South Hakarth Academy as not, as a general rule, a place concerned with nighttime security. The sorts of wealth contained within its stoic brick walls were generally not of the kind that drew those with an eye for riches, nor were they of the particular kinds useful to the very poor. Still, the campus was intimidating when lit only by the light of the moons. Unaffected by season or temperature, it reared up from the earth to reveal an intimidating edifice described utterly by shadow; the Lightbringers brought no light to the academy, since it was empty in the evening hours. Where by day stood the colored arches designating the various classes of the academy, by night there stood gaping chasms where the universe appeared to coalesce, eager to swallow up trespassers.

“Are you sure about this?” Garret asked for the dozenth time, as he, Merigold, and Alecia approached the building where the erowist were kept in their carefully aligned iron pots.

“I couldn’t be any more sure,” Merigold informed him. The certainty in her voice did not seem to do anything for his concerns; his eyes darted all around them as they passed the grasping acacia where they had once met for class together. Its thorny boughs were more intimidating in the night than they ever had been by day.

“There will be rune traps,” Alecia said pragmatically. “I’ll need to take the lead.” No one argued with her as she moved to the head of their group.

“How will you find your erowist without any light?” Garret asked seriously.

Merigold held up a hand-wound flashlight; it would provide plenty of light for reading the labels of the iron pots, though the crank was anything but stealthy.

“I don’t think Aron will have anticipated me coming to take the erowist, so it should go unnoticed for a while,” Merigold said. “I plan to replace it with another one just in case.”

Their voices lowered to whispers as they passed under one of the dark arches. Shadows closed up around them, and they shifted as one to the brick walls of the Academy to navigate with their hands. It was not long before they had made their way inside, and their movements slowed. Alecia stopped them frequently, though she only found two runes on the hard floors underfoot. They left them intact, circumventing them where possible.

By the time they reached the labs, it felt like they had been wading through darkness for hours, but had in fact been no more than thirty minutes – they knew because the great bell at the heart of the campus rang out the hour. It reverberated deep in their bones, and Merigold was reasonably sure not one of them managed to avoid jumping at the sound of the bell.

“This won’t take long,” Merigold promised as she hurried into the lab, flicking out the flashlight. She cranked it expertly, and kept it turned off for as long as possible while she navigated the shelves by memory. She had seen Aron place the pot containing Ughvac on one of the lower shelves, and expected it to still be there. Fifteen more minutes passed before she was forced to admit that she either remembered wrong, or the pot had since been moved.

Merigold’s flashlight cleaved the darkness as she raked it over the counters and clay circles in the room, growing desperate.

“What’s taking so long, Merigold?” Alecia hissed from the doorway.

“It’s not here,” Merigold hissed back. She then hissed louder as her toe rammed into something heavy, and the flashlight clattered to the floor.

Spouting hushed curses, Merigold knelt down to hold her booted foot between her hands, and grope through the soupy blackness for the handle of the flashlight. When she found it, she pulled it closer to see what she had tripped over.

A pot.

Merigold’s eyes widened as she grabbed the edge of the cast iron and tipped it, looking for a label; there were three, covered in all sorts of runes. One of them was the one she had been dreading.

Ughvac.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The lid of the pot lay nearby, but there was no sign of the erowist, nor of the core that should have been contained within the pot. There was no way the erowist could have escaped the contract she had forced to agree with, which meant…someone had taken it. Someone other than her.

“Merigold, we can’t stay here all night,” Alecia had come over to whisper urgently behind her. “Especially in the lab. The technicians come early, long before classes start.”

“It’s gone,” Merigold nearly forgot to whisper.

“How can it be gone?” Alecia knelt beside her, looking at the pot. “Gods. Do you think it escaped, Merigold? A class-four erowist, or whatever Aron called it?”

“No, someone must have taken it…” Merigold swept around the floor of the lab, looking for any clues as to what had happened. She was too surprised to hold on when Alecia suddenly snatched the flashlight from her and hurried a few paces away to crouch and peer hard at the floor. After a moment, she picked something up, twirling it in the flashlight beam. It looked like a fragment of burned paper.

