Operative Augustine Storvrek of the Republic Central Bureau better known as the RCB rubbed his hands together, letting the dirt fall through his fingers.

  It dropped like it had something to confess.

  The lonely pair of footprints beneath it told the rest of the story. One set coming in. None going out. The dwarf’s last known presence, stamped into mud long since dried before a house that had seen too much work and not enough forgiveness.

  The house squatted in the middle of nowhere, stubborn and tired. Built big—too big—like it had once expected someone larger to fill it. But the furniture inside was dwarven, neat, repaired, worn smooth by repetition. Paintings hung on the walls: childish things, old things. No new art. No mess. No life spreading beyond its assigned borders.

  The remnants of a home gym sat off to one side, simple but cared for. The walls were scrawled with runes—dozens of them. All disarmed. Every one placed with some mad purpose.

  This place reeked of sorrow and hard work.

  “This place is a temple to paranoia and perseverance,” Augustine murmured.

  There was an aggrieved sigh behind him.

  “Gusty,” said Bartholomew Colt, “we’ve talked about the poetry. Details please.”

  Augustine—and definitely not Gusty—straightened and turned to regard his senior operative. Barry was an older Wolf Beastkin, grey fur creeping into his hair, sharp ears twitching constantly even while the rest of him slouched like a guardsman who’d signed on for the pension and stayed for the doughnuts. Crumbs dotted his jacket, yet his amber eyes were constantly on the hunt.

  “Lieutenant Bartholomew,” Augustine said, deciding the name Barry lacked sufficient gravitas for the discussion, “the walls are covered in disarmed runes, there are no signs of forced entry, and everything here has been repaired at least three times.”

  “I’ve told you before, it’s Barry or Lieutenant,” he said. “And that is a perfectly valid observation. So say that. Not the temple thing. We’re professionals. Tell me you don’t write this stuff in your reports.”

  “My reports are very detailed.” Augustine did not add that this was only true after he’d been yelled at for submitting what his superiors called a detective novel as an incident report and was forced onto a corrective writing course.

  “Look,” Barry continued, “you were chosen for this job because you’re good at it. This had my guvnor looking like he had an entire internal audit team crawling up his arse, so let’s not horse around.”

  “Did you get any idea why this is so important?” Augustine asked.

  “It’s a reported as an attempted murder of an unclassed. That makes it important,” Barry said. “What I don’t get is why we’re playing cloak and dagger. We’re hiding from the local plod, and we came in on transport connections expensive enough to make accounting cry.”

  “And you didn’t get told anything? I just got dragged onto the transport station.” He hadn’t argued. Augustine would never admit it to anyone, especially not the Lieutenant, but he might be somewhat of a fan of such secretive skulduggery.

  Barry shrugged. “All I got told was that eyes from up on high were invested.”

  “A mystery,” Augustine said softly. “Something dark must be going on.”

  “Or the kid and his dad had connections,” Barry replied. “Just because they ended up out here doesn’t mean they spent their whole lives in the arse-end of nowhere. I’m hoping the information packets on them catch up with us soon. Going in blind can help but all I’ve got is the basics.”

  “Lieutenant,” Augustine said, clinging to the title. “Why do you think central is so interested, what makes this kid important?”

  Barry sighed, then nodded. “You’re the one with all the poetry in your soul. Could be they pissed off the wrong people. Could be they wanted to disappear. Could be there’s treasure in them there hills. Either way my gut says, figuring that out is key.”

  Augustine nodded and stepped back. “Alright. Ritual’s ready.”

  He rolled out a mat, inscribing it with interlocking pentagrams, runes caught between them like labels on a particularly cursed Venn diagram. The air thickened. Time bent.

  The room filled with ghosts that didn’t know they were dead yet. Magic flowed through him as he invoked [Chonomatic Recall] and shining rings of power power circled his wrists offering up the tools to control his localised disruption of the fabric of time.

  Ghost of the past filtered past, shifting into familiar forms like smoke learning the shape of a bottle. Weeks bled through the air—slow, colourless days that didn’t bother naming themselves. A tall, heavy-set dwarf moved through the house, always alone. Always deliberate.

  The walls watched him. The furniture endured him.

  Barry stood beside Augustine, unobtrusive and solid like living embodiment of a filing cabinet. His ears twitched, amber eyes darting, tracking absence more than presence.

  No visitors.

  No suspects.

