It was late morning in the coastal trade city of Emeston, a city of gold and squalor, of riches and crime, where two youths stood in the cluttered workroom of a dead man, both silently caught up in their own thoughts and the urgent distractions of their emotions. Neither of the youths conformed to what would be considered human features, each showing the faint effects of over-exposure to warping magic. As with all such wraiths, their inhuman traits were as markedly different as their origins.
One, an eighteen year-old girl with a frame of coiled muscle only slightly softened by the lushness of her curves, had skin so darkly purple that in the right light, it appeared nearly black. Her eyes and hair were a bright shade of violet, and though the room was too well-lit to tell, they had a faint glow to them. Her name was Allana, and Emeston was the only home she had ever known–for better or ill. Her wraith traits were the heritage of some ancestor, as was the case for most of the wraiths in the Realm.
The other figure in the room, an androgynous boy a couple years younger than Allana, had only become a wraith recently, and his appearance reflected the tragic nature of the manifestation that had warped his body. His naturally dark skin was tinted by a gray pallor that gave him the appearance of a fresh corpse, while his hair was bleached to an uncanny bone white. His eyes, most unsettlingly, were the color of still wet blood, brighter crimson than the stains still scattered throughout the house they stood in.
The boy’s name was Tenebres, though he often went by Seo, and were it not for his wraith traits, his most noticeable feature would be his androgynous curves, a measure of solar softness that ran counter to his lunar identity. This was not a product of his transformation, but rather an aesthetic he purposefully cultivated, complete with cosmetics on his face and clothes as tightly bound as Allana’s.
Unlike Allana, Tenebres had only recently come to Emeston, in the days following the same unfortunate incident that transformed his body and given him a gift he preferred not to discuss, but he and the streetwise orphan had become fast friends, and their connection had quickly bloomed into something neither was willing to call a relationship but which was equally satisfying to the both of them.
Before Tenebres’s eyes floated his stats, in the vague way notifications could.
Tenebres
Level: Novice
Gifts:
[Gift of the Void]: +5 will and charm
[Gift of the Evoker]: +2 to coordination, knowledge, and focus
Attributes:
Strength: 3
Resilience: 4
Stamina: 4
Coordination: 7 (5 + 2)
Speed: 4
Will: 11 (6 + 5)
Knowledge: 9 (7 + 2)
Focus: 7 (5 + 2)
Awareness: 6
Charm: 10 (5 + 5)
Mystical Well: 10
[Gift of the Void]
Level: Novice
Experience: 57%
Embrace the Void
Abilities:
[Void Invocation] - Active, Summon - Open a gate and beckon a fiend to cross over. Nature and power of the fiend as well as ability cost varies based on the strength of the invocation. Sufficiently powerful fiends may be difficult to control. Moderate duration.
[Sacrificial Victim] - Active, Final - Make a physical attack that does a small amount of dark damage on a hit. If this hit kills the target, receive a moderate boost to all physical or mental attributes for a lesser duration. Minor focus cost.
[Enshadowed Soul] - Boon - Major boost to will and charm.
[Gift of the Evoker]
Level: Novice
Experience: 39%
Advance your theoretical and practical knowledge of evocation
Abilities:
[Novice Evocations] - Spell - Gain access to Novice level evocations, utilizing your mystical well as a resource. Spells require study in order to learn.
[Arcane Mind] - Boon - Lesser boost to coordination, knowledge, and focus.
Augments:
[Blood Magic] - Void, Evoker - Passive - You may take damage in order to enhance the power of your evocation spells.
Tenebres sighed. He dismissed his attributes and put down the battered lantern he had been inspecting in an effort to keep his hands busy. Why Geoffrey, their late mentor and master assassin, had felt the need to keep all of this crap, he would never know. Geoffrey was beyond the ability to question now.
“We need to decide what to do next,” Tenebres finally said.
Allana blinked at his words, as if coming out of a reverie. Tenebres’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully–he had caught his partner spacing out no less than four times in the brief hour or two they had been awake. That kind of inattentiveness was extremely unlike the normally paranoid, suspicious girl.
The confusion and conflict obvious in her expression was just as uncharacteristic, and Tenebres found himself moving closer to her without thinking, wrapping an arm around her waist.
