It would have been ideal, in Eresthanon’s opinion, to employ some form of magic to provide him and Aaliyah better concealment in their pursuit of the magus from the unknown order. Unfortunately, the enchantments and wards on the maze in the fifth floor of the chantry were smothering, oppressive even. He felt that enacting a magic to obfuscate their presence would be fiercely contested by the defenses and he certainly didn’t have the time to try piercing them.

They followed as quietly as they could, which wasn’t all that quiet by elven standards. Eresthanon reminded himself that elven senses were far more acute than those of humans, which was to their advantage.

The magus led them through the hallways, taking turns seemingly at random and passing doors without looking at them. It was no mean feat to keep pace with someone who clearly knew where he was going and didn’t need to slow for the purpose of stealth, but the two vigilum managed somehow.

After a couple minutes of this, Aaliyah brought them to a complete halt at an intersection the magus had turned down a few seconds earlier. She used her odd surveillance device to watch around the corner for a moment, then brusquely passed the half moon glasses over to Eresthanon.

When he set them on the end of his nose, he saw that the lenses did, indeed, act as a receiving device for Aaliyah’s tube-like apparatus. In them he saw the unknown magus, though only from the back. Two things immediately jumped out about the stranger.

The first thing was that the man wore a long coat that was a good deal too heavy for the weather in New York at the moment. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, but Eresthanon thought it was telling. The magus had to have come from somewhere and it wasn’t likely he’d snuck past the two vigilum on the lower floors, which limited the possibilities. Coming from the roof was one, but Eresthanon suspected he had arrived directly on the fifth floor. It was something he intended to keep in mind for later should the chance arise to speak with the magus.

The second thing that stood out was that the man was standing at a blank stretch of wall at an otherwise unremarkable corner of the warren of passages. Although he was uttering no verbal incantations, Eresthanon watched him working through several complex spellforms with a series of intricate, precise gestures.

A door, matching the others they’d passed in the halls, appeared in the patch of wall. It began as a faint afterimage and grew more distinct with each passing second of continued casting. No sooner had the door finished forming and solidified than it began to change again, rapidly replaced by an entirely different — and much more conspicuous — style of door.

That was a threefold door, a complicated and powerful enchantment usually constructed from one or more artifacts that were built into the structure itself. They could confound all but the most skilled and determined thieves.

A first, hidden secured door was set at the front. If it was breached, it usually contained an entire dimensional space affixed to the frame that was meant to act as a decoy or trap. Behind it was a second door, more concealed and with better protections, that granted access to the real room being secured.

In addition to being fiendishly difficult to create and prohibitively expensive to install, they had fallen out of vogue in recent centuries as buildings had become less permanent and rarely had the lasting power to justify renewing an installation every time some new piece of technology or architectural style became ubiquitous. They had much more use in ages past, when castles and manors could stand for centuries without any major modifications.

Nevertheless, they were an excellent security investment. Very few people would think to look for a second door, even fewer would possess the magical capability to find and access it without having either foreknowledge or a great deal of time to spend performing complex magic. This mysterious order must have placed a very high value on whatever treasures were stored behind it.

The magus continued his spells for several more seconds until, finally, the second door opened. Eresthanon’s elven physiology prevented him from gasping at what was revealed, but his eyebrows threatened to creep perilously high on his head. Aaliyah, watching her partner closely, registered his shock and physically peeked around the corner so she could see what had elicited such a strong reaction.

From what Eresthanon knew of her, there was very little chance she would have the context to understand what she was seeing. It was likely to be an awe-inspiring sight nonetheless, even for a cynic like the Quaesitor.

Beyond the threefold door was a room filled with fire, only it was an impossible fire. Flames filled the room entirely, reaching to the very ceiling, yet neither heat nor smoke nor any additional light were emitted by the inferno. There was barely even any noise. Where a fire of that size should have produced a crackling roar, the only sound that escaped through the door was a sinister hiss. The flames were also indigo — a deep, rich, and uniform purple that did not exist in nature.

More unnerving than all of that, however, was the way the fire moved. The flames did not move fluidly, but flickered from position to position, a ponderous stroboscopic image that resembled primitive animations. The conflagration ‘moved’ every second or two, enough to give the sense of continuous motion yet slow enough to be obviously disjointed.

“Should we follow him in?” Aaliyah asked, her voice barely a murmur.

Eresthanon shook his head. “We cannot follow him through that. If he doesn’t come out soon, the trail ends here and I would suggest we call in the MRU to do a full clear of the premises.”

