The Blank Bird

Kerrowyn Lightfoot had always preferred to do her worst work at night. The air was crisper, the silence fanged with potential, and the perpetual haze of chalk dust, burnt coffee, and ozone felt less like a nuisance and more like an elemental boundary keeping the day’s idiots at bay.

Her office bore all the marks of protracted battle. Half-corrected essays carpeted the desk and nearby floor, each bristling with angry red lines and looping commentary that was either witheringly sarcastic or, for a select few, extravagantly effusive. A cheese platter teetered on a stack of treatises about leyline resonance. Several pots of tea stood as silent testament to the war of attrition between caffeine and Kerrowyn’s frail circadian rhythm.

Lynx, her pseudodragon familiar, performed lazy figure-eights above the carnage, wings whispering as she glided through the drafts. Every so often, she would spiral close to Kerrowyn’s head and, with predatory timing, snatch a cube of dried jerky from her mistress’s distracted fingers before looping away to the window ledge for gloating consumption.

“Don’t get smug,” Kerrowyn muttered, flicking another cube into the air with the snap of her wrist. Lynx intercepted it with a neat snap of her jaws, landing on the lintel and arching her back in triumph. A film of pale lavender scales shimmered in the moonlight, so fine as to be almost transparent.

The Tower itself hummed with the kind of sentience that was rarely noticed in daylight. At night, its moods manifested in the breathing of the pipes, the sub-audible drone of leyline resonance bleeding through the walls, and the gentle, omnipresent tingle of static across one’s skin. It was not, strictly speaking, a haunted building, but rather a building that had grown tired of waiting for permission to be alive.

Kerrowyn hunched over a particularly egregious essay, someone had managed to conflate “leyline hysteresis” with “excessive arcane bloat,” which she privately admired for its audacity, if not its logic, and was about to underline the word “catastrophic” three times when the temperature in the room dropped by two full degrees. A pressure, like the inside of a tuning fork, settled in her chest. She raised her head.

Halli, the Tower’s Heart and resident demigod, materialized four feet to the left of Kerrowyn’s desk, radiant in the way a problem set is radiant when you’ve already solved it and are just waiting for someone else to notice. They wore the standard illusion, a woman-shaped shell, lavender skin, and hair that looked like spilled ink laced with diamonds, but the effect was muted, as if Halli had forgotten to color themselves in that evening.

Kerrowyn offered a polite, if perfunctory, nod. “Wasn’t expecting a social call. What’s up?”

Halli’s eyes, which contained a hundred tiny galaxies and zero empathy, blinked twice before responding. “I bring a message.” Their voice was impossible to localize; it emanated from the walls, the floor, the back of Kerrowyn’s teeth.

They held out a hand. Resting in the center of their palm, folded with obsessive precision, was a paper bird.

“That’s… mine.” She reached out, feeling the faint static cling that meant the bird was still semi-active. She recognized the cheap, teal-tinged paper from the batch she’d ordered for practical exams, and the rune sequence on its breast was her own design, specifically, the anti-snooping model she’d perfected last spring.

She had given only one of these to Alavara, the night before Team Seven left for Volfast. “For emergencies only,” she’d said, and the look on Alavara’s face had promised that she’d either burn it at the first opportunity or forget it at the bottom of her satchel forever.

The fact that it had returned at all was enough to short-circuit Kerrowyn’s brain.

She plucked the bird from Halli’s hand, careful to ground the minor air elemental inside. She placed the bird on the desk. It twitched once, then righted itself on its feet. With a flick and a murmur, she banished the residual charge. Lynx, sensing the mood shift, abandoned the window and perched on the back of Kerrowyn’s chair, her tail coiling protectively.

Kerrowyn unfolded the bird with surgical delicacy. She squinted at it, then flattened it against the desk under her palm.

It was blank.

“Shit,” said Kerrowyn, with the flat finality of a surgeon discovering the tumor was much bigger than anticipated. “That’s not right.”

Halli leaned forward, their face an ambiguous mixture of curiosity and algorithmic patience. “I detect no content. The bird was not intercepted in transit; the message was not erased by outside intervention.”

Kerrowyn’s mind whirred through the possibilities, fingers drumming a code on the desk. She checked the edges for micro-writing, latent sigils, anything that might explain the absence. Nothing.

