Juniper stood at the edge of the woods, the stars and moon bathing her in twilight.

She’d rather be at the dorm listening to her sister gush about the history in her books or friends she made in class or anything else, but there was a pressing matter that would keep burning a hole within her until she’d addressed it.

There were no guards to speak of on campus. And from her amateur experience, it meant that they were so good as to not be spotted or the campus really was overly confident with its location to bother keeping around extra muscle.

Honestly the whole campus came under an overwhelming silence that the belfries would stir to life for the few attendees to bustle to their next destination.

There were five buildings on campus organized on star points (how cute) along with the central plaza that administrative staff and advanced attendees used to teleport in and out of campus.

Of the buildings she had a solid guess of their use were their dorm building, the educational building from which those spires pierced the heavens, and the administrative building that their guide walked towards.

Juniper was unable to walk into the fourth building earlier that day but confirmed its use as an event hall of some kind. Seemed a fancy enough place to hold events considering the domed skylight at the building’s center.

The fifth building was a complete mystery to her. From her idle observations on the campus lawn, she’d seen slimy eyed executive types walk their way over to said building, incapable of keeping their gaze from sullying the women and the environment around them. It’d be like an institution like this to have top bill degenerates.

A chill ran up her spine.

She refocused on the endless woodland clearing in front of her. The darkness so occluded that not even the gentle glow of the night sky above could pierce that veil.

It’d be just like delving into the other side, she told herself. Her stomach was cloying and knotted in anticipation. Juniper could feel the pace of her heart quicken and the hairs on her brown skin stand on ends.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the ripped piece of paper.

Deep breaths.

Juniper reached within herself and wordlessly manifested golden threads into her hand. One thread was tied to her ring finger, the string becoming immaterial as she traveled along its length to her campus dorm room. Turning back to the ripped sheet of paper in her hand, she swirled her index finger over it.

Golden threads unspooled from the pointed digit.

“Locate this paper’s origin.” Juniper whispered to her golden thread. The string coiled at her fingertip before bursting with life through the woods into the unknown. Tugging at the string and finding it was still taut, she returned the ripped sheet to her pocket.

She took a deep breath and marched past the woodlands threshold.

Unlike the cool summer air she was relishing in, the woodlands were stale and damp. She suppressed a cough as she walked in the unnatural stillness. Her steps on the wet earth made no sound, twigs cracking underneath her boots with nary a snap or crunch.

Her eyes adjusted to the low light her golden thread radiated. She could make out the rough outlines of people just out of the corners of her eyes. Like brushstrokes, their bodies muddied into the darkness upon closer inspection and any attempt to angle her path towards her spectating specter was met with an impossible distance between them.

These must be the unfortunate souls who walked into the woods without a means to find their way out.

Or the more sorry sort just strolling down the wrong neck of the woods.

She tried calling out to them. Her voice could not reach their ears or even pierce the oppressive silence around her but something in the world shifted ever so slightly. Motion without sound in the far distance of something large that heard her call.

Juniper refocused her attention to the thread and continued down the quiet trek through the woods.

She did not look back to check what had become of her former spot but knew instinctively by the gust of wind on her back that something was there.

With a blink and a threshold crossed once more, the world around her was once again subsumed by the cacophony of life. Chirping and hooting and howling overwhelming her ears. The pleasant waft of woodland air to filter out the staleness she had once found herself in.

She followed her thread down the beaten path and onto the jagged streets with its inert mechanical beasts and pockmarked pavement. They’d agreed on a time and, looking at her worn watch hidden in her jacket pocket, she was going to make it with time to spare.

Juniper walked on the side of the road down the meandering hillside towards a remnant of civilization, the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. From the vantage point she had, she could even see their infrastructure slowly being revitalized, the heart of the city lit up to repel the creatures of the night and remind humanity of what they once had.

Of what they’d never reclaim again.

Her thread was mercifully closer to the edge of their darkness, pointing in the direction of a crumbling cul-de-sac. She tried to keep a professional mindset with this call but Juniper found the secrecy perturbed her more than she’d realized. Skullduggery was common in her field and the stars certainly warranted her end of the bargain be held but the lack of a face to her employer rubbed her off the wrong way.

It either spoke of weakness on the part of her employer to take ownership of their actions or a request that was going to present more headaches than originally intended.

Regardless, Juniper was in too deep now to fuss about the ethics. She found herself at the front door of a refurbished suburban home, candles lit at the windowsill giving the place its own ominous orange glow. She knocked once before testing the door knob.

