Destiny? There’s no such thing as destiny. Not even the gods believe in fate. Only the ignorant do. When we send a man to the gallows, is it his destiny to die? Or is it merely a consequence of his actions and ours? Information, my friend. That is the only power that truly matters. Information, the knowledge to apply it judiciously, and the ability to question your own ignorance. The previous emperor, good ol’ Neftertum, believed Destiny appointed him the greatest ruler since Kayden the Bright. He knew he was invincible. That’s why, of course, he did a terrible job and died a pathetic death. Never forget, there’s always someone who knows something you don’t.

—Jasper Nezir, Imperial Prince of the Radiant Empire, 2492 AK

-

Rest 29, 2497 AK, Radiant Empire, Cleft Isles, Greyport.

The stench in the alleyway remained exactly as Kaydence remembered it: a foul blend of blood, terror, and human waste. She could almost hear echoes of screams and silenced pleas for mercy, feel the pressure of phantom hands on her throat, the tension in her limbs trying to break free from a stronger assailant.

Mana was ubiquitous in this world. It bridged the material and the immaterial and reacted to powerful emotions. As such, impactful events always left their mark in the ambient aether, discernable to those who knew to seek them. It was not exclusive to mages either. Even mundane folk often felt discomfort in places where the unspeakable had happened.

This was magic in its most ancient form, one that existed since the Old World, before people mastered mana, created spells and called themselves mages, back when the inhabitants of the world would gather and wish together for their desires to come true, hoping the world would listen. Some saw in it the origin of prayer. Some even said there lay the genesis of the gods, birthed from people’s expectations and sustained by their collective beliefs.

Right now, Kaydence wished she could avoid this blood-soaked alleyway and the memories it evoked. Sadly, the world seemed deaf to her pleas.

Not that she had anyone to blame but her own stubbornness. She cared not what evils the people of Greyport visited upon each other—so long as they stayed away from her and hers. However, ignoring these matters entirely would be irresponsible. Any suspicious death could turn out to be the work of a criminal mage, and letting heretics go unchecked was begging for the Imperial Inquisition to intervene.

Kaydence wanted to prevent that at all costs. As confident as she was in her stealth, she was loath to play hide-and-seek with mages trained in hunting their own kind. Any Inquisitor worth their salt would take one look at her and at least investigate, and who knew what tools they had at their disposal or what they might find? Getting caught would spell disaster. Laws had certainly changed in two millennia, but back in Seifer’s days, the norm had been to erase the entire family of any proven necromancer. She doubted the modern imperial authorities were any more clement. After all, magic was too dangerous to take its practitioners lightly.

Ironically, this worked in her favour as well. Because no one wanted murder-happy wizards around, the City Guard actually did a semi-decent job tracking them down. Anonymous tips usually sufficed for the duke’s men to move swiftly, and Kaydence only had to intervene personally a couple of times.

She found the girl’s body behind a pile of rotting crates.

The blood pool around the corpse had long since frozen in the winter night cold. Yet, the smell lingered, and so did the stench of all the other fluids. Death was a messy business, especially a violent one. The human body was a horrific work of art, operating on a delicate balance, and when that balance broke, things fell apart fast.

Kaydence never understood the appeal of watching public executions. Was it boredom, sadism, or a desire to reaffirm their own righteousness that drove a person to watch another dangle at the end of a rope until their bowels voided? She had seen and caused too much death to understand the mind of a regular civilian. Morbid curiosity, maybe? Humans did have a formidable ability to detach their emotions from anything that did not affect them directly.

Her awareness spread throughout the alley, performing a more thorough inspection than the superficial one before. However, she found no trace of residual mana, whether from a spell or a magical presence—only painful echoes that she forcefully shut out. This crossed out some of her worst-case scenarios. There were many ways to hide one’s mana, but few were foolproof against an attentive opponent or a dedicated investigator. Then again… Kaydence wondered, pulling back her own aura and doing her best to cover her metaphysical tracks. My expertise isn’t exactly up to date. Greyport’s defensive wards alone told her humanity’s magic had kept progressing while she was busy being dead.

