It should have tasted like wheat and salt and the faint hint of the baker’s hearth. Instead, her teeth worked it the way one chews paper, slow, mechanical, without appetite. The crust scraped against her tongue; the crumb clung stubbornly to the roof of her mouth. She swallowed anyway, feeling it drag down her throat.
She hadn’t even bothered checking the doorwatch glyph when she entered her quarters. No sweep for spies, no glance for unwanted marks.
Just the muted thud of the door closing and her boots carrying her straight to the bed. She didn’t climb onto it. She slid down beside it, sitting with her back pressed to the headboard’s side panel, knees drawn slightly up. The bread sat in her palm, warm against skin that suddenly felt cold.
Fifteen hundred hours. Same chamber. The actual mission.
The words wouldn’t stop circling. She set the bread on her knee, palms pressing flat to the floor as though weight alone might force the memory to mean something else. It didn’t.
She’d thought that was it. That today had been the briefing. That it was about the ruin again. That she would be ready.
It wasn’t.
What she’d just endured wasn’t the briefing at all, only a follow-up, a sweep of loose ends. A prelude.
She should have known.
Even the collar at her throat seemed to hum with mockery, the faint vibration settling into her bones.
They always looked at her with that same measuring stare. Judging, assessing, weighing. She was used to that. But not today. Today there had been something else behind their eyes, something sharper.
Even Caustic Ink and the Quill woman had been tenser before she was dismissed. They knew.
And Tiran...
She’d known him too long not to recognize the signs. The stillness before he spoke. The exact way his gaze held, not hard, but unyielding. That was the look he gave before saying something that could break her.
What could it be this time?
Another suicide mission? Another ruin? Something worse?
Infiltrate Kesherra to assassinate a known key figure in broad daylight? She’d done something close before, her last grade-four in Karmith. That one hadn’t been easy, not with every civilian trained for war. Would Kesherra be the same?
No. Too straightforward. Caedern wouldn’t have grinned like that if it were something so simple.
The bread sagged in her hand. She let herself tip sideways, lying down on the floor with her back against the headboard. The wood was cool against her cheek. She took another bite, chewing slowly, barely aware of the taste at all.
Her other hand pressed to her pocket, feeling the soft bulge of Kion’s coin pouch.
Kion didn’t know. He’d managed to dig up her Tenzurah assignment, even volunteered to be her eyes in the city. But this one... he had no idea.
Was it guarded more tightly because it was grade-four? Would he appear anyway, uninvited, like before?
If the mission was under too many Accord eyes, she hoped not. Lunlun would peek at him without restraint, and they would notice.
What would the grade-four be?
She wished someone would come now, knock on her door, tell her everything. Let her prepare. Let her not walk in blind, not again.
But that was a dream.
They would keep her waiting. They wanted her waiting. Let the panic simmer in the silence, until it steeped into every thought.
She curled in on herself on the floor, knees drawn, the bread cradled loosely in her hands. She kept chewing, slow and mechanical, until all taste was gone.
And she let the time pass.
She wished, at the very least, it would be survivable.
That she would come out intact.
She wished.
The moment the third bell faded, they told her to enter Tiran’s office.
Same room. Same layout. Same three figures behind the desk. Same two Quill-shadows flanking them.
The center figure still wore that half-worry, half-weighing look. The one on the right still had his too-amused grin. The Veiled on the left still met her with that indiscernible gaze. And the pair of Quills… still tense.
She made herself look past all of it. She would not let them see it bothered her.
She stood in the same square of floor she had the day before, time stretching until it felt like the air itself was watching.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Finally, Tiran spoke.
“Silent Writ.”
A pause.
“Your next assignment begins tomorrow.”
His voice was steady, carrying that clipped weight that made each sentence stand alone.
“You will interrogate individuals suspected of disloyalty. Each session will be conducted separately.”
“You will receive a scripted set of questions. You are to follow them in sequence, but you may deviate or add questions if you deem it necessary.”
His eyes flicked sideways, just for a moment, before the next line.
“The judge will monitor each session directly,” the words thinned, a reluctant edge bleeding through before he smoothed it back into formality.
“At the conclusion of every interrogation, both you and the subject will be allowed one question each, off the record.”
“You’re required to give report after each interrogation. Written and verbal.”
“The day prior to each interrogation, you will be given access to the subject’s profile and history. You may take notes, but no files or paper will leave the room.”
“Bed will be provided in the preparation room. But you are permitted to choose where you spend the night between sessions.”
When he finished, his tone was level, but the weight of each instruction pressed against her skin like the slow push of pins.
Interrogation, not interrogated.
The judge would watch.
Reports after every session.
Extra questions, hers.
One “off-record” question. As if the Accord ever meant that.
A bed in the prep room.
Every detail sounded less like procedure and more like a lock clicking shut.
“Questions?”
“If the subject refuses to speak?”
Tiran’s reply was as plain as if he were reciting the weather, “then the judge will decide what their silence costs them... and take it. If it happens too often, he might decide you’re not worth keeping either.”
The words slid under her skin like a cold blade. Not just a warning for them, a quiet promise for her.
Caedern’s smirk deepened.
She nodded once.
