While Akemi dreamt, Pyre toiled.

She sat by a small table in the dark of the chapel’s abandoned catacombs, illuminated only by an oil lamp. Dread’s ravens cawed as they soared through the catwalks above her, and their eerie calls made her whole body twitch. It caused the line she was painting with her finger to jump, and the perfect circle of ink that had begun to form on the page frayed at the edges.

Damn it.

She suffered in silence as she stood from her seat, hands knuckling through her red hair. Her oil lamp knocked softly side to side on the table, and she quickly righted it. She had to be more careful. Her most prized possession sat unprotected right in front of her—a beige scroll of parchment, slick with black ink. It was a skull, drawn by a master Rune Artist’s fingers.

The Sigil of Undeath.

All of her feeble attempts to copy it sat stacked to the side, pages and pages of crumpled paper and empty ink bottles. Her hands wore the same stain; fingertips black as night.

But she couldn’t copy the sigil. She hadn’t even come close. The lines were simply too intricate. The small fractures of bone in the skull, the tiny birds crawling out of the eye sockets. It had been someone’s life’s work to draw it, and it would be her life’s undoing to try and replicate it.

But she had to. She must. And she had very little time.

It had been a week since Nocturne left for the Dragon’s Lung. At first it had seemed to be a miraculous turn of fate; she had been assigned to guard the catacombs, and trusted with a skeleton key to the vaults. It was everything she had been after; the whole reason she had been so feverish to earn his trust. But it had been a false, naive victory.

Nocturne had trusted her with the key because he knew she could do nothing with the treasure. Sure, she could copy amateur runes with ease—Locking runes, runes of Heat and Shadow—but something at this level was incomprehensible to her. It was like asking a blind toddler to sculpt like the Greeks. Utterly ludicrous.

And short of copying it, there was nothing else she could do with it at all. One of the Plain’s greatest artifacts lay perfect and pretty right in front of her, and it might as well have been a slab of cracked stone. She couldn’t sell it, she couldn’t bring it to a master artist and hope he’d tattoo it onto her skin out of the goodness of his heart; hell, she couldn’t even bring it outside.

Nocturne had warned her of it himself, a thinly disguised threat that masqueraded as instruction. He had told her that the runes above the catacomb doors were there to impede anyone who dared to leave with the treasure that was buried there. The moment she exited the door carrying the scroll, it would disintegrate, and her with it. A pile of bonedust and paper scraps.

Never one to take a man at his word, she had corroborated this fact by inspecting the runes herself. The dusty old sigils hung innocently over boarded up doors toward the end of the dormitories. They looked dead to the untrained eye, failing to glow the miraculous green of typical Watching Eye runes, but that was only proof of their deadliness.

Dead runes were Death runes. To see one glow green would be the last thing you’d see.

It was a miracle Akemi hadn’t died that day.

Pyre had heard whispers about the girl—jet black hair, long legs, terrifying smile—who had gone exploring near the end of the dormitories. It hadn’t taken much detective work to figure out who that prowling intruder was. Akemi was lucky beyond her years that some kid had warned her off of delving any further. If she had even so much as taken a single step inside the catacombs and tried to bring a shiny pebble back with her, she would have been an unrecognizable pile of flesh at the end of some trainee’s bed.

The idea of it made her stomach turn, and not pleasantly.

Like a drug to an addict, thinking of Akemi had become a bit of a nasty habit for Pyre. One she couldn’t seem to kick no matter how many times she tried. She explained it to herself like this: Akemi was simply so unimaginably stupid that it made Pyre’s permanent fugue of stress just a bit less intense, like watching a clown stumble down a set of stairs, or a dog bark at its own tail.

Comedic relief, that’s all it was.

Still, no matter what tale she fed herself, the truth sat tangy in her throat; she had acquired a pesky parasite when it came to that girl. A feeling low in her stomach that made her hesitate around her. Do things she commonly wouldn’t do. Overthink the simplest of choices. Go out of her way to be helpful and generous, when that was her last instinct around anyone else.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Akemi would sell her in exchange for a horse’s hoof, Pyre knew that. But it didn’t stop her from finding her strangely… How should she put it? Alluring, perhaps. Like an accident so tragic you found your eyes glued to the scene. It reminded her of the first lighter Enzo had given her back in Rio. When she was ten, and orphaned, and terrified, that little light gave her a rush of dangerous hope. Like holding power incarnate in the palm of her hand.