  The dwarf crossed to the breakfast table. Then the gym. Then back again to work on runes. The magic didn’t capture the work well but from his actions he’d looked to be an expert. Occasionally he'd pull out a bundle of paperwork which he'd spend some time glaring at before filing it all away. The routine repeated. Over and over. Like a man trying to wear a groove into the world.

  Augustine felt the dwarf’s loneliness settle in his chest. Not sharp. Not dramatic. Just heavy. The kind that didn’t complain because it knew no one was listening.

  “Well he was a boring sod. Routine’s stable,” Barry said, interrupting Augustine’s musing. “Too stable for a normal kid.”

  Augustine ignored his colleague and plunged himself into the mystery before him. He believed a certain gravitas was needed for such occasions.

  They watched the final days unfold.

  The dwarf entered the room and placed a heavy metal vial on the table. Notes said it was enough Ambrosia to start a turf war. Enough to turn friends into enemies and neighbours into corpses.

  He pulled out a bundle of paperwork. The spell couldn’t render it clearly—it was mostly focused on living things—but they saw enough. He added something to the top page once.

  Then he drank.

  “This is all wrong,” Augustine said, watching as the kid slumped forward eyes glassy.

  “Yeah,” Barry replied. “The kid filed that thing old to new, so why is he looking at the first page.”

  “I more meant the waste of life to drugs. Not—how did you notice his filing?”

  “Because I don’t get distracted by poetry. This is a murder attempt. I’d bet my badge on it. The kid wasn’t that desperate and definitely wasn’t that dumb.” Barry paused before giving his full attention over to his colleague, “Augustine what did you notice during the week preceding?”

  “He moved through his days like a man pacing the length of his own cell,” Augustine said. “Meals alone. Muscles worked raw. No indulgence. No deviation.”

  Barry just raised an eyebrow.

  “I’ll ignore the poetry this time as I don’t fully disagree. I just think he seemed like a man who was nearing the end of his sentence. He ate a balanced breakfast every morning. No stimulants. Trained for hours. Same time. Same order,” Barry said. “If he got some news that meant he felt he had to stay here don’t you think he would’ve been a little distracted. Would've changed things up before jumping straight to drugs?”

  “That’s why you mentioned the paperwork,” Augustine said.

  “Exactly,” Barry replied. “Every time he looked at it, he added to it. Checked it. It wasn't his friend but he wasn’t afraid of it.”

  “But something changed.”

  “Yeah,” Barry said. “Tell me you saw it. Facts, Augustine.”

  “He didn’t make breakfast. Didn’t go to the gym. Like he knew something was going to happen.”

  “Right. He left. Came back. Then an oh so obvious glance at paperwork.” Barry’s jaw tightened. “What was wrong with it?”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “He opened it.”

  “And?” Barry pressed.

  “He added it to the top page.”

  Barry’s eyes narrowed. “Which makes no sense. We saw him messing with the back pages mostly, everything was filed to the back. So our dwarf gets bad news brings it back to this orderly house where everything has it's place and does what? Take the time to stick something in exactly the wrong place? It'd been on top of the folder or not near it at all.”

  “And the fact he even looked at it in the first place means someone planned for us using a past-seer ritual.” Augustine added. Barry clicked his finger's in agreement.

  “You're right, we'd have found the paper filed right or wrong, but they wanted anyone who ran a ritual like this to see it,” Barry said. “The average brass would’ve found a neat little death by misadventure, or suicide if they decided they wanted extra work, with paperwork to back it up.”

  “That doesn’t explain how they got him to drink the Ambrosia. He didn’t hesitate.” Augustine felt the mystery slipping away. He could feel the shape of the crime and there was an answer out there but he could make it fit.

  Barry straightened. The slouch vanished. His ears angled forward.

  “Augustine, stop thinking of the dwarf as a kid or unclassed. Treat him like one of your usuals. What would be the obvious solution?” The Lieutenant's voice had lost all sense of levity, his words had the weight of lead to them.

  Operative Augustine paused. It took only a moment to follow the advice but once he did everything clicked into place.

  “Mind control. On an unclassed.” Augustine swallowed heavily. He’d not considered it because it was beyond taboo. It was the kind of lazy writing that ruined the trashier detective novels he certainly didn’t read in his spare time. It was a pathetic thing, a mystery enabled by an abomination.

  “Someone wanted this kid dead so much they were willing to piss off the Weave,” Barry continued. “There’s little it hates more than people using powers to mess with the unclassed. And mind magic is high on its shit list.”

  “Are you sure it’s mind control?” Augustine felt sick. Mind control was tightly controlled, magic gave many horrible ways to inflict pain and suffering on others but few were as reviled as invading another mind.