“If it’s blank, it means they didn’t have time to write anything,” Kerrowyn said, almost to herself. “Or they couldn’t risk it. Or, fuck. Halli, how old is the message? How long ago did it arrive?”

Halli did not blink. “It arrived four minutes and thirty-six seconds ago. Direct path from Volfast. I diverted it from the standard landing site to you, per your previous standing order for urgent correspondence.”

Kerrowyn’s eyes flashed with an old, dangerous humor. “I’m going to murder her,” she said, with more pride than venom. “If she’s not already dead.”

She straightened in her chair, addressing Halli directly. “Can you sense her?”

Halli considered, their neck tilting just slightly too far to be human. “Not from this distance. She is not yet bonded to me as a Master. The link is theoretical. I would need an anchor, or else a relay point closer to Volfast.”

“Can you back-trace the bird’s path? Anything odd, anything that suggests she was on the move or being watched?”

“Negative,” Halli replied. “It was sent from a stationary point on the southern edge of the city. Coordinates match the location of the Order of Nemesis. The route was direct.”

Kerrowyn muttered, “Not good. Not good at all.” She closed her eyes, replaying every lesson, every screw-up, every hour she’d spent trying to turn Alavara into a survivor. Had it taken? Or had the Tower’s way of raising its prodigies doomed her to be noticed, hunted, devoured by some brute force that didn’t care about subtlety?

She reached for the comm-stone embedded in the desk, then thought better of it. Instead, she withdrew a strip of vellum and, with brisk, angry movements, scrawled a message in ink that bit the page like acid. She folded it, sealed it with her personal rune, and handed it to Halli.

“Get this to Isemay, wherever she is. Tell her it’s Code Black; absolute priority, no delegation. And do the same for Iliyria Sylren, over at APS headquarters. She’s the only one who knows what we’re up against if this turns out to be what I think it is.”

Halli took the paper, holding it with a delicacy reserved for either sacred texts or highly volatile substances. “As you wish, Kerrowyn, they are both currently in their rooms at the Tower, so they should arrive momentarily,” they said. “A warning: if the adversary is what you suspect, you will have limited time.”

Kerrowyn nodded once, every part of her radiating a sharp, hungry energy. “Time is overrated,” she said, and stood so quickly her chair skidded across the floor. Lynx leaped to her shoulder, claws digging in for purchase, but Kerrowyn didn’t flinch.

She swept the essay-strewn desk with one arm, scattering a blizzard of marked pages and half-gnawed cheese into the recycling chute. Lynx launched herself from Kerrowyn’s shoulder to Halli’s, then back, as if punctuating the moment with aerial punctuation marks.

Halli inclined their head, the approximation of a bow. “May the dice favor your gambit, Master Lightfoot.”

Kerrowyn grinned, wolfish. “They usually do. Otherwise, I'll cheat.”

She strode to the door, flung it open, and stepped into the phosphorescent half-light of the Tower’s inner hallways. The air was charged, crackling with the anticipation of an experiment about to go either transcendentally well or spectacularly bad.

Halli lingered for a fraction of a second, then dematerialized, folding the urgent notes into the arcane currents that ran through the Tower’s spine. Lynx watched, tail lashing, eyes narrowed to slits, before darting to join her master.

The Tower, which had lived through centuries of disaster and intrigue, sensed the pivot in its own mood. The air vibrated at a new, more dangerous frequency. The dominoes were already falling.

In the stairwell, Kerrowyn’s footsteps set off a ripple of magical lights, each one trailing behind her like the afterimage of a comet. Her mind raced ahead, assembling the pieces of the next move even as her feet carried her, unerringly, toward the sanctum where she knew Isemay and Iliyria would be waiting.

Time was overrated, yes, but if she didn’t move fast enough, Alavara’s blank message would be the last anyone ever heard from her.

Thanks for the Consult

The Divination Room was, as always, a study in unearned serenity: pale marbles that never stained, stained glass in a motif of spirals and open eyes, the floating mirrors, and, in the center, the scrying pool; oval, four meters long, filled with a vaporous blue fluid that refracted light with a moody, supernatural malice. There were three chairs around the pool, and at the moment two were occupied.