Twisting it once found no resistance so Juniper walked inside. The candlelight did little to dismiss the darkness around her employers framed photos and paintings. The interior of the building made her rethink whether this person could even afford her services with the way things were.

And this was with the darkness doing its best to hide the worst of the peeling paint and shattered wooden beams on the staircase.

“Is that you?” An older woman's voice called out from another room. Her voice was strained. “You’re the delver, right?”

Guess that’s her. The remaining stars in her pocket felt uncomfortably warm now, practically begging to be returned.

She crossed past what remained of the living room into the kitchen where the older woman sat, body hunched over the countertop table. The fluid glow of the candle gave the woman’s graying hair a pleasant sheen. The age had caused her skin to sag in places, flesh defining the taut muscles she once had. The woman was once a stout firebrand, Juniper was sure of it. Despite the melancholy that hung on her neck like an albatross, there was a burning passion in her eyes that continued to weather the worst this world had offered her, although the spark was flickering.

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“Do you want some food while we talk?” The older woman asked.

“I ate already,” Juniper lied, “Let’s just get the rest of the details now out in the open so we can part ways.”

The older woman frowned, “Didn’t your parents teach you to behave yourself with old folk?”

“My parents weren’t around long enough to give me that lesson. Not like you’re pushing into your sixties anyway.”

There was a reflexive rebuttal that ran through the woman's mind that died in her throat when the gravity of the statement caught with her.

“I’m sorry. I-I didn’t-”

Juniper rolled her eyes, “It doesn’t matter and you’re burning your time with me. Get to the point. Please.”

She added the last bit with as much good will as she could muster.

The older woman took a deep breath and recomposed herself.

Round two of this terrible introduction.

“My name is Miss Smith.” She started her statement with a bold-faced lie.

Juniper repressed a sigh, refraining from correcting her backwards traditionalist beliefs. It’d just derail the conversation again so she let it slide out of courtesy.

“Miss Smith, you paid me three times my rate in stars to have me enlist into the coven and meet you a few days after settling in that institution. I’m meeting you a day after getting sorted in the facility. You don’t look like the espionage type so I need to know what you want from my involvement in all this or consider our contract fulfilled.”

Another moment of silence as the good Miss Smith turned gears for phrasing and word choice.

“I need your particular set of skills to find my daughter.” The old woman croaked out the tail end of her statement, fanning her eyes in what felt like an overdramatic fashion.

“Is she a graduate of the institution or did she run away? What-”

“She didn’t run away.”

A sentence spoken with a firm finality, so cold it caused a tingle to run up Juniper’s spine.

“Claire wasn’t the kind of girl to run away, least of all from me. We’re all we have left of each other and… and the thought she’d run away just doesn’t make sense.”

It was Juniper’s turn to turn gears.

“Alright, assuming she didn’t run away, what are you suspecting and how am I involved in all of this? Try to give me a timeline of her involvement with the coven.”

“Claire was accepted into the Scarlet Sisters last year under their accelerated program. Back when her father was around, may he rest in peace, he’d done what he could to teach her to manage the power inside her. Rotten luck, the kind of spell that’d latched onto my sweet girl, but we all made the best of a bad situation.”

A story as old as the Schism.

“She does well to practice after her dad passes on but it’s difficult for her to keep the spell in check without their little hunts and we’re both too afraid to have her running in the woods alone. We think about turning to the association first but-”

“Let me guess; spells either too chaotic to reasonably control or too detrimental to their operations to invest resources into her.” Open contempt dribbled out of Juniper’s mouth.

The older woman shared in the vitriol, “They wouldn’t even get us through the application process when they identified the spell in my poor girl! Only options they’d left us with were old crones, charlatans, and the damned coven.” She crossed her arms. “It was here that the coven offered their services.”

Juniper shook her head. Of course they did.

“One of their representatives came to us and offered my sweet Claire a seat in their accelerated programs. They sung high praises ‘bout the curriculum, ‘bout the friends she’d be able to make, and about the opportunity she’d get being accredited from their institution as a private Incant. Lot of good that’d do for a girl that had the right sense to avoid using her ability once she could master it.”

She’d received the sales pitch herself. It didn’t matter as much to her that she’d receive a license to work as a private contractor because she already had one.

So they targeted what they did know.

“So you accept their terms and Claire is off to school. Did she write? Send messages your way? Odd behaviors that made you worry?” Juniper pulled out her work pad and jotted down the details of interest she’d received thus far.

