Korax 18 – Inselaciune 2, 1308

The storeroom was suffocating. Its narrow walls, damp and filthy, closed in on me like a predator toying with its prey. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even shake off the sweat rolling down my face. My hair was soaked in fear and my heart was clawing its way out of my chest. It hurt. It fucking hurt.

The masked bloke wouldn’t let me leave even though the ones outside were long since gone. I’d tried to get him off me but he was larger than I, and he’d used his body to pin me against the wall. Mercifully, he’d removed his hand from my mouth so I could breathe, but the tears were still stuck in my throat. I wanted to scream and push him off me, but my arms failed me and so did my voice.

Gods why? Please… I just wanted to—

The door swung open with a loud thud. I fell to my knees, gasping for air. The sun trickled down through the windows – had someone removed the rags that covered them? – but the shapeless spots of colour still filled my vision. Blinded as I was by the sudden surge of light, I noticed Curiosity was nowhere to be seen. There were only a few spirits of Concern in the warehouse, probably brought about by the men’s sudden appearance, and poor little Sorrow crying in a corner by the hatch.

The masked man reached out to me, trying to grab me by the shoulder, but I instinctively slapped his hand, flinching away from him.

‘You don’t look well, ‘older,’ he said. ‘Need a minute?’

‘Who are you?’ I asked, my eyes fixed on the white, featureless mask he wore.

‘You must leave,’ he ignored my question. ‘They’ll be back soon.’

‘Who are they? I… Look, I can’t leave just yet. There’s something I must find. Someone I must find.’

The man strode towards me in just two steps, breathing heavily from behind the safety of his mask. The thing covered his entire face, with only two almond-shaped sockets interrupting its smooth whiteness. The dim light crossing through the windows showed a pair of green eyes staring right at me through those holes.

‘You must leave,’ he repeated.

The dim light… Something was wrong. The rags over the windows weren’t the only things missing. The bottles, the bed and the mirror were gone too. Only the barrels and the dust remained. Whoever those men were, they’d taken it upon themselves to get rid of everything that belonged to Elian. Dammit it all.

I began searching frantically for anything that could have been left behind. The knife was out of the question. That probably was the first thing they took if they knew about it. Maybe they had missed a shard from the mirror or a bottle that could point me towards—

‘Didn’t you ‘ear me? Those men will kill you if they catch you ‘ere.’

‘You just don’t get it,’ I snapped. ‘An innocent man – an innocent holder is missing and he could be more dangerous than any of your masked mates. Turning into a Rotten should take years, even decades, yet Elian’s descent happened in mere days, if what his daughter said is true.’

‘I know. I just think—’

‘No. No, you don’t. You don’t know what we’re facing here. You don’t know how dangerous a lost holder can be, or seen with your own eyes what they can really do. Entire settlements can be wiped off the map by a single Rotten gone mad. Families torn apart by the beasts’ madness. Lives destroyed in mere heartbeats.

‘Tell me,’ I continued, my face brimming with anger, ‘have you tasted the ash of a burning village? Held the hand of a dying child as she cries out for her parents? Have you ever witnessed the aftermath of a rampaging abomination?’

‘No,’ he said sheepishly.

‘Then kindly, get the fuck outta my face. I need to find Elian.’

The man stood by the storeroom’s doorway, his hands inside the pockets of his black trousers. He didn’t dare say a word but I could feel his eyes staring daggers at me.

It didn’t matter. Nothing did. All crates had been moved, leaving only traces on the dust where they’d been dragged. Some of the barrels had been knocked over and the catch inside had spilt on the floor, leaving nothing but the stench of dead fish to keep us company. Even the old rags had been taken by the masked men, torn off the windows. The warehouse had been emptied of anything that could be remotely useful to me.

Defeated as I was, I collapsed next to the hatch, my eyes sweeping the place one last time. To think I’d come so far only to be sent back to square one.

I stared out the window. It was probably close to midday or shortly past it, judging by how bright it was outside. The clouds came and went as the minutes passed, and the sun appeared to be mocking, alternating between moments of comforting darkness and bursts of annoyance when it shone right into my eyes.