  “We can’t be sure. Still we’ll recommend the victim gets looked over by a specialist. But it all fits too neatly.”

  They spent a few minutes making notes, then walked back to the maximum extension of the chrono ritual. A month. But there was no sign of any other suspects; the dwarf lived alone, and the only thing that stood out was how frequently he came back with bruises.

  “Just more questions, let's check the end,” Barry said. “It’s unlikely but let’s see if they checked on him.”

  Augustine pushed harder. The body slumped. Hours of nothing. No one came to check, perhaps a day passed. And then—

  The dwarf vanished.

  “Run it back,” Barry snapped.

  They rewound. Again. Again. Finally, they caught it: a woman appeared looming over the table, concern and shock etched across her face.

  “Well fuck,” Barry said. The Wolf Beastkin had gone pale.

  “You recognise her?” Augustine turned to his colleague.

  “You don’t? That’s the Colossi.”

  Augustine’s mouth went dry. He could see it now, the elven lines, the slight hint of tusk. What really sold it was the stance, she floated in the air standing on nothing and yet radiating utter stability. The S-Tier Keeper. One of the greats whose Legend was heavy with titles, terrifying in their weight.

  “Well,” Barry muttered, already moving, “we should get going and send a report. I don’t want her breathing down my neck for updates.”

  “Who in the nether is this kid?” Augustine asked.

  Barry paused.

  “Wrong question, or at least not important right now,” he said. “The bigger question is, did whoever did this know about her?”

  Augustine swallowed.

  “Because if they did,” Barry finished, “we’re going to need backup. This screams professional hit, some dark genius shit.”

  Three figures gathered in a safehouse. Miles distant from Greywater, in the basement beneath a failed rest stop formerly called ‘Huckeyes Hovernight Hotel’ by a man willing to sacrifice clarity and business to a love of alliteration. It hadn’t panned out.

  The place had never prospered and had been shuttered long enough that the sign had fallen apart, leaving the chilling threat of ‘eyes Hover’.

  While it had been, at most, a mediocre hotel, its remote location and thick walls made it a five-star location for clandestine meetings. A feature being leveraged by a trio of shady figures. The current occupants were making use of the basement, the old cold room with its empty shelves playing host to a rare meeting between the shadowy cabal.

  “How did you idiots lose a fucking corpse?” Postmistress spat across the desk, her voice cracking out like a whip. The hooded woman stalked left and right, ignoring the empty seat at the plain table. She was broad and muscular beneath her robe, but her voice came out shrill. She seemed the kind of person to tear verbal strips off a service worker before folding their manager in half.

  “He’s not dead, the claim is still enforced,” came the voice of Assessor. He wasn’t cloaked or concealed; he was merely an extremely plain man of such mixed heritage that no single feature stood out. His suit was grey and nondescript, and his glasses’ generic wire rims were the type favoured by the frugal. He sat firm behind a clipboard, wielding the neat tables of numbers like a club as the two other people in the room glared at him, before turning back to each other.

  “Oh, beg my pardon. It’s so much better that you lost a vegetable. How is that little shit not dead?”

  “He would be dead if someone hadn’t come and saved him. It’s your team’s job to do the research and manage the connections. You’re the one who missed that he had someone on his side so powerful they maxed out the local essence monitors and had the connections to stop soul degradation! That’s someone from outside this shitty little town. I did my part; not our fault you didn’t do yours. Years of fucking work, infiltration, and keeping that stubborn, trap-obsessed bastard on the back foot, and you stuff it at the last minute.” The last member, a man going by the voice, wore a domino mask. A paltry protection against identification if it wasn’t for the magic emanating from it, which twisted his features and made it impossible to pick out what colour his hair was, let alone any other feature. He lounged in his chair, happily sniping at his colleague.

  “Curator, we aren’t here to assign blame,” Assessor sighed. “We have an agenda.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Assessor. It seemed that Postmistress was implying I was to blame for this situation.”

  “Me? Your poison didn’t fucking work!”

  “My observation team confirmed they saw him drink, under Curator’s encouragement, what should’ve been a lethal dose of concentrated essence. The plan was executed; the plan failed. It is not the first time this project has suffered such a setback. The target’s father was just as adept at surprising us.” Assessor shuffled his papers. “Now sit down and let us get to business.”

  “I almost miss that ornery old bastard. At least with him you knew what to expect,” Postmistress growled as she reluctantly took a seat.