Isemay Misendris arrived first. She was always the first. At this hour her complexion was more porcelain than flesh; the white of her knuckles matched the white-blonde of her hair, both standing out sharply against the deep green of her robe. She sat with her back straight as a column, hands folded until the appointed time.

Iliyria Sylren was next, in the kind of rumpled, half-buttoned ensemble that would have made a tailor weep. She looked exhausted.

Kerrowyn Lightfoot entered last, trailed by the whisper of Lynx’s wings and the static-charged flickers of Halli’s noncorporeal form, who hovered just to the right of the threshold, seemingly as bored as any demigod could possibly be.

Iliyria slouched lower in her seat, arms crossed, eyes red-rimmed and sharp. “Whatever it is, Lightfoot, it better justify waking me before sunrise. Some of us have to run a city in the morning.”

Kerrowyn didn’t waste time with apologies or preamble; she never had. “It’s Alavara. She sent me an empty bird.”

At this, the two Masters stilled. Halli flickered at the periphery.

Isemay’s lips barely moved: “Explain.”

Kerrowyn held up the paper, still creased from her fingers. “Came through a direct ley channel, straight from Volfast. Bird’s mine, no evidence of tampering, arcanic or otherwise. She either couldn’t write, or wouldn’t risk it. Either way, she’s in trouble. They could all be in trouble.”

Iliyria’s eyes flicked, brief and wild, to the edge of the scrying pool, not at Kerrowyn, not at Isemay, but past them, as though searching for a witness or an exit. The effect was immediate and ugly; her habitual mask of tired authority gave way to something rawer, panicked. It happened only for a second, but Kerrowyn, whose entire life had been spent mapping the fault lines in other people’s composure, saw it plainly: Iliyria was not just professionally invested in the fate of these particular runners. She was terrified.

Kerrowyn pressed on, as was her way. “The message was sent from inside the Order’s headquarters. She may already be in custody, or worse”

The Tower’s Heart appeared between them, a spectral presence cast by a trillion pinpricks of shifting light. “You can see now the benefits of residence at the tower,” Halli said. “To be on hand for emergencies such as this. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to move in permanently?”

Iliyria gave Halli the finger, but in a way that could have been interpreted as a formal salute.

Isemay cut through the preamble. “I can’t waste more time. If she’s been captured or, if this is a trick, then Team Seven is already on a pyre.” 

The pool churned, throwing off a faint blue haze. Isemay’s hands moved above it, slender and quick, flicking small stones into the liquid at precise intervals. After three minutes, sweat had begun to bead on her brow. After seven, her breath had shortened. At ten, she pulled her hands away, her entire body shaking.

"Well?" asked Iliyria, voice soft.

Isemay stared at the pool as if daring it to contradict her. "There’s nothing. No signal. No resonance trace. If they’re dead, the echoes would still be here." She turned to Kerrowyn. "It’s as if the entire cohort has been locked behind a Privacy Partition. A really, really good one. Like—" she shook her head, "like mine. But better."

"That's not possible," Kerrowyn said, but she looked to Halli for confirmation.

The Tower’s Heart considered. "If Isemay cannot scry the target, then the source is either destroyed, or more likely, occluded by a ward."

Isemay interjected, “I thought Volfast outlawed magic use over a hundred years ago. How would they have access to something so sophisticated?”

Iliyria snorted. "Illegal just means the rabble can’t use it. The law, as ever, is written in disappearing ink for the people at the top."

Kerrowyn, eyes narrowing, asked, "Do we know what kind of magic? Is it brute-force, or something more subtle?"

Isemay wiped her palms on her robe, staring at the print as if surprised to find herself corporeal. "It's not brute force. It's beautiful. Elegant. Layered like… like a garden, or a trap designed by someone who spent a lifetime watching for scryers."

Iliyria leaned forward. "So the regime is expecting us."

"Of course they are," said Kerrowyn, exasperated. "But we’re not here to debate the foreign policy of the City Council. The problem is, my best student is in a cell or a box or gods know what, and an entire team of APS runners is with her. I teleported them there. I’ll damn well be the one to teleport their asses back."

Isemay looked up, the blue of the pool painting her cheeks. "You’re going yourself?"

"Someone has to." Kerrowyn’s gaze was hot and sharp, the point of a dagger testing for a seam.