Careful to avoid leaving any footprint, she crouched beside the corpse. Scarce rivulets of moonlight trickled through the clouds, and fewer still reached inside the narrow alley, but they sufficed for her to inspect the dead girl. “…she’s just a kid,” Kaydence muttered, quashing an unwelcome swell of anger. The girl was young, not yet in her twenties. Her cheeks were bruised, her teeth chipped, her nose broken. Her slack expression reflected the abject fear, pain and confusion she had felt in her last moments. Lifeless blue eyes stared up at the thin band of sky above the alley, as if seeking an escape. She might have prayed for help at the end, only to receive none.

Her face jogged Kaydence’s memory, but recognition did not click until she noticed traces of badly wiped rust-coloured makeup on the girl’s forehead. Her mind flashed back to a young prostitute, wearing too much face paint and too little clothing, shivering as she dragged a man into a brothel by the Split. Kaydence could not recall what the man looked like. It had been less than three hours ago, and she had been well alive back then.

So much could happen in such a short span of time.

A struggling light so easy to snuff out. The cause of death was obvious. A chunk of flesh was missing from the girl’s throat, as if bitten off by a wild animal. The blood from the wound had soaked her ripped collar, turning the white dress brownish red. However, the shape of the bite was wrong for a beast, and while the girl’s clothes had been torn, her body lacked any claw marks. A person did this… At least a monster in the guise of one.

Kaydence knew those better than anyone else.

“Who did this to you?” She reached out to close the girl’s eyes but stopped herself at the last moment. “Maybe I should just ask.” Even with their soul gone, corpses often had a lot to say. People remembered things with more than just their minds, and recent murder victims were always among the chattiest.

However, before Kaydence could decide whether this was even worth dusting her old necromancy skills, noises from the alley’s entrance caught her attention: footsteps and the clinking of chainmail.

“Who’s there?!” called out an unpleasantly familiar voice. A group of guards bearing torches walked into the dark alley. Leading them was Flynt’s weasely mug, followed by a greying older man in a fancier uniform holding a staff. The taciturn Carl brought up the rear along with three others. “Show yourself!” Raising his torch, Flynt squinted suspiciously down the alley.

The firelight revealed nothing but the pile of rotting crates and the dead body.

“I’d swear I saw…” Flynt’s voice trailed off. Still scrutinising the obscurity, he gestured at the rear group, who split into two pairs to cover both ends of the street. “Something’s not right.”

“You mean, besides the obvious?” the older guard commented sarcastically, eyeing the corpse. “Allow me.” Ignoring Flynt’s mean glare, he raised his staff and started chanting an incantation. Lights gathered at the tip of his staff in a circle of odd geometric shapes.

Looking down from a rooftop, hidden in a chimney’s shade, Kaydence recognised the first glyphs of a detection spell and decided she had snooped enough. With a discreet magic cast of her own, darkness swelled around her, and she faded away into the shadows.

* * *

The faint scratching of a quill on paper was the loudest noise inside the cramped, dimly lit office. No window allowed the stuffy air in or out. Rows upon rows of tightly packed shelves lined the walls, heaving and creaking under the weight of countless unlabelled notebooks. Hunched over a small desk, a corpulent man was penning oddly mundane anecdotes, records of Greyport’s weather and its impact on the migration patterns of the imperial trout over the fishing season. To anyone else, it would read like pure nonsense.

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Edon leaned back with a groan, set the notebook aside to dry, and put down his quill. He checked the mana charge of the magic lamp sitting on his desk. Finding it low, he pushed some power into the engraved crystal. He was no mage, but even he could do this much.

A mage. Me. Now that’s a laugh. A chuckle escaped Edon as he pictured his lardy ass throwing lightning bolts across some faraway battlefield. Those silly childhood dreams of his had been thoroughly doused on his Appraisal Day. As a wee twelve-year-old, he had been devastated to hear of his lacking magical affinities. As a grown adult, however, he had since come to terms with his place in the world and had carved a comfortable niche for himself.

The bluish light brightened, and a smile lifted Edon’s round cheeks. Lacking the ability to conjure up firestorms did not stop him from enjoying using these simple luxuries. The small artefact had been expensive, and it barely lit more than a much cheaper candle, but this was a price he was willing to pay to keep fire hazards out of his study.

He picked up an open scroll lying to his right, looked over the content one last time, and rolled it up. “Talin!” he shouted.

Soon, the door creaked loudly open, admitting a stick-thin youth with messy wheat-blond hair and a pockmarked face. “Yes, Master Edon?”

“Seal this and bring it to the captain of the Flying Crab. Pontoon six.”