“I think you’re right, Merigold. Someone did take that erowist,” she whispered after a moment. “And it looks like they tried to bind it with a contract first.”

“That’s impossible. Whoever it was would have had to know the terms of my contract to work around all of the existing –“

“Later, Merigold,” Alecia interrupted her sharply, flicking off the flashlight and dragging Merigold to her feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You don’t understand,” Merigold protested, foregoing whispering as Alecia dragged her out towards the hallway, where Garret waited impatiently for them to return. Whatever expression he hearing her, she could not see it. Neither Garret nor Alecia lost any time in hurrying back down the dark halls they had traversed to reach the lab. Merigold, meanwhile, continued incredulously. “The only ones who could have formed a contract with the erowist would be the necromancers, like myself, and among them, only Jayce would have had any reasonable knowledge of the contract the erowist signed. It would have been impossible for it to sign another contract with a single term out of place without being destroyed—”

“Maybe it was destroyed,” Alecia threw over her shoulder as they slid out from the shadows beneath the arches of the Academy building.

Overhead, the two moons threw the world into sharp relief. A faint silver glow had spread over everything, from the bricks of the academy to the hard earth. In the distance, the glass windows of Hakarth’s many buildings glittered like eyes in the moonlight.

“There would have been remains of some kind. There was no sign of the core,” Merigold argued. “I’m telling you, this is…” She trailed off, stopping suddenly. Abruptly, she had gone very pale.

“Meri, this really isn’t the time,” Garret said as he turned to help Alecia hurry her along.

“Another erowist,” Merigold sputtered. “There’s another one here. Aron said the class-four erowists are more intelligent. They might try to rescue…to rescue one of their own.”

No sooner had she spoken than an earth-shattering boom sounded from the farthest south end of Hakarth. All three of them swayed, and Garret and Merigold collapsed to the hard earth. Alecia had whirled to stare in the direction of the explosion, mute. More booming echoed through the night, now joined by bright flashes of light that lit up the clouds from below.

Merigold forced herself to her feet, running to stand beside Alecia and stare into the distance. There was a great fog of steam rising from the city. It was joined by monstrous golden flames that licked the night like the blinding waves of the ocean in a thunder storm.

“The steamworks,” Alecia said softly. Merigold shook her head, hardly believing her eyes. The steamworks underpinned all of Hakarth. Anything that they did not rely on magic for they relied on steam to accomplish.

“Not just the steamworks,” Garret said, brushing himself off as he came to stand behind them, “That’s the direction of the train depot.”

Eyes bright with the distant flames, Merigold abruptly took off in the direction of the train tracks, and ultimately, the site of the explosion. If Garret was right, it would take her thirty minutes to run to the train depot – a manageable if uncomfortable distance.

She was stopped by a pressure on her arm as Garret grabbed her, trying to stop her. “Wait, Meri! Where are you going?” he asked.

“The depot,” she turned to shout. “I can stop Ughvac. I have to. If they kill it, I’ll die as well.”

She could see beneath the moonlight that he had paled as well.

“We can’t stop the erowist,” he tried to reason with her.

“I can stop one of them,” she persisted. “There’s a clause in the contract, a way to force it into dormancy. The other one…I’ll just have to avoid it.”

“Don’t be a fool, Merigold. You can’t do this alone!” Alecia growled. “Take us with you. I’m going to see if I can contact Ilf.”

“Ilf will—” surely kill the erowist, Merigold had intended to say, but Alecia already had paper and ink in hand, and was rapidly scribbling runes by the dozen.

“Ilf will help us,” Alecia muttered. “She’ll be able to spread word about what’s happening. We need her, and Eros. Now, buck up, Merigold. There. Done. See – you need me, too. Now, let’s run. You’re the slowest one of us, anyway.”

Merigold had no time – or breath – to argue. Alecia charged ahead, and she followed, eyeing the steam and fire that filled the horizon, covering up the mountains.