Iliyria nodded. "I’ll go with you."

"Absolutely not," Isemay shot back, surprising even herself with the force of it. "You’re needed here. The city can’t be without you right now."

Iliyria’s jaw worked. "You don’t get to decide—"

"I do," Isemay snapped, and for a moment the air in the Divination Room went thick as soup. Even Halli seemed to draw back, their voice absent for several heartbeats. "If you’re gone and Lowshade pulls another stunt, the Watch will be running inquisitions before you get out of the city’s shadow. No. I won’t allow it."

Kerrowyn watched the interplay with a scholar’s detachment. "I agree. Sylren, you stay. We need you on the bench, not in the field."

Iliyria exhaled through her nose, but didn’t protest further.

Isemay turned to Kerrowyn, “are you sure you can handle this alone?”

Kerrowyn grinned, smile crooked. "I'm a Lightfoot," she said, as though that explained everything.

Halli, now re-solidifying into their more familiar guise, cocked their head. "If you succeed, Kerrowyn, you’ll be the first Tower Master to break into Volfast in seventy years. If you fail, the bards will write ballads about your hubris."

"Nothing new there," Kerrowyn said. She rose and nodded to both Isemay and Iliyria. "Thanks for the consult. If I don’t return, send someone with more subtlety next time."

She swept from the room, leaving the scrying pool to ripple and subside in her wake.

Iliyria stared after her, then turned to Isemay, her voice stripped of bravado. "She’s going to get herself killed one of these days."

Isemay’s hands shook as she gathered the scattered stones. "We all are, if we keep doing this job. But I’d rather be her than anyone else. At least she has a reason."

Halli, silent for a moment, resumed their gentle, omnipresent thrum. "I will watch. If the leyline shifts, I’ll send word immediately."

Isemay nodded. "Thank you."

"Next step," Isemay continued, "is informing the Watch. They must be alerted in case of an incident."

Iliyria groaned. "Lowshade’s going to love that. I’ll schedule the meeting for sunrise."

Halli almost smiled. "Shall I arrange coffee and a city-sized supply of patience?"

Iliyria grunted.

They all stood there for a while, not speaking, watching the blue water turn gray as the Divination Room’s magic dimmed with the hour. Above and below them, the city shuddered and turned in its sleep, dreaming of crisis.

Pseudodragon Sitter

Kerrowyn’s chambers looked like the den of an unrepentant hoarder: books and spell components on every flat surface, a tangle of maps and half-burned candles, several pairs of boots (none matching), and a single armchair that looked as if it had survived five wars and three restoration efforts. By the light of the lanterns she’d left burning, the place was even more chaotic, each shadow deepening the sense of frantic, last-minute packing.

Lynx watched from her usual perch atop the coat rack, eyes narrowed into suspicious slits, tail flicking in a slow, martial rhythm. She had known from the moment Kerrowyn started making “that face” that something disagreeable was afoot.

Kerrowyn did not waste time with apologies. She strode to the armchair, grabbed Lynx’s favorite blanket (stolen, years ago, from the Headmaster’s suite), and stuffed it into a battered carpetbag. Then came the brush with the silver bristles, Lynx’s scale polish (lemon-rose scented, which Lynx would deny under torture that she enjoyed), and a full pouch of beef jerky. Kerrowyn dumped all of it, plus the half-finished treatise she was meant to grade over the weekend, into the bag.

Lynx made a noise, a small trilling sound that belied her uncertainty.

Kerrowyn shrugged, not looking up. “I’m leaving for a bit. No longer than a week or two. You need to stay.”

Lynx snorted, a puff of purple smoke emitting from her nostrils.

Kerrowyn finally met the familiar’s eyes. “I’m sorry, but be honest with yourself, Lynx. You are not built for stealth. You’re a shade too… distinctive.” She gestured at Lynx’s wings, which flared in affront, then subsided.

Lynx began to prowl, making a show of crouching and moving with silence, as if to say “I’m very good at being invisible, in fact, I’m the best at it.”

Kerrowyn grinned. “You’re the best at being invisible when no one is watching. As soon as you’re being observed, you can’t help showing off. That’s why you’ll be safer here, with Pembroke.”

At the mention of the name, Lynx’s posture changed from combative to deeply skeptical.

