither my name nor my appearance. But I will have to be more careful still.’ She tapped her lips with her fingertips, lost in thought. Then she looked again at the shadeling still caught in its net. “Go little one, go home.” She cast another spell and with a sizzling sound, the being vanished and the net disintegrated into motes of silver, who vanished shortly after.

She concentrated on the beacon and saw its light from far off on the hills beside the river. ‘At least they managed better accommodations than me.’ She thought back to the mansion she had arrived at. ‘But with all the magical distortion in that place, it would be a viable hideout. I don’t think it would be a good idea to keep using the astral plane. And with all the wards against spatial translocations, I can’t simply gate to their location.’ She shook her head and continued.

Several times she had to evade a shadeling, but as she entered the better parts of the city she had to evade patrols and wards that were anchored on the larger shops and houses, protecting them from casual trespass.

At last, she arrived at a smaller mansion on the slopes of a terraced, rocky hill. She jumped on the roof and silently disabled an alarm spell embedded in a gargoyle. Then she navigated the silent corridors before she concentrated and turned to mist, which seeped beneath the crack of the closed door. Inside the room were a lot of books and some interesting paintings. The three girls slept peacefully in the large bed towards the rear of the room.

Cyrus opened one eye and looked at her before giving a rasping noise, probably meant as a greeting. The little wyvern, even if he was growing fast, became more intelligent by the day. ‘It should be mostly the familiar bond. But I don’t think anyone bothered to measure the intelligence of the average wyvern.’

She cleared her throat and as that got no reaction, shook first Mireille then Alyssa and Alea.

Mireille yawned “Mornin...I feel as if I had not slept at all. Can I say I fell ill and have to remain in bed for the day?”

“Vanessa!?” Alyssa saw the small girl with glowing green eyes and hugged her.

Vanessa was always startled at that. She was an undead being, even if the stolen life of the blood she drank gave her the semblance of the living. Did that girl have no self-preservation instincts? Or perhaps the instincts were very well developed, she had no designs to harm her after all. Helplessly she patted her back. “Yes, I had something that could not be delayed any longer, but now that I am here, I will endeavor to take a more active part in your life again. Please tell me what happened after the battle of the Green Dragon.”

Asandria's still form rose from the shadows of the curtains. ‘Welcome back, mylady.’

The telling took some time during which Alea nearly fell asleep again.

“So you plan to take service with the Graufurts? I see no downsides to that. The threat of Ulsolm will grow in the years to come. We will have a lot of common ground. I am loath to risk entering the academy so I would ask that you make some time for my instructions on the weekends or even outside the grounds if you can manage. We will have to make appointments it seems.” She smiled. “But the wards and guardians of the Academy of the Arts are not something which I can safely overcome.”

Seeing them yawning and sleep-deprived Vanessa sighed. “I will then take my leave. We will see each other on Saturday evening. Is that suitable?”

Getting their assent she motioned for Asandria to accompany her. And as soon as she was on the roof again she said, “did you have any problems remaining undetected in the academy?”

‘I don’t think they have found me out yet. But the contract is of divine origin and as such very difficult to measure, and there are often ghosts attached to people, be it family members or those bearing a grudge. As long as they seem harmless most would let them be.’

“If you think that there is a problem don’t hesitate to tell me. I could fashion something to further conceal your presence. But with the materials that requires and the workspace, I would not do so unnecessarily.”

”Thank you for the offer.’

“Then I bid you a good night. Novaer1!”

And then she was off.

Asandria drifted back down through the roof to find the girls talking drowsily and soon they fell asleep.

The two moons shone on the city, the reddish one Ioreth and the white light of the lost eye when Vanessa arrived at ‘her’ mansion. ‘At least it has some style.’ She thought and entered the partly collapsed cellars. She cast some spells before she laid down to rest. Glyphs shone as a snake formed from the dirty water slithered into the nooks and crannies over the empty doorway, just waiting to strangle anyone entering. A ring of runes activated, diverting attention magical and otherwise.

And as dawn began to lighten the skies, she fell into the unnatural, deathlike slumber typical for the children of the night.