The docks of Kentar were never silent—not even at this hour, when mist still clung low and the gulls hadn’t yet begun their shrieking chorus. The air was thick with brine and sweat, tar and rotting hemp, punctuated by the slap of waves against hulls and the creak of mooring ropes drawn taut.

  Gale leaned against a rust-streaked piling, arms crossed, watching a trail of fishblood run along the wooden planks toward the edge. Two weeks. Fourteen godsdamned days of following dead leads and listening to Ludmilla mock him for “expecting miracles from a city run by coin and crotch.” And now—finally—she claimed to have something.

  Her message had contained little. A name — Ressan. A place — The Hollow Knot. No certainty, no guarantees.

  Of course, she’d sent the boy.

  Movement caught his eye near the inner piers. A familiar silhouette stood beside one of the larger vessels—tall, dark hair tied back, that confident slouch in the shoulders as he gestured to a ship’s captain.

  Ezaryon.

  Even from this distance, Gale would have known him anywhere. The scent of the sea did little to wash away the words still lodged in his memory.

  “You became the son no one missed.”

  He looked away as the waves slapped harder against the stone.

  “Master Dekarios!”

  The voice cut through the clamor. Gale turned sharply.

  A boy was weaving between crates and dockworkers—black hair tousled over his brow, blue eyes darting about warily. He wore a dark jacket slightly too large for his slender frame.

  “Daimon?” Gale blinked. “You’ve changed your face.”

  “I do, every time I leave the Crescent,” the boy replied with a shrug. “Master Ludmilla says I’m too... conspicuous. Too red.”

  “So she taught you her tricks?”

  Daimon looked down quickly. “She tried. But every time I try to shift the pigments, I get stuck. To make them black, they’d have to absorb light differently. Denser strands. Different refraction—like you wrote in your third paper on chromatic manipulation theory—” He caught himself, face flushing. “I mean, I can feel it starting, but I can’t push it through.”

  Gale’s eyes sharpened. “But your hair is black.”

  “No. You see it as black. So does everyone else. But it hasn’t changed.” Daimon shifted, suddenly animated despite his awkwardness. “It’s just an illusion. Strong enough to hold unless someone actively dispels it.”

  “You’re casting an illusion powerful enough to fool an entire city?”

  “Just on whoever’s looking at me. It’s easier that way.” He hesitated. “I mean, it’s not that good...”

  “Let me get this straight,” Gale took a step back, studying him with the intensity of a scholar presented with an impossible theorem. “If one person sees you—or a hundred thousand—they’ll all see the same dark-haired, blue-eyed boy?”

  Daimon nodded, clearly uncomfortable. “Yes. But it’s just a lie. I can’t actually change, not like Master Ludmilla.”

  “How are you anchoring it? To yourself? To each individual observer?”

  “To myself, I think? It moves with me—"

  “And your power draw? Continuous or maintained?”

  “Continuous, but it’s barely anything—”

  “Barely anything?” Gale’s brow twitched. “Daimon, do you understand what you’re describing? A self-anchored, multi-target perceptual illusion with zero refresh lag?”

  “It’s not zero, there’s probably a few milliseconds—”

  “A few milliseconds.” Gale’s voice was flat with disbelief. “How long have you been maintaining this illusion?”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Since I left the Crescent this morning?”

  “How long can you hold it?”

  Daimon shrugged, missing the significance entirely. “I don’t know. All day? I’ve never really tested the limit...”

  Gale stared at him. The puppy was cleverer than he looked.

  He didn’t praise him. Didn’t comment on how casually the boy maintained something that would exhaust most mages. But he thought it.

  Daimon pointed toward the far end of the dock. “Master, I was told we should head that way—”

  “You already have master, Daimon,” Gale said, his voice softer now. “Just call me Gale.”

  “Really?” The boy’s face lit up with such pure joy that Gale felt a strange pang in his chest. “Then... Mast—I mean, Gale... you can call me Dai.”

  The Hollow Knot was wedged into a bend of broken paving stones near the fishmongers’ guild—a sunken tavern with faded red paint and a wooden sign etched with a knot that looped back onto itself until it became nonsense.

  A bartender who looked like he’d been grown out of the very wood he was wiping gave them a long, flat look as they entered.

  “Quiet,” Gale said under his breath, “and let me talk.”

  The barkeep didn’t ask what they were drinking. Just kept wiping the counter, and waited.

  “We’re looking for someone,” Gale said. “Goes by Ressan. Might’ve been here two nights ago.”