“He’s more competent than he looks, and he’s still the best abjurer in the city. Besides, I need someone to keep an eye on the place while I’m gone.” Kerrowyn reached for the comms spell, then remembered her audience and opted for a different approach. “Halli,” she called aloud, “can you open a door to Pembroke’s quarters?”

The Tower’s Heart answered, this time in the voice of a slightly exasperated personal assistant. “He is asleep. Should I wake him?”

“He’s always asleep at this hour. Just open the door.”

A soft, shimmering sound, and the back wall of the closet shifted seamlessly into a passage. On the other side was a snug, book-laden room, at the center of which a very confused Master Pembroke sat up in bed, blinking as if the world had changed species on him overnight.

Kerrowyn strode through, bag in hand, and tossed it at him. “I’m going on vacation,” she said, in a voice that suggested the vacation would include murder. “Watch Lynx for me.”

Lynx padded through, wings folded and jumped into the bed. She sat at Pembroke’s feet with the air of a cat forced to share quarters with a dog. The old wizard glanced down, then up, then down again. “You’re… what?” he managed.

“Vacation,” Kerrowyn repeated, already backing into the closet. “I’ll be back in a few days, a week at most.”

Pembroke opened his mouth to object, but Lynx had already twined herself up around his neck in a lavender coil, tail dangling like a delicate feather boa. She made a small, undignified growling noise, less threat, more declaration of temporary alliance.

Kerrowyn winked at the duo. “You’ll be fine. Don’t let her eat your eyebrows.”

Before Pembroke could form a single coherent protest, Kerrowyn had closed the door, leaving him alone with Lynx, a bag of familiar comforts, and a sense that the city’s hierarchy had shifted in some ineffable, dangerous way.

Suiting Up

Kerrowyn’s last stop before the jump was the closet, a misnomer, really, since the “closet” was a warded cube built into the outer wall, reachable only by a panel disguised as part of the bookcase. She ducked inside, yanking the door behind her, and let the dark swallow her for a heartbeat before she flicked the switch that lit the closet from floor to ceiling in a sterile, surgical blue.

Everything in here was black: leather trousers and fitted vest, gloves, and a long coat etched on the inside with runes of concealment so fine they looked like the residual pattern left behind after staring at the sun. Kerrowyn stripped off her Tower livery, tossing it carelessly to the floor.

She dressed quickly, with the economy of someone who had done this before, many times, too many to count. The coat was heavy, lined with pouches for potions, climbing tools, vials of pre-cast spell effects that could be activated with a squeeze. She clipped her lockpicks to her belt, and checked the small, lethal daggers in each boot.

The runes on the coat tingled as she cinched the straps. They were fresh, painted only last month by a journeyman enchanter who owed her a favor. She’d always liked the way the magic made her feel less substantial, as if she could walk through walls or vanish from memory at a moment’s notice.

Next came the vials, two healing potions, one potion of invisibility, two potions of disguise self. She tucked them into her inner vest, then ran her fingers over the edges of the pocket, reassuring herself they were all present and accounted for. She strode out of the closet.

On one of the side tables was a squat pot of flowers; orchids, which grew with a stubbornness that Kerrowyn admired. She drew one of her throwing daggers, tested its balance, and with a single, casual flick sent it through the air. The blade spun in a perfect arc, slicing the center blossom in half before embedding itself, quivering, in the opposite wall. Then the blade jerked free, returning to her outstretched hand. Kerrowyn smiled. The enchantments were tuned just right.

She wiped the petal residue off on her sleeve. As she did, a scrap of paper floated down from the pocket of her jacket. It was the blank message from Alavara, the bird’s payload, battered and empty.

Kerrowyn picked it up, held it to the nearest mage lamp, and stared for a long moment. There was nothing to see, no code, no trace, not even the indentation of a pen. For a second she thought about sending a message back, something sarcastic, maybe, or just “don’t die before I get there, kid.” But that felt wrong.

She folded the blank note into a tight square, then, with a small grunt of irritation, crumpled it in her fist and tossed it into the recycling bin.

Time to go.

She made her way, with haste, to the room the Tower had designated for teleportation. Halli cleared a path for her, shortening hallways and spinning staircases so that Kerrowyn had only to walk in a straight line. When she entered, the silence of the small circular chamber seemed to taunt her.