The man still didn’t move. Had I been too hard on him? Stupid mask aside, he’d proven to be a good person. I wanted to apologise but the words failed me, to the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody. My thoughts drifted back to you. You would have known what to say.

Well, there’d be time to drown myself in regret after I’d solved this case. Elian was somewhere out there and, masked conspirators or not, I’d have to find him.

I sighed and focused, scanning the warehouse one more time. The hatch hadn’t been touched, it didn’t seem, so they probably didn’t go back that way. Still, if the tunnels had brought me here, they could point me towards someplace else. Perhaps Elian had used them to move through the Quay unnoticed. And that begged the question, was that how he’d escaped from the abandoned shed after he attacked me?

‘You there,’ I called out to the masked bloke in the corner, ‘did you follow me through the aqueducts?’

‘The tunnels? Aye.’

‘Do you know if one of those tunnels goes to the shed under the whaling station?’

‘I dunno,’ he said, stepping closer, out of the shadows. ‘I really don’t. ‘Twas the first time I explored them tunnels’.

‘If you’re lying…’

‘Nay, Master ‘older. I was ordered to follow you shortly after you entered through the underground.’

‘Ordered? By whom?’

The man didn’t answer. He only averted his gaze and shielded his eyes from the light shining into his eyes.

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Wait. That wasn’t right.

He had stepped forward a bit, but he wasn’t anywhere near the sun yet. The staircase leading to the upper walkways cast a shadow right where he was standing. Something was reflecting the light into his face.

I leapt from my ‘seat’ on the floor. This was the best news I’d got so far.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked me.

‘Don’t move. Just stay right there.’

His shoulders slumped and his hands shot up, palms exposed, as a sign of surrender. Luckily, for both of us, he didn’t argue.

‘The thing shining in your face may help us find Elian,’ I said. Annoying as he was, the man deserved some sort of explanation.

‘Like the shard you ‘eld before when them visions appeared?’

‘Aye. If your mates missed a shard—’

‘Let me ‘elp.’

The man’s sudden interruption caught me by surprise. He’d never interrupted me so far. Yet, I could feel it was more out of a twisted sense of duty or enthusiasm rather than mere frustration at my choppy way of speaking. I stared at him. If only he didn’t have that stupid mask on I could perhaps read his face and find out what he was thinking.

With a nod, I accepted his offer.

The man wasted no time dropping to the floor on all fours, his back against me. Despite his large body, the man moved with surprising finesse as he searched by the windows and the knocked-over barrels. It was quite an amusing sight.

For my part, I began my search closer to the hatch and underneath the stairs, my palms sweeping through the floor as I looked for this metaphorical needle in this house of dust and fishbones. It wouldn’t matter if the shard was tiny or if it splintered into my skin, as long as it belonged to the same mirror, I could use it to follow the Threads to Elian.

‘Oi ‘older,’ the man called out from the opposite side of the room, ‘check this out.’

I winced as I ducked to avoid hitting my head with the staircase. It took me a second or two before I was standing next to him. While I couldn’t quite see it behind that stupid mask of his, something told me he was grinning, all while pointing at something on the floor. Or I should say, the lack of something.

‘What is it?’ I asked cautiously. ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘It’s a shadow!’

‘What a thrilling revelation. Should we hold the phones? Stop the presses, perhaps? You have discovered the lack of light, o’ Shadow Lord.’

My day was complete now. The bloke who had manhandled me earlier, and not in a fun way, was excited about a bloody shadow. What had I done to deserve this?

‘Since you’re such a shadow connoisseur,’ he said, chuckling under the mask, ‘maybe you can explain what’s causing the shadow.’

I followed his finger with my eyes. He was pointing at the window and then back at the shadow on the floor. He was right, there was nothing that could cause the shadow. Was it a spirit?

‘And perhaps, Master ‘older,’ he continued, ‘you can tell me why my “thrilling discovery” is reflecting the light that ‘ad got into my eyes earlier.’

He once again pointed at the floor and then at the spot by the staircase where he stood before. The light still shone on the wall, reflected not by a mirror shard but by a blood shadow.