Talin raised an eyebrow. “The Flying Crab?”

“We’re not paid to give lip to our clients’ naming sense, boy,” Edon warned playfully.

“Yes, Master Edon. My bad. I’ll be going then.” The lad picked up the scroll and was off, the door whining shut behind him. Edon winced at the noise. He needed to get those hinges fixed.

Letting out another amused chuckle, Edon picked up the notebook that had finished drying. He closed and tied it shut with a leather strap, then stood with a huff and walked to one of the shelves, hesitating only an instant before slotting the booklet in a spot that only made sense to his peculiar sorting strategy.

He took a step back and a moment to admire his collection. Rows upon rows of carefully catalogued gossip, statistics, all sorts of information, lists of contacts, clients and targets, all recorded using a code only he knew the secret of. The life of an underworld information broker was undoubtedly not what Edon’s baker father had hoped for him. But the portly man was proud of what he had built: becoming maybe not the most prominent informer in the city, but one with a solid reputation for reliability.

The Cleft Isles might have been an unimportant territory within the Radiant Empire, ignored by the mainland despite the Greyport nobility’s desperate attempts to emulate the capital’s lifestyle. However, it sat at the midpoint of the trade route that sailed along the Empire’s east coast. Wise captains knew to avoid the Abyssal Trench and detour by the archipelago, and so all manners of goods, people, and stories transited through Greyport every day. Competition was cut-throat in this information business—often literally—and it was an undeniable accomplishment that Edon could today consider his situation relatively secure.

A sudden cold shiver ran down the man’s spine.

Brought out of his musings, Edon noticed his breath fogging up. Before he realised, the stuffy warmth had leached out of the room, and the feeble glow of the magic lamp had dwindled to almost nothing. He gulped nervously, rubbing his shoulder against the abnormal cold, and slowly turned around.

A shadow stood in the middle of his darkened office, clad in a long black cowl. It floated in the obscurity, towering to the ceiling and dissolving into smoke at the fringes, looking like a reaper of Urabi, the Death Goddess. Edon did not dare look into the cloak’s hood, for he knew it held nothing but impenetrable pitch-blackness.

“W-Wraith!” Edon caught his breath, and a professional smile crawled onto his pear-shaped face. He was pleased that his voice shook only a little. “S-So lovely of you to drop by.” He returned to his desk, eager to put even a symbolic barrier between him and his visitor. Once seated, it was easier to fake assurance. “What do you have for me?”

A dull noise accompanied a leather-bound ledger dropping on the desk. It seemed to materialise out of thin air, and the figure certainly had not visibly moved. A slow, deep voice wheezed out from underneath the hood, like hoarse wind hissing out of a deep well. “Accounts of Viscount Darien’s criminal activities.”

“Oh? Oh! Excellent!” The broker cheered up, as always at the prospect of profit. He leaned over and skimmed through the rather thick volume, squinting to read in the oppressive darkness. It appeared authentic. Coins danced in Edon’s eyes. “You work miracles, my friend.” He retrieved a heavy purse from a drawer and pushed it across the desk. “Here’s the usual fee. With a bonus. No, no. I insist.” A wave of Wraith’s ample sleeve made the bag vanish.

One thing Edon appreciated about Wraith, besides scary competence, was how business always happened swiftly. The dark mage never haggled or even counted the money. Not that the broker would ever dare short-change the frightening personage. He still sharply remembered the night, half a decade ago, when this “Wraith” first appeared inside his office. He nearly had a heart attack, persuaded an agent of Urabi had come to claim his muddied soul.

Edon had since figured out Wraith as a mage with dual affinities for ice and darkness—and a flair for the dramatic.

At least, that was what he told himself in the warmth and safety of his office, long after his guest’s chilling and predatory presence had cleared the room. In those five years of collaboration, he had made the mistake of upsetting Wraith exactly once. The broker had been too curious and had men follow the mysterious stranger. Never again. Edon had certainly learned that lesson.

At least his men were returned alive. Barely. Of the three, one recovered but retired, one still spent his days staring at a wall and randomly screaming in terror, and the last one had thrown himself off a cliff a year later.

“Any new requests?” Wraith wheezed out, startling Edon out of his dark recollection.

