Quinn felt cold. "Seth," he said, suddenly jolting awake in the painful light of a burning torch. "Seth, it's too cold here. Something's wrong."

"He's alive," a familiar voice said.

Quinn blinked against the flickering orange glow. The damp stone of his prison cell was jet-black, hewn from the bedrock using primitive tools. Reluctantly, he allowed himself to remember. He had not slept outside, nor was he still traveling with Seth through the mountains in a boxcar. Seth was, in fact, quite dead. At present, Quinn found himself locked up somewhere deep within King Edwin's palace.

Heritor Maxius the Younger stood beyond the rusty bars, his relieved face shrouded by the hood of his shaggy brown robe. A bald man stood nearby, dressed up in the black-red uniform common to the Aden family soldiers. In spite of his garb, the man was clearly from eastern Renna, maybe even Lawgiver City. His face, which was marred by ancient scars, looked determined as the man blindly tested each key on the goaler's ring.

"Quinn?" Maxius asked. "Can you understand me? Can you speak?"

"I hear you," Quinn rasped. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm going to bring you to the king. He is going to pardon you in secret."

"Pardon me? Wait. How the hell did you get past the oculomancers?"

"The same way I always get past the oculomancers," Maxius replied. "That's not important. You need to skip town. Right now. Your reputation is in ruins."

He reached through the bars and offered a rolled-up broadsheet. Struggling to focus in the dim light, Quinn began to read:

University Student Perpetrates Life Insurance Fraud: Tragedy strikes this morning at the University of White Chasm. A devious plot to murder a student and collect the insurance payment was recently reported to the Hightown Constabulary. What is worse, the perpetrator conspired to murder his own brother. The oculomancers of Spire Lyn have verified that the life insurance policy purchase was in fact valid and signed with the perpetrator's signature. The perpetrator has been arrested and is currently being held in the king's dungeon.

Sources say that the victim was witnessed operating a flying machine. The design of the flying machine was very similar to the design which crashed into White Chasm Harbor earlier this month. Unlike most flying machines, the one in question was not a balloon. While this may seem ridiculous and outrageous, it was this very flying machine that fell out of the sky and killed the victim. We received the following report from the Hightown Constabulary:

"We are seeing an uptick in fraudulent insurance claims in other cities. The scam works like this: some charlatan lures the victims in with promises of being the first person to fly in a flying machine, while also purchasing a life insurance policy on behalf of that person, generally claiming to be a sibling or spouse. Then, the machine falls out of the sky and kills the victim. If anyone out there in the public is listening, we implore you to please report any instances of charlatans who claim to have invented a flying machine. It may save your life."

Our Senior Correspondents have found the world's leading experts on flying machines. Here is what they have to say:

"Flying machines are relatively safe and well-understood, so long as they are balloons. There is no safe way to fly through the air without a balloon. The weather patterns are too unpredictable to fly very far, and balloons are required by Spire Law to be tethered to the ground. The fact that the victim's body was found broken apart on the ground is proof that the human body is not robust enough to withstand the forces that will be subjected to it without the slow, predictable motions of a balloon."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

There is a graveyard at the University of White Chasm for students that die while trying to invent the flying machine. The victim's body is going to be buried there. Professor Atlas vin Truscae, the ethermancy professor at said university, had this to say:

"We inspected the classroom that the perpetrator was using as a club headquarters. We read through their notes and designs. They were complete nonsense. None of the calculations were correct, none of the facts and figures were correct, and the design contained blatant flaws and direct contradictions. We concluded that the perpetrator had never actually done any real design work on the flying machine, but only created an elaborate illusion that design work was taking place. This is strong evidence, in my mind, that fraud may have been involved."

We know this tragedy may be very disturbing to some readers, but we have published it without a content warning because the message is too important: Don't be a victim yourself!

Quinn set the broadsheet down on the floor of his prison cell after he finished reading. "Professor Atlas was working with the oculomancers the entire time," he said.

"What really happened?" Maxius asked.

"I'm not sure," Quinn admitted. "According to the thermometer, it was too warm for ice to form on the wings. But I saw it with my own eyes. The entire craft was crusted over with ice before it broke apart in midair."

With a sudden metallic thud, the door to the prison cell began to creak open. Quinn scrambled to his feet, pushing through the aches in his joints which came from sleeping on the bedrock floor.

"Did you calibrate the thermometer?" Maxius asked. "At least test the thing on something that's already frozen?"

"Why would I?" Quinn asked. "Why would a university laboratory have thermometers that don't work? They were brand new as well. I saw them in the box in the dean's office."

"Then Yana Justicia Sophia must be working for the oculomancers," Maxius concluded. "Either way, you won't be here long enough for it to matter. Follow me."

"I've had a lot of time to think about it," Quinn said as they walked through the damp, narrow stone passages of the palace dungeon. "There is only one school in the world that teaches ethermancy to commoners, and it's located here in White Chasm. And the weather here is absolutely horrible most of the time. It's cold and foggy and the terrain is jagged and the White Chasm itself is a deathtrap. I was wondering, is it possible that White Chasm was chosen specifically because the conditions are bad for flying?"

"Who knows what the witches are thinking?" Maxius asked with a shrug.

"Do they already have flying machines?"

"Nobody in my family has ever seen one. As stewards of the ancient land of Renna, we don't exactly have a great deal of status among the Heritors. As long as we keep our auras roughly in the correct geographic area, the witches leave us alone."

"I did not realize there was a petty hierarchy among Heritors," Quinn said.

"It happens in every institution. The Varelion clan is by far the most trusted of the Heritor families. They are descended from Dame Varelion, who was instrumental in establishing the Elder Saint's power after the war. Nydia the Midwife devotes the bulk of her attention to managing their bloodline. By contrast, Renna's lands are a backwater. Out of all the witches, Renna was the only one that the Elder Saint murdered. I don't think it matters who we are or what we do. Anyone who is associated with Renna, even incidentally, will be at the very bottom of the pile."

They came to a small spiral stairway leading up out of the dungeon into a small, comfortably-furnished antechamber. A man in dark robes sat in one of the armchairs, his face half-shrouded by a solid black hood.

"Thanks for agreeing to meet us here," Maxius said. "Do you have the pardon?"

"It's here," the man said. One hand flicked out of his robes to offer Quinn an envelope sealed with the Aden family crest.

"What about the guards in the caverns?"

"I have devised a pretense that should occupy them until you have passed. The way is clear."

"Thank you, Heritor Edwin, I'm sorry that we did not have time to perform your conversion in public. A highborn daughter will be sent to you, as promised. It may take some time, because the situation with the empire has deteriorated quickly."

"I understand," Edwin said. "And I'm sorry that we did not have the time to announce the restoration of House Renna. Citizen Quinn, what happened to your brother was a tragedy. I'm sorry about that as well."

"Quinn, there are caverns through the mountains to the south," Maxius said. "We will escape the city through those caverns and then we'll catch a steamboat in Zairo."

"I've been inside those caverns before," Quinn said.

"We must be on our way then."

"Go in peace," the king said. "And pray to the Lawgiver that my ancestor Fiona doesn't find out about this."