Of course. It all made sense now.

Scholars believed that spirits were manifestations of a particular emotion or its direct opposite. Elation or Sorrow. Pride or Humility. Truth or Deceit. In truth, they were as coins. Or like an old gossiping hag. Two-faced. A personification of not only one aspect but the complete duality of their eldritch nature.

And if my mate was the pure essence of Curiosity, it was also its opposite: the thirst to keep knowledge away from prying eyes. Hidden. Obscured from inquisitive minds.

‘Curiosity, mate,’ I called out, ‘is that you?’

With a flash of dim light, the tiny spirit sprung from the ground, dissipating the ‘shadow’ it’d used as its hiding spot. Its wings flapped rapidly as it took flight right in front of me, and its silver scales had now filled the whole room with tiny rays of light, reflecting the sun as it had done mere moments ago. It was happy to see me, and I it.

Surprisingly, the foreman, er, the masked bloke stumbled back a step or two. He reacted to Curiosity. He must have caused quite an impression on my mate for I could only count three times when it had permitted a normal person to see it.

‘What’s that thing, ‘older?’ the man asked, pointing at my little mate.

‘Its name is Curiosity. He’s a spirit of… well, Curiosity. It’s a good mate of mine.’

‘WHY do you wear that mask? WHY does it look like an owl?’ it asked him, skipping all social formalities. Even I wasn't that rude.

‘I… I d-don’t… It’s not an o-owl…’

‘Leave the poor man alone, Curiosity,’ I said. The masked man gave me a knowing nod, probably thankful for the intervention. ‘But tell me, why were you hiding? You are aware they cannot see you unless you want them to, right?’

‘The doll,’ it said. ‘They wanted to take it away. It is not theirs to take. The child will want it back.’

Curiosity uncoiled its silvery tail, revealing the small yarn doll it had kept hidden from the men. With a flick of its tail, it put the toy in the masked bloke’s hand. He flinched and almost dropped it, but he quickly composed himself.

‘Thanks, M-master Curiosity,’ he said. ‘We c-can take it back to Arianwen.’

Right, that was the name of the man’s daughter. Looking at the doll now, I couldn’t help but think back at my encounter with her.

It’d been the twelfth of Convingere, the last day of the Coral Festival, when I first saw her. She was giving away daffodils by the side of the road that connected the Quay to the Octant. It was an old Kefnforian tradition, where small girls would hand out flowers to all, mirroring the way the children had waited for their parents to return at the end of the war some thirty or forty years ago.

Still, while all the other girls danced in their beautiful colourful dresses, huge smiles plastered on their little faces, Arianwen looked ‘sad’. An old woman next to her, one of the vendors from the festival stalls, was trying to cheer her up. Sure, she was doing an awful job at it, but at least she was trying.

That’s what drew me to help. It had been that look in her eyes, staring into the distance, and the shaky gasps, the kind one does after some really hard sobbing. Even if I’d known then what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have refused her.

The bloke was right. He had to take the doll back to Arianwen. And hopefully, bring her father along.

As I snapped back into the present, Curiosity had coiled itself around the masked bloke’s shoulders, resting on him as it’d done with me so many times before. He looked uncomfortable but not in a bad or rude way. He had the look of someone who was holding a babe or a small animal. Mindful. Careful.

‘Aye,’ I finally said. ‘Let’s find the girl. Surely she misses her little yarn friend.’

‘No!’ Sorrow screamed, before rushing across the room and jumping right into my arms. Its ethereal eyes were brimming with tears and its sobbing filled my mind. ‘No. No. No. No.’

‘Woah there, mate,’ I said, trying to comfort the little spirit. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘Everything alright, ‘older?’ the masked bloke asked me.

‘I’m not sure. Another spirit seems distressed—’

‘The girl is missing,’ Sorrow interrupted. ‘Abducted. Seized. Taken. You cannot find her. You will not find her.’

‘What happened? You look white like a sheet, lad.’

My blood froze. The words failed to come out of my mouth. Curiosity answered on my behalf:

‘The one you called Arianwen has been taken. She is gone.’