  The barkeep’s cloth didn’t pause, but his gaze sharpened. “Plenty of names in this place. Some stay. Some don’t. What’s your business with him?”

  Gale smiled faintly. “A misunderstanding about a shipment. Diamonds. Loose-cut, unmounted.”

  A few heads turned at nearby tables. No one spoke.

  The barkeep finally set down the cloth. “Try Lowbrick Street. East of the dye vats. That’s where the rats have moved.”

  “Rats?” Daimon asked before he could stop himself.

  “Old saying. When the cellars change hands, so do the routes. Shipments don’t vanish. They migrate.”

  They didn’t linger.

  Lowbrick Street lived up to its name. The cobbles were uneven, thick with tar and the oily residue of dye runoff. The air burned faintly in the lungs.

  Gale approached the first warehouse with purpose, studying the chalk marks near the loading dock. “Guild marks,” he murmured, tracing a finger along the symbols. “Recent. Someone’s been moving cargo through here.”

  The dock supervisor, a weathered woman with ink-stained fingers, looked up from her ledger. “You’re asking about diamonds? In this quarter?” She laughed, but it had an edge. “Nothing that valuable moves through here, friend. We handle dyes, textiles, cheap grain.”

  “What about three days ago?” Gale pressed. “A man named Ressan. Medium height, scar on his left hand, according to my source”

  Her expression shifted—just a flicker, but Daimon caught it. “Don’t know any Ressan.”

  “But you know someone who does.”

  She closed the ledger with a snap. “I know a lot of people. Most of them don’t appreciate strangers asking questions.” She stood, already turning away. “Try the Copper Anchor. Two streets over. They handle the... special cargo.”

  The Copper Anchor turned out to be a defunct tavern with boarded windows and a door that hung askew. But the loading platform behind it was active—men in dark clothes moving crates with practiced efficiency.

  Gale watched from the alley mouth. “Too organized for random smuggling,” he said quietly. “Someone’s running a proper operation here.”

  One of the workers noticed them and approached—a lean man with quick eyes and quicker hands. “You’re in the wrong place, gentlemen.”

  “We’re looking for Ressan,” Gale said. “About a shipment that went missing.”

  The man’s expression didn’t change, but his posture did. “Ressan’s not taking meetings. Hasn’t been for days. Word is he’s lying low after some trouble with the Harbor Authority.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The kind that makes smart men disappear for a while.” The worker glanced over his shoulder. “You should do the same.”

  They tried two more locations. A chandler’s shop where the owner went pale at the mention of loose diamonds. A boarding house where the landlord claimed Ressan had paid his rent through the month but hadn’t been seen since last week.

  Each lead felt promising. Each one crumbled to dust when they pressed deeper.

  By the time they reached a narrow alley behind the dye vats, Gale’s jaw was tight with frustration. The stench of chemicals was overwhelming here, and steam rose from grates in the street.

  Daimon slowed. Something had changed in the air—not a sound, not even scent, but a sensation that slid along the skin, electric and faint, like the moment before a spell collapsed.

  He turned toward a long warehouse with a rusted brass bell above its frame. Nothing unusual—shutters bolted, stone damp, front sealed. But just for a breath, the lines of it shimmered. Not illusion. Not a ward. Something else. A ripple, gone before it fully formed.

  He took a step closer. The sensation grew stronger, like standing too close to a lightning rod during a storm.

  “Dai,” Gale called, already ahead by several paces. “Come on.”

  The ripple vanished. The electric feeling faded.

  Daimon stared a moment longer, then forced himself to turn away.

  They questioned an old man sitting on a crate who muttered something about “white stones weighing too much” and laughed into his beard. A girl sweeping ash from a doorstep said she’d seen a barge unload crates at midnight, but they were gone by first light. A fishmonger claimed Ressan owed him money but hadn’t been around to pay it.

  Every lead seemed to point somewhere else. Every answer raised new questions. But none of it connected. None of it led anywhere solid.

  By the time they reached the dockside again, the sky had bruised further, and the wind had picked up.

  “Three hours,” Gale muttered, flipping through his notes. “Three hours, and we know Ressan exists, he’s in hiding, and someone’s moving valuable cargo through channels that officially don’t exist. But we’re no closer to finding him than when we started. All we have is ghosts and riddles.”

  He closed the notebook with a snap. “The bastard’s good at staying hidden.”

  Daimon, quieter than usual, kept glancing back down the alley.

  The shimmer hadn’t returned.

  But he’d felt it.

  And that meant something.

  Even if no one else believed it.