Fire was how Pyre learned to solve problems. Enzo didn’t like someone? Boom. Their house got burned down. The mole at the police station was giving Enzo trouble? Pyre knew what to do when he was out at the bar. Fire was a tool, and that’s how she saw Akemi—an instant salve to her stress, as easy as pushing a button. Thoughts of her made everything else blur for a moment.

She sighed, leaning back in her chair and let her mind swim with the other woman. She daydreamed about all the ridiculous things that had come out of those frustratingly red lips, that obnoxious curve of her mouth, those baby brown eyes—

Her breathing became shallow, her cheeks red.

That’s enough. This is ridiculous. She’s a distraction, nothing else.

She rolled up the scroll of Undeath, and took her oil lamp.

She’d come back the next day to practice again, she told herself. She had no other choice. It wasn’t like she had the money to pay a Master Artist to trek to the catacombs with her and perform the tattooing there, beneath the catwalks. Such a field trip would be among the most expensive things one could pay for in the Plains.

And it wasn’t like she had that kind of person on speed dial, either. Her accomplices list started with Nocturne and ended with him, too. Everyone else in between was a hindrance at best.

After putting the scroll back in its rightful place, she silently crossed the threshold back into the dormitories, and clapped the door shut firmly behind her. The recruits knew better than to look at her; they let her pass like a phantom through the halls. She had her own bunk there, of course, but she refused to rest in it. She didn’t trust a single soul enough to sleep next to them.

I’ll stop by the parchment office and check that everything is running smoothly before I head back home. I’m sure Dread’s birds have picked apart at least half of my files by now.

As she turned the corner from the nave into the adjoining paper room, a System box flew in her face.

Nocturne: Pyre. I hope you’re well. Dread tells me that everything has been going smoothly at the guild. All the right blades in all the right places.

Nocturne: Your meticulous eye continues to shine.

Pyre bristled. She hated the way the praise lit her up from the inside. An emotional relic from her days with Enzo that she’d so far been unable to kill. Still, she hastily wrote a response back, trying not to sound too eager. She hadn’t expected to hear from him at all until he had returned from his personal mission. This research was clearly important to him, and if she had learned anything about Nocturne, it was that he was fiercely single minded.

Still, a small, irrational fear lurked inside her that she had been found out. That Dread’s birds had seen through her obfuscation spells and caught her prowling around the wrong corners of the catacombs. But she didn’t let her mind travel too far down that path yet—Nocturne could be messaging her for any myriad of reasons. Simple, digestible ones.

Pyre: Hello sir, thank you.

Pyre: Is there anything I can do for you?

A few seconds passed. That was odd for Nocturne. He wrote as he spoke, briskly, with little time left for speculation.

Nocturne: Yes, in fact.

Nocturne: It seems that Akemi has completed her mission.

Pyre’s eyes narrowed, her heart rabbiting in her chest.

Already?

Pyre knew that Akemi had a kill contract of some kind, but she didn’t know who, or what, or where. Just that it required her to go north, near Kerbes. Pyre’s mind had been too consumed by practicing the Sigil to grill Akemi for details about it.

Nocturne: Pyre, you are one of my most tactful disciples. The type of person who knows when something is strictly business. A no hard feelings kind of individual.

Pyre’s fingers began to twitch, her stomach tightening. What was he getting at?

Nocturne: I will cut to the chase. Akemi’s use to us has gone past its expiration date.

Nocturne: I have reason to believe that several variables are converging to make sure she will meet her ideal fate soon, but, as we both know, I don’t like leaving things up to the gods to decide. I like to execute my plans personally to ensure their success. But seeing as I am currently indisposed, I must allocate work to those I trust.

Nocturne: People like you, Pyre.

Nocturne: Do you understand what I’m asking from you?

Pyre stared at the screen, her ears ringing.

What?

Feeling her stomach clench, she grabbed the frame of the door. It felt like the world had upended her. She fought to control her breathing.

What’s wrong with you? Get it together.

It was a simple order. Something she’d done for him countless times. Pyre was a tool powerful men threw at their problems, and that had served her well. Why was she having this reaction only now? It wasn’t like Akemi was any different than any of the other hits. Nocturne had ordered the death of other guild members before. It wasn’t uncommon. If anything, Akemi posed more of a threat than any of the targets Nocturne had pointed her toward in the past.

And yet.

She looked to her left, and found Dread’s bottomless hat sitting there. She picked it up, curled her fingers around it, and cupped it around her mouth. Then she screamed.

It was soundless, like yelling into a void.

Breathing heavily, she placed down the hat, and brought her System panel back up.

Nothing comes in the way of the Sigil.

Pyre: Yes, sir. I believe I understand.