“I… I don’t know.” Allana’s voice was soft, almost lost, far cry from the domineering confidence she typically projected. Not that he could blame her, really. Just the night before she had seen the death of her friend and mentor, the first person to show her she had worth, at the hands of her adoptive father, the crimelord Telik, who she herself then killed not long thereafter. That was bound to shake anyone to their core.
Tenebres blew out a breath. “Okay. Well, let’s start from the top. We can try to go into business without Geoffrey.”
“No.” Allana’s voice hardened a little, and she went so far as to jerk her head in a tiny shake. “No. I’m done being an assassin. I don’t… I’m just done with that.”
Tenebres’s eyebrows lifted. For months, as long as they had known each other, the pair had been training with Geoffrey to be assassins, completing an assortment of jobs, including taking down two of the man’s marks themselves.
But that hadn’t been all they had done with Geoffrey. For whatever reason–he had always been vague on why–Geoffrey had spent as much time or more hunting monsters than people, and even those people he took contracts on had accepted forbidden gifts that marked them as needing destruction. More of their time, in fact, had been spent killing minor and lesser monsters than anything else.
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“There is the other part of his work,” Tenebres suggested cautiously.
“The monster killing, you mean?”
Tenebres nodded. “How does that sound?”
“That… I think I might be able to-”
Allana’s response and the small smile that had just started to turn up at the corners of her mouth, were both interrupted by a small, polite knock at the front of Geoffrey’s manor house–which was odd, considering that the front door of the place had been torn off.
Tenebres looked to the hall in surprise–and by the time he looked back, Allana was gone, no doubt vanished behind one of the powerful illusory veils her gift of stealth allowed her to make.
Well, at least that was a little more like the Allana he knew. As jumpy and ready to scrap as an alleycat. It was odd to be pleased by such a thing.
“Guess I’ll go see who that is,” Tenebres muttered dryly to himself.
#
The knocking continued as Tenebres moved down the hall of Geoffrey’s manor, incessant and firm but still polite. By the time Tenebres reached the front hall, his gaze carefully avoided the bloodied and battered rooms to either side of the hall. He was fairly certain he knew who was knocking, but he called out nonetheless, “Who is it?”
“It’s Alleghy.”
The healer’s quavering voice, like brittle iron, was unmistakable. Silently, Allana reappeared behind Tenebres and nodded her head. The man was standing just to the side of the gaping doorway, his hand knocking politely on the door frame.
Alleghy was a tall man, grown stooped in his middle age, with drooping features. He was a wraith as well, with a pair of horns curling over his bald, liver-spotted pate and eyes of solid, glossy black.
The healer gave them a curt nod, but there was something soft in his normally professional, interrogatory gaze. “May I?”
Tenebres took a quick step back, gesturing to the workroom at the end of the hall. Alleghy didn’t need to ask why the pair disdained both the late assassin’s office and his lounge. He had seen what had become of them during Geoffrey’s fight with Telik.
They weren’t even settled in the cluttered room before Allana was asking, “Is Geoffrey…” She seemed unable to find the words to finish her question.
Alleghy took her meaning without further details. “Laid to rest, in a crypt he paid for himself, years ago. No one can disturb his body without provoking the ire of the Healer’s Association, the Golden Council, and the Warden's Office.”
“And Telik?” Tenebres asked.
The healer snorted. “I threw him in the fountain at Rainbow Square.”
Both youths couldn’t help a huff of dry laughter. They had, not so long ago, hunted a dangerous monster in the vicinity of the reeking neighborhood that the most offensively odorous of Lowrun’s businesses had collected in. It was a fittingly disgusting place for the crimelord’s corpse to be thrown–and a public one at that.
“Word has already begun to spread,” Alleghy told them, answering the question neither had asked. “My information network doesn’t begin to compare to Geoffrey’s, but even I can tell the city is already holding its breath. Given another day or two…”
“It’ll mean war,” Allana mused, a small frown creasing her pert lips. “I hadn’t thought about that in the moment.”
Tenebres felt his brow furrow. “I don’t think I understand. War?”
“Telik was the most powerful crimelord in the city,” Allana explained, her tone thoughtful. “None of his lieutenants can step into his shoes, and even this hag he was working with will have to tread carefully until she has a new partner as potent as he was.”
“And that’s forgetting his legitimate connections,” Alleghy pointed out. “Telik made his wealth as a fence to many of Highwalk’s richest merchants, and had no small sway on the Golden Council.”