“Ah, err…” Edon pulled a notebook from a pile, opening it at a marked page. “Cheating spouse?” The answering silence was deafening. Edon pulled at his collar nervously. “Right, well, can’t blame me for trying to expedite some easy contracts. Hehe, he, ehhh… Ahem.” He flipped through the pages. “I’ve got rumours of another shipment of Ruby Dust coming into town, using the festival as cover.”

Wraith’s hood twitched at the mention of the dangerous drug. “That filth again?”

Endon shared the mage’s disdain. Inhaled, the red dust gave a feeling of euphoria and invulnerability, enhanced one’s strength, and removed all sense of pain. It might have been helpful for therapeutic purposes, except the dust also provoked intense murderous impulses, a thirst for blood, skin discolouration, and hypersensitivity to light. Regular consumption also caused a rapid deterioration of the addicts’ physical and mental state, eventually reducing them to shambling, corpse-like, raving lunatics attacking anyone on sight. Another name for the drug was “Vampire Dust,” although whether it was made of actual dried vampire blood like hearsays claimed was left to prove.

“Is any already in circulation in the city?” asked Wraith. The mage sounded pensive.

“Not to my knowledge.” Edon left unsaid that his knowledge of the city underworld was quite extensive. “Though if you wish to investigate, I’ll gladly buy any new information from you.” He flipped through his notebook. “Besides that… Someone is asking for information on ancient tunnels underneath the duke’s castle. There’s a request for dirt on the head of the Gold Leaf shipping company. Then one about a– ahem– about a suspicious figure spotted lurking in the… noble district…”

“It’s not me.”

“Of course.” Edon smiled politely but neglected to comment more. He set the booklet down. “Nothing else worth your time, my friend, except the usual ongoing criminal bounties.” He hesitated. “Also, people have gone missing.”

“…people vanish all the time,” the dark mage noted slowly, though not quite dismissively.

“It’s been happening more, recently. Mostly people nobody would care about, urchins, vagrants, whores. Because of that, it appears the Guard isn’t alarmed yet. But I like keeping to the pulse of the street, so to speak.”

“Why do you care?”

Edon linked his fingers over his rotund belly. “Some of my competitors might disagree, but I believe that insecurity is bad for business. I’m a civic man, you see. Also, if there’s some serial murderer on the loose…”

“A hefty bounty for their identity. I understand.”

Was that sarcasm Edon heard in the mage’s ghastly voice? He preferred not to question it. He leaned down and retrieved a slip of paper from a drawer. “Here’s a list of the potential victims.” He pushed the paper over, and a sweep of Wraith’s sleeve made it vanish. “I identified seventeen suspicious cases so far–”

“Eighteen.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Eighteen cases. A girl working at the Bronze Palace was murdered tonight. Throat ripped out, teeth marks around the wounds, and left to bleed out in an alley.”

“Dear me… Poor girl. Teeth marks, you said? Oh… I think I understand your question better now.” Edon picked up his quill. “Could you give me more details about–”

“The guards have her corpse. Ask your moles there.”

“Ah… I understand.” Edon tried to hide his disappointment.

“I will check for the drugs and the tunnels… and keep an eye out for… suspicious characters.”

“Much appreciated, friend.” The broker smiled nervously, then leaned over his notebook to scribble that the requests were being handled. “Are you sure I cannot interest you in a cup of tea?” he asked out of politeness rather than a genuine desire to keep the mage around.

But when Edon looked up from his writing, the space before his desk was empty. The temperature was back to normal, and the unnatural darkness had lifted. He scratched his head. “…how does he keep doing that?”

Edon sighed and shook his head. He hoped these assignments would occupy the scary mage for some time. As much as he liked working with competent people, too many of them turned out to be unnerving weirdos—though Wraith sure took the cake. Too many visits from such people would be bad for his heart.

Heaving yet another sigh, he got back to work.

Not much later, a knock on the door interrupted him.

“Yes?” he called without looking up.

The door creaked open loudly, making Edon frown, and Talin’s unfortunate face poked through. “Master Edon.” The boy looked annoyed.

“Did everything go well with the client?”

“What? Oh, that. Yes, yes. But, err, there’s a goodman Gale at the door, asking to meet you.”

Edon’s quill stilled. “Thirty-ish, grey hair, looks like he hasn’t slept in a year?”

“Uh-uh.” Talin nodded, nose scrunching. “Or had a bath, if I may say.”

“…send him in.”

“Yes, master.”

The door closed. Edon slowly set his quill down and leaned back, fighting a sudden headache.

* * * * *