Kerrowyn closed her eyes, centered her breath, and focused on the leyline signature she’d memorized years ago. The Volfast tower hadn’t had a master in decades. Who knew what awaited her there. There was risk, but not enough to matter, not compared to the risk of waiting even a minute longer.

She drew her wand, tracing a complicated circle on the floor at her feet. The mage lamp light stuttered once, then again, then snapped off entirely as she disappeared in a flash of blue-tinged shadow.

For a moment, the room was empty and still, save for the hum of static where the teleport had discharged.

Halli appeared then, faint and non-corporeal, arms folded and gaze lingering on the spot where her Master had vanished.

“Good luck,” the Tower’s Heart whispered, and their voice was as close to tender as the city’s magic would allow.

Her Element

She rematerialized with the familiar nausea of leyline travel, shoulders hunched, vision stippled with afterimages, and the taste of ozone on her tongue. The Volfast Tower’s teleportation room was a relic, bare rock walls, a squat circle of tarnished silver inlaid with hairline cracks, and the stench of old, unrefined magic. Where Halli’s presence had filled every inch of home with a hum of arrogant, insistent sentience, here the magic was quieter, and unmistakably wary.The light was wrong. Instead of Halli’s warm, calculating pulse, the wards flickered like dying embers, a sad echo of sentience that limped along out of habit rather than will.

Kerrowyn took an inventory of herself. All limbs present, runes humming, boot laces tied. Good. The chill was immediate and total, as if the room itself objected to a stranger’s presence but was too polite (or too afraid) to say so aloud. She scanned the perimeter.

Kerrowyn straightened, rolling her shoulders as she adjusted to the local ley signature. It was sour, like water gone bad, and prickled at the base of her skull in a way she had only experienced the night Lavan Edor had tried to rip open a portal to the afterlife. Interesting. She tucked that information in her pocket for future use, then withdrew her consciousness from the leyline. She couldn’t rely on it, not here, Volfast was renowned for tracking any use of magic within its city walls.

The only exit was a heavy oak door, and when she went to open it, she found it locked. She grunted, considering her approach, before she tried again, this time reaching her consciousness to gently brush against the Tower’s, asking permission, not demanding obedience. It worked, and she found herself in a well-appointed, if not a bit dusty, Wizard’s library. It was smaller than the Tower’s in the Capitol, but that didn’t surprise her. This Tower was made as a home for one Master, not a cohort and a veritable army of student and apprentices.

A glint between the ranks of untouched folios snagged Kerrowyn’s peripheral vision: something small and reptilian, coiled atop a weathered edition of The Law of Manifest Symmetry. At first she dismissed it as a trick of the lamplight, but the gleam shifted, resolving into a muted brass and then, with a slow, deliberate unfurling, the narrow head of a pseudodragon. Its wings were drawn close to its body, the tail wrapped in a perfect spiral around a starfruit, which it cradled as a dragon might a gold piece.

The creature’s eyes, slit black and full of measured disinterest, regarded Kerrowyn with the precise disdain of one academic observing another’s failed experiment. She slowed, nonthreatening, and the small dragon licked its lips with a forked, electric blue tongue. It considered her, then the fruit, then her again, as though weighing which would prove more dangerous. When she extended a hand, palm up, the pseudodragon met it with a careful, weightless step, placing the starfruit like an offering in her palm. Kerrowyn grinned, already this creature was far friendlier than Lynx on their first meeting but nearly dropped the fruit when the small creature in front of her opened its mouth and spoke. “Another visitor! Already more in the past week than the past thirty years combined.” The brass pseudodragon flicked its tail, its eyes alight with curiosity. “The others brought me my missing books, and,” it nodded its head towards the fruit, “sustenance. What do you have to offer?”

Kerrowyn held the starfruit with a reverence that bordered on mockery, weighing it in one palm and the pseudodragon in the other. She had spoken with more varieties of familiar, infernal, and extraplanar entity than she had cousins, and yet the sound of this creature’s voice, smoky, androgynous, with a faint lilt of paternal exasperation, ticked a box in her mind marked impossible. Pseudodragons did not talk. They chirped, they pried, they manipulated with the patience of saints, but never once had one addressed her in the Lower Tongue.