“Which means the goldshits will be sending feelers down here for a replacement too,” Allana groaned in realization. “There’ll be blood in the streets before the week is out. That will require a warden presence to crack down. And that means riots. Unrest. Tension between the upper and lower cities…”
“Indeed.” Alleghy looked more strained, his face more lined, with each link in Allana’s cascade of logic. “I suspect Emeston is looking ahead to a long and bloody transitional phase in the coming months.”
“Which brings us back to our conversation from earlier,” Tenebres pressed. “What’s done is done. We need to figure out how to move forward.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Alleghy confessed. “Might I know what you’ve considered thus far?”
Allana gave the healer a closer look, some suspicion creeping back into her gaze. “Why do you want to know?”
The old man offered a tired smile, too gentle to rightly be called a grin. “Come now, Allana. Surely you must’ve realized by now that I’m not simply an old business partner of Geoffrey’s.”
Tenebres took a sharp breath. “You’re like him. The monster hunting part.”
Allana looked at him sharply, then turned back to Alleghy, studying him more closely.
The healer chuckled softly, lifting a long-fingered hand as if to gesture for a pause. “No, nothing so great as that. I’m not secretly a battle-gifted or something of that sort. But people like Geoffrey, they need help too. A… mutual friend, let us say, introduced us several years back.”
“That’s why he sent us to you, after the fight with Sloan,” Allana intuited.
“Indeed. Having a healer you can trust in a place like Lowrun… I should think the value is obvious. But to put that aside, if you wouldn’t mind, we were speaking of your plans from here.”
“We were,” Tenebres acknowledged. “I think we had decided-”
Allana cut him off. “Don’t waste your breath, Seo.”
Tenebres arched an eyebrow at her, silently asking for an explanation. She gestured at Alleghy with her chin.
“He’s got a plan for us. Don’t you?”
Alleghy’s wrinkled brow climbed. “Well. As sharp as Geoffrey claimed you to be, aren’t you?” The healer patted the air in a calming motion. “You make me sound so sinister. I have no hold over either of you. I would simply like to offer… Let us call it a recommendation.”
Tenebres looked to Allana for her thoughts. The wraith girl simply shrugged.
Seeing no negative response forthcoming, Alleghy reaching into a fold of his robe to pull out a folded sheet of paper. Tenebres regarded the letter with as much suspicion as Allana while Alleghy folded it open.
“I mentioned that Geoffrey and I met by the intercession of a mutual friend. Though I was unaware of it, Geoffrey had apparently remained in contact with him for some time, informing him of the goings on in the city. In particular, he apparently spoke of you two in no small detail.”
“Us?” Allana asked. Judging from her tone, the words had burst out with little thought.
“Yes, you. I assume, based on the tone of this response, that he spoke of you quite flatteringly, at that.”
A flutter of suspicion passed through Tenebres’s mind, while Allana still seemed too struck by the idea of her mentor complimenting her to think out the implications. “And how is it you came into possession of this response? It seems quite fortuitous timing.”
“Suspicious…” Alleghy noted to himself. Tenebres wondered if he was even aware of his constant commentary. “But you would be, wouldn’t you? The timing was at once fortunate and unfortunate. My friend himself came to my doors in the early hours of the morning, shortly after I laid Geoffrey to rest. He was mere hours too late to save your master’s life.”
The words provoked another immediate outburst from Allana. “He was here!?”
“Indeed.”
“Was,” Tenebres noted. “He arrived just hours ago, and he’s gone already?”
Alleghy sighed, the sound infinitely weary. “He is.” Another hand, lifted slowly, forestalled any further outbursts. “I won’t pretend to understand, but apparently, Geoffrey’s death changed things, somehow. My friend was forced to move in a way I suspect he did not want to.”
“You expect us to believe that?” Allana immediately shot at the man. The numb confusion that had defined her since the night before had vanished as quickly as the morning mist. Tenebres was relieved to see the girl’s customary temper bubbling up, especially as he felt the same.
“I expect nothing of you,” Alleghy clarified, his tone sharp as a scalpel, reminding Tenebres more of how the healer had carried himself the first night they met, unbowed by his friend’s death. “Sebastian, my old friend, wrote this letter quickly, and bid me give it to you, as well as any assistance I could, as Geoffrey would’ve, regardless of your decision.”
“Decision?” Tenebres echoed.
“See for yourself,” Alleghy told him, holding out the letter.
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