The woman shook her head, “It was some of the happiest I’d seen and heard from her. Whatever they were doing, they were helping her control those… outbursts and although she complained sometimes ‘bout some of the girls in her class, she got along just fine in her studies. Even came home a few times to study and read to me some of the wild jargon they taught over there.”

“And when did she disappear? Do you have a time of day? A date? Any contact with the coven after the fact?”

The woman snorted with indignation, “Wouldn’t have needed to hire you if the fucking coven was being honest with me. No, I don’t have a time of day or a date but that girl went a week without reaching me and that was enough to tip me off that something had happened.”

Juniper raised an eyebrow, “A week? She’d been consistent in sending a message with you at least once a week and that week she’d failed to send something to you? Was there a significance to this week for her?”

The woman huffed, “It's what the coven kept leaning on. They kept explaining to me that they have some final exam or what have you where they dive into the other side and my girl didn’t come back. We signed out forms acknowledging the risk but I don’t believe them for a second.”

The dubiousness of the claim was creeping on Juniper’s face enough for the woman to flare her nostrils and stare Juniper down from the incredulity.

“You don’t get it! They said that she took the exam on a Friday and that doesn’t make sense because that girl would message me on a Wednesday without fail! And she hadn’t then! And the woman to deliver this bad news was an entirely different representative than the one we’d been having contact with up to that point, and reaching her hasn’t been possible either.” She huffed and puffed til her face was red and lined with tears.

Juniper’s face abandoned any semblance of professionalism, opting for a gentle and sympathetic demeanor, “Listen, it’s hard to talk about these things but making the assumption that I don’t believe you or get it isn’t going to help the case. I’d be much the same way if it were any of my loved ones so I get it.”

Her voice quieted down, “I can’t say I wholly believe you because it’d make me a bad delver if I did. What I can say is that we have a couple of lines to go off of here that can help me paint a better picture on the whole situation. You hired me to do my job, not agree with your connection of dots.”

Juniper couldn’t avoid getting serious with her closing statement. The method she’d taken to even take this job put her and her sister at stake and she wasn’t going to burn the place down on a series of hunches from a distraught mother.

“My daughter could be out there. She could be,” Her voice cracked, emotions boiling over, “She could be dead and they don’t even have the decency to give me the truth. To let me know. I know my daughter and she wouldn’t disappear if she wasn’t bound or dead.”

Juniper rubbed the bridge of her nose and let out an exhausted sigh.

“I’ll take your case and try to ask some questions around the campus.”

Despite the tear streaks and puffy eyes, the core of that mothers face was brilliant with hope rekindled.

“I’ll need the name of that representative you got chummy with to follow that lead and I’ve got some other threads I can possibly follow. I’ll also need something of your daughters, preferably something discreet that I can use for my spell. I’m gonna be dark while finding your daughter in the meantime. If something big develops, I’ll try to let you know.”

Juniper hesitated for a moment before reaching into her pockets to pull out her expensive business card.

“Scratch the label off the card and write down a place if you wanna reach me. I’ve only got one so don’t use it unless it’s an emergency.” Juniper lied.

The woman held onto the card tightly as she walked out of the room. Juniper could hear rummaging and wood creaking before she came back with another ripped slip of paper and a stitched pink handkerchief with Claire’s name in cursive.

“This is the name of the guide, or what she’d been willing to offer while handling my daughter's visits. This kerchief is part of a matching set I stitched for my little girl.” The woman balled the objects into Juniper's hands and held them tight. “Thank you for all of this.”

Juniper uncomfortably pulled her hands free from the woman’s, “You paid for these services and I’ve got personal stake in all of this. Just keep yourself healthy in the meantime.” She bit her tongue, trying to avoid making any hopeful comments for the poor woman's sake.

The two slipped away from each other soon after and Juniper was left to follow her golden thread back to the touchstone of her life.

She’d remained dubious of the woman’s claims until the mention of a guide change brought her back to the woman’s side. Her gut was screaming conspiracy and hearsay but Juniper didn’t trust institutions enough to believe they’d be perpetually on the up and up. Moreso a secretive coven with ties to opaque funds and black connections.

Juniper would tie one of her threads to the kerchief in the morning.

She’d need to get in contact with the guide and gather information on this final exam to get a complete timeline of the disappearance.

Preferably before anything untoward was discovered that her sister would get endangered by.

Juniper bit her lip.

Guess that offer to attend classes would be made good on, much to her chagrin