“Is the magic fire really that dangerous?”

“It is entropic fire,” Eresthanon answered. “There are, thankfully, very few magic substances more dangerous.”

“I’ve never heard of it; what does it do?”

“It works much like normal radiation, breaking down the connection between things only it does so on an aetheric, rather than molecular, level,” Eresthanon said. “Limited exposure can cause devastating mutations to the… how can I put this? To the magical realness of the victim. Acute contact with entropic flame can ‘unweave’ a person’s very essence, effectively leading to disintegration. It is exceedingly rare to withstand entropic flames, even briefly, without suffering grievous harm.”

“How the hell do you fight something like that?” Aaliyah asked.

“Barring powerful temporal magic? Avoidance. Entropic fire must be anchored to a clearly delineated point or area in space, otherwise it will quickly dissipate.”

“Wait, then how is that dude just walking through it?”

“There will be a path or, rather, there will be several paths but only one that can be safely traversed through the changing state of the flames. I doubt the magus in there is local to this chantry, which suggests he either has something to guide him or this order uses a standard pattern when they design and set the conflagration.”

Before they could discuss any further, the magus in question emerged from the flames. The threefold door closed and vanished behind him almost as soon as he was out and he immediately brought out his phone to make a call. The nature of the magic required to contain entropic fire would render most forms of communication from inside that room impossible, much to the benefit of the eavesdropping vigilum.

“Vault zero is secure,” the magus said. “I’m continuing to vault one.”

He hung up and began to move again, heading away from where Aaliyah and Eresthanon waited, poised to backpedal if he had come their way. The vigilum followed as closely as they dared, Aaliyah retrieving her glasses and using her device to check around corners ahead of them so they wouldn’t come around a corner and stumble into their quarry.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Several turns later, the magus stopped at one of the unmarked and unremarkable doors along one of the stretches of hallway. Aaliyah passed her glasses back to Eresthanon again, apparently keen to put his knowledge of magic to good use and unwilling to miss an opportunity for whatever information he might glean.

Eresthanon watched the magus perform a very brief spell with no apparent purpose — likely an otherwise-meaningless bit of magic meant only to unlock or access this specific door — then he grabbed the knob and pulled it open.

Instead of a room, the open door revealed a blank stretch of wall. That was odd, but it was even more odd when the door continued to swing until it was fully open. When it made contact with the wall, it merged into the structure of the hallway. Suddenly, it was as if the door had been placed there the entire time; all that remained of its previous position was a faint outline of the frame.

The unknown magus grabbed the knob — the knob that would have been on the inside of the room that didn’t exist — and opened the door again. This time, there was a room behind it.

From their position at the end of the hallway, Eresthanon could only see a small sliver of the room. There was no entropic fire, which was something of a relief, but all he could make out was the side of a bookcase, cabinet, or some other tall piece of wooden furniture.

“Can you slip your device a bit further along the wall?” he asked sotto voce.

Aaliyah took a moment to reshape the bit of tubing that served as the input of her device so she could slide it along the wall with at least some modicum of discretion. The view in the glasses was chaotic while she did so and Eresthanon made a point not to focus his attention there; he wanted to avoid even the chance of momentary disorientation given how precarious their situation and position were.

When she was satisfied with her adjustment, Aaliyah knelt low to the floor and slid the device out along the baseboard of the hallway. Eresthanon watched the view in the glasses move over the wall until the open door came more fully into view. He tapped Aaliyah on the shoulder lightly and she held the tube steady in its new position.

Past the door was a well-organized repository of knowledge; a private library, but much smaller than the one the vigilum had seen downstairs. Many of the shelves and cases had protective covers made of wood, metal, and glass and contained tomes, grimoires, scrolls, and other media. This collection held items of much greater rarity and value than those below. Eresthanon could see powerful magic bound into some of the volumes even through the shelf covers and the lens of Aaliyah’s device.

The magus was flitting from one shelf to the next, clearly trying to take an ad hoc inventory to see if anything was missing. There must have been some order of priority that wasn’t tied to where things were stored, because Eresthanon lost sight of the magus frequently as he moved around the room, often passing outside the device’s field of vision.

“What is it?” Aaliyah asked.

“A library of some sort,” Eresthanon replied quietly. “Curated for particularly powerful or valuable pieces, I suspect.”

From inside the library vault, they heard the magus shout.

“Oh bloody shitting hell!” he cursed.