  “Isn’t the point of traps that you don’t expect them?”

  “I was more thinking of the reckless use of runes, and don’t forget the explosives.”

  “I’m sure none of us have forgotten the explosives.” Assessor cut through the banter. “Speaking of which, our first item on the agenda is the absence of Draftsman. He believed he’d worked out a way to get further into the complex.”

  “So the new Draftsman’s dead? Isn’t that like the seventh one?” Postmistress laughed.

  “Eighth, actually. Surprisingly, this one survived, though given he was dragged out both blind and emasculated by obsidian shards, I suspect he will need to be replaced. The healing for such injuries is traumatic and seems to have broken his spirit.”

  “You’d never get me going down there. That dwarf was insane. Isn’t that your fault, Curator?” the hooded agent sniped.

  “He was like that before I ever got involved. Which you should know if you read your own dossiers.”

  “Please stop bickering; you’re just extending the time we have to spend here. Let’s get through the agenda, please.”

  “Alright, related to that point, I thought we weren’t meant to be going down there, you know, because of all the fucking unstable runic explosives,” said Postmistress.

  “The deep parts of the complex remain our goal. Certain risks will need to be taken, especially now that our chance to free up the arcane ownership of the complex has failed. As to the original point, Curator, I’ll need your help to explain why Draftsman is absent.”

  “Alright, but it’s getting hard to hide all these buggers disappearing. Can the next one just be a hidden operative? It’s not that small a town, but nearly everyone here is a vet or married to one. They pay far too much attention. Eight rune experts in five years is a pattern.”

  “Yes, Command has agreed that adding another agent to Greywater right now would be challenging. Especially given our next agenda point. It is possible that the RCB is going to be paying Greywater a visit.”

  “Well, shit. Maybe you should start planning for a new Curator then.”

  “Get fucked, Postmistress. What the nether, Assessor? Since when?” Curator exploded, no longer cool and collected. It was his turn to stand and stalk the room, kicking debris out of his way.

  “We’re not sure. Command intercepted something. Someone was floating his name and Greywater around.” Assessor slapped his clipboard on the table. “We have been meticulous. There is no evidence of our involvement with the target. Even a chrono ritual won’t tell them anything.”

  “I’ve touched a good chunk of the minds in that shitty town. If they send a proper mentalist, they’ll know something’s up if they do even a basic sweep.”

  “And if they ignore the doctored attribute sheet, the bullying and isolation, the grief, and the years of neglect that all explain his drug overdose, and drag over one of their handful of specialists, they might indeed suspect something. Which is why we have that idiot tycoon set up to take the fall.” Assessor sighed. This is why you had contingencies. The potential of this mission was huge, and yet was offset by endless setbacks. He was the second to hold the title Assessor; the first had been removed from the position for a lack of flexibility.

  And for letting the former priority target create a stockpile that was capable of punching a hole in the mountain. They still weren’t certain if it would be enough to eliminate their goal. Even if it didn’t the attention it would draw down would turn the mission into a most-likely suicidal dash for victory.

  Assessor was many things, but self-sacrificing was not one of them. That’s why he had colleagues.

  “We are going to go dark following this meeting. Watcher Protocol is in effect as of now. Limit all actions to passive engagements. If we believe that operatives are in town, you’ll be alerted and, if necessary, withdrawn. We have practised for this. We knew it was a risk.”

  “Says you; you’ll be safe in your bunker,” Curator grumbled, only to be spiked by a disapproving glare.

  “You mean the bunker near the unstable explosives crafted by a madman? Above a complex that these operatives might stumble into and trip who knows what kind of failsafes?” Assessor glared at his colleague before setting his shoulders and adjusting his notes.

  “Postmistress, given you’ll be operating out of town, your job is to find our missing target. Removing him and his claim to the complex remains our best option. Even if we can’t kill him, knowing who in the nether swooped in and grabbed him would be invaluable to understanding just what scrutiny we might come under.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard. Whoever they were, they blew up the transport gates they were in such a rush. No way there’s not a paper trail on that fuck-up.”

  “That’s not reassuring, Postmistress. This is your job! How don’t you know? The transport gates are rated up to peak B Tier. So that means our visitor was A Tier! Someone able to devour us like Assessor in front of a fresh tax report.” Curator spun from where they’d been walking.

  “At least A Tier,” Assessor whispered to himself. As the pair bickered.

  “What was that?” Curator turned, having not quite caught the words.

  Assessor sighed and shuffled his papers. “Don’t worry. Shall we move on to the next agenda point?”