Tiran’s gaze stayed on her a fraction longer than necessary, as though measuring whether she understood or only heard, “If there’s no more question,” he said at last, “he’ll take you to prepare.”
Another nod.
Caustic peeled away from Caedern’s side and fell into step beside her. She followed without looking back.
The door shut behind them with a click, sealing in the faint scent of ink and iron.
This wouldn’t be easy.
Caustic led her down a short hall to a small room. White walls. White bed. White desk. The light above was the same flat, too-bright white, leaching shadow from everything.
Three of the walls were lined with half-height mirrors. A blank strip at the top, another at the bottom. Observation glass. She could feel it.
He gestured for her to wait, then left.
She walked to the desk. Even the pen they had left for her was white. She picked it up, let it scratch across the paper.
At least the ink was black. Not white.
The door opened again without a knock.
Caustic stepped back in, a file in his hand. She took it without ceremony, one hand closing over it.
But his gaze stayed.
She met it.
A second. Two. Neither moved, neither spoke.
Finally, he blinked and let out a low sigh. His hand lifted. She didn’t flinch when it came down, only once, a light pat on her shoulder.
“Good luck.”
Then he turned and left again.
Writ stared at the door long after it shut, as if the wood might shift and give her a reason.
She almost asked why? for that tap on her shoulder. Almost.
The contact still hummed in her nerves, faint and persistent, like the aftertaste of a word whispered too close to hear. She pressed it down, slid the thought into the locked drawer in her head where all the unhelpful things went.
Focus.
She sat, the chair’s cold frame biting through her sleeves, grounding her in place. The moment she cracked the file open, it wasn’t the name that caught her. It was a word, written neat and stark.
Rowan Brennan
Chasm Lily Research Facility, Glyphfire Division. Suspected of leaking Blissbane cure data outside the Accord
Blissbane.
The Blissbane cure.
They had threatened her with it. Withheld it. Then spoon-fed it to her as if that made it something else.
Rowan Brennan. Age forty-three.
Civilian. Alchemy shop, Brandholt. Bankruptcy. The words sat there like dry ledger entries, but she knew the taste of them, how a slow collapse could strip a person until nothing remained but the quiet.
Wife and child. Carriage accident. Five years ago. She stared at that line too long. The file noted he had once voiced suspicion, believing the Accord had engineered it, a murder wrapped in tragedy. The margin note called the suspicion unfounded. Accord’s tidy word for don’t ask again.
Ten years of commendations in the Alchemical Division. Precision. Patience. Avoided politics. She’d seen that kind before. Steady hands, too clean for the circles above them.
Then the breach. Unsecured channel traced to him. No why. No what. Just the brittle husk of an act, hollowed of meaning.
Instruction to Operative: mental and emotional state, and potential risk for unauthorized information disclosure. Intentional, coerced, or motivated by emotional factors.
And on the next page, the 'confirmation list'. Like she’d just tick boxes and call it truth.
That was all they’d given her. Two sheets of paper.
No images. No past history. No lines to connect, no context to hold onto.
Nothing.
And still, she was expected to interrogate on that alone.
She shut the file and leaned back, letting the fragments scrape together in her head. Not enough to see the whole, but enough to know it mattered.
From the desk drawer, she pulled a slip of paper and rewrote each checkpoint into a question worth asking.
She mouthed them, voice low, letting the shapes of the words settle in her throat. Calm. Neutral. Not warm enough to be read as sympathy, not sharp enough to provoke the wrong kind of silence.
Then she tried them again, shifting phrasing, slipping hooks into them where they wouldn’t be seen.
Her eyes drifted, but she kept her head still. The faint iron tang in the air. The soft draft tugging toward the door. A crooked scratch in the desk lacquer like a smirk someone meant to hide. She didn’t move, let them watch, let them think she was fixed in place. Checking the room too openly would mark her in ways she couldn’t scrub clean.
On another scrap, she wrote pivot questions. Safe enough to be harmless, sharp enough to cut back into the main line if she was cut off.
Her thumb traced the file’s edge as she looped through the details again, matching them against her questions, tugging at any place where something didn’t sit right. The ones that felt evasive she marked, once, twice, then set the pen down before she pressed through the paper.
A slow breath in. Hold. Slow out. Counting heartbeats until they leveled. She’d need that tomorrow, the stillness she could wear like armor.
And then, the question she couldn’t put on any list.
The 'off record' question. A single chance to aim where she wanted, if she was willing to risk herself to do it.
She could ask about the potion she’d swallowed without choice. About whether he’d ever made a variant meant to reach into the mind and pull the strings. About the fake cure Kion mentioned. The seven-week trial.
Too much of her in those questions. Too much she couldn’t take back.
But this might be the only chance.
The thought of it still prickled at her calm, a memory of the first swallow, the way the knowledge of it settled heavy in the gut.
She had no one else to ask. Kion didn’t know. Caedern refused to answer. Which meant Tiran wouldn’t even blink before shutting her down.
Is there a variant of the cure that has a mind-control effect?
That one stayed in her head like a blade she kept hidden in her palm.
Tomorrow, she might finally get the answer.
If he answered at all.
Or she’d have to decide for herself... before they decided she wasn’t worth keeping at all.