A moment later, the vigilum were crouching on either side of the open door and peering around the frame into the library itself. They had moved as quickly and quietly as they could. If the unknown magus had stumbled upon the intruder, they needed to be ready to intervene; if he hadn’t, they didn’t want to forfeit their concealment. Something relevant to their case was happening in that room and they needed to be ready to respond.

The magus was leaning, practically hunched over, on a broad archival cabinet along the back wall. The cabinet was made of a handsome, dark-stained wood and stood about four feet high, coming just up to the man’s chest. There were several wide shelves beneath the angled reading top and the highest one had been pulled out slightly.

With no immediate danger, the vigilum watched and waited.

They were ready to spring away and move back to their corner if the magus turned to leave, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. His posture and the droop of his head indicated he was struggling under some great emotional weight. Eresthanon suspected the magus had discovered something had been taken from the cabinet, but it was paramount for the investigation to have it confirmed.

After a little over a minute, the magus took a steadying breath, pulled out his phone, and placed another call.

“It seems our divinations underestimated the threat,” he said, a bitter note in his voice. “Our old adversaries have grown quite bold indeed now they have a new leader. I have little doubt they are the culprits behind the breach, given their apparent target.”

A pause, then, “There may be other losses — I have yet to check — but I can confirm they entered the first vault and reclaimed The Sleeping Dragon.”

The sense of some impending menace, of a growing storm, that had nestled in the back of Eresthanon’s mind since he first opened his eyes in this Cycle swelled. It was as if a peal of dreadful thunder had crashed on the distant horizon and just rolled across the place where he was sheltered, shaking the walls even after weakening from the travel.

There was, as of yet, insufficient information to be certain whether a renewed war between one of the most ancient Creaturae and the collective of magi was the source of his vague and dreadful foreboding, but each new revelation he discovered working this case was making a point to gesture vaguely in that direction.

Eresthanon found he had some knowledge of the dragons — or drakus, as they called themselves — but it was largely centered around how their kind interacted with others and provided little insight on their internal structure or culture.

He believed — or had believed, in his previous Cycles — that the dragons were a largely independent and fractious lot who had only nominal leadership most of the time. They had no rigid clan, bloodline, or other governing structures, and no powerfully authoritative ruling bodies like many other Creaturae.

Hearing this magus speaking of a new leader, Eresthanon was forced to consider that he was missing a big part of the picture.

After the First Reformation of the Vigiles Creaturae in the fifteenth century, most knightly orders had been disbanded, often by force of treaty. That left the few purported ‘dragon slayers’ of the world to find new callings or go to ground. In the aftermath, the most well-established orders of magi were poised to be the greatest authority on the dragons among the Creaturae.

The secretive order who owned this impressive chantry might know a great deal about the dragons — they certainly seemed to have had some highly prized volume that once belonged to the drakus in their possession until this evening — but Eresthanon did not. He would have to be careful not to let his ignorance influence or cloud his conclusions.

If, as he suspected, his new Cycle and position in the Vigiles was going cause him to become embroiled in whatever intrigues were brewing between these long-standing enemies, a hasty or ill-informed assumption could lead to catastrophe. Especially considering he didn’t know where his fortunes and favor might fall if war erupted, no matter how much he might strive for neutrality.

After all, few entities had played as prominent a role in the last protracted conflict between dragons and human sorcerers as the Vigiles Creaturae. While that involvement had led directly to the First Reformation, those with an interest in such things were unlikely to be unaware of what preceded it.

“Quite right,” the magus said, interrupting Eresthanon’s thoughts. “I believe we must fortify our most valuable resources until we can ascertain the lay of the land. We can hope our other endeavors bear fruit in finding a resolution to this nascent conflict, but it would be foolhardy in the utmost to pin our hopes on such vagaries.”

Things were in motion now. It wouldn’t be long until the magus left this vault to check the others, so Eresthanon prepared himself to move back to their last hiding spot. He and Aaliyah would benefit from continuing to monitor the magus for new information. They had learned a great deal already, but you could never really know too much.

The Quaesitor seemed to have other ideas.

She flicked her long braids over her shoulder, stood up, leaned against the open door, and knocked on the wooden frame.

The magus spun around, phone held to his ear with one hand and a blue crystal orb in the other. The orb shone with magic waiting to be unleashed, but Aaliyah simply brushed aside her jacket and put one hand on her hip, the badge hanging from her belt brazenly on display.

She smiled at the magus in a way that some might describe as sweet, even saccharine. However, it looked like a distinctly unfriendly smile to Eresthanon, even malevolent.

“We should talk, bucko.”

“I’ll have to call you back,” the unknown magus said before hanging up his phone.