She said as much, and the pseudodragon, who looked, on closer inspection, to be at least double Lynx’s size and several centuries older, shrugged in a manner that was all too human.

“I am Abraxos,” it said, flexing its wings and sending a dusting of iridescent dust into the air. “And I’m special.” The declaration was so frank, so perfectly unadorned, that Kerrowyn’s lips parted in a laugh before she could stop herself. It was a sound as much of admiration as surprise.

“Special, are you?” she replied, setting the fruit atop a bookpile and crouching to eye level. “You talk. That’s new.”

Abraxos preened, stretching a wing for effect. “I do many things that are new. I’m not the only guardian here, just the only one worth talking to.” He cocked his head, the sinuous crest along his skull rippling. “You’re not here for the library.”

“Not unless you have a copy of ‘How to Breach a Theocratic Dictatorship Without Spilling Your Own Blood.’” Kerrowyn reached up and ran a finger along the edge of the shelf, feeling the steady, low-frequency buzz that meant the shelf was a vertebra in some larger, sleeping animal.

"You mentioned other visitors?" she asked, letting her hand rest just above the pseudodragon’s head. "You said there were more in the last week than the last thirty years. Who?"

Abraxos let the silence grow deliberate, as if weighing how much to say and how much to let her guess. "Eight," he said at last, savoring the consonant. "One—" here he paused, assessing her with a sideways, eyelidless glance, "a dragonborn, scales, blue; two elves, two humans, a tiefling that they kept tethered to a leash, and two more; one that looked human but tasted of the sea, and one that looked human but tasted of the grave. They entered through the tower’s teleportation room, lost and underprepared. They nearly destroyed the workshop on Level Three.”

Kerrowyn felt a cold, metallic taste at the back of her tongue. "Team Seven," she said.

"Is that what you call them?" Abraxos flicked his tongue, a blue ribbon out, then pulled it back with a rapid-fire clack of teeth. “They broke things. Not the good kind of breaking. But they were determined.”

Kerrowyn’s mind snapped through the list, assembling faces and dossiers. “So they’re alive. Or were, when you saw them.”

“They were very much alive.” The pseudo-dragon did not blink. “They lingered only long enough to find what they were seeking. I assisted them, in exchange for a modest retainer.”

Kerrowyn snorted. “Let me guess: books and fruit.”

“Among other things.” Abraxos twined his tail, savoring the moment. “And now you are here, which means you’re either their shepherd or their hunter.”

“The former,” Kerrowyn said. “Though sometimes I wonder.”

“The shepherd always wonders,” said Abraxos, and for a moment he seemed less a familiar, more a philosopher in miniature. “They left through the main stairwell, toward the city proper. You may follow, if you wish. The Tower here has already accepted you, as much as it accepts any living thing.”

Kerrowyn considered this, glancing up at the dark ribs of the ceiling, feeling the weight of unseen eyes. “That easy, huh? I didn’t even bring it a gift.”

“You brought yourself,” said Abraxos. “The Tower is lonely. You know how it is. It remembers every Master, and it misses being ruled. Would you like to stay? It’s been too long since it belonged to anyone.”

Kerrowyn barked a laugh, her voice bouncing off the stacks, sharp as the crack of a deck being shuffled. “I’m flattered, truly. But I’m spoken for.” She curled a finger at the pseudodragon, who allowed himself to be scratched under the jaw with something resembling dignity. “I’m just here to collect my strays and go home.”

Abraxos cocked his head, as if unconvinced this was the wisest course of action, but then nodded towards a door on the far side of the room.

Kerrowyn thanked Abraxos with a quick, sardonic bow and slipped through the indicated door. The Tower’s old bones creaked contentedly at her passage, and as she descended the tight, winding stairwell, she felt the pressure of its attention ease, like a host, satisfied with the quality of their guest, turning their energies elsewhere.

The stair dumped her into a small atrium on the ground floor. The exit was a slab of black steel, so overdetermined it made her smile: the city’s taste for the theatrical had only grown in the years since the schism. She listened at the door. The air outside was so dense with cold that it hummed like a captive wire.

She opened the door a crack. The first thing to hit her was the cold, a physical presence, not just temperature but a purity of intent: Volfast didn’t just want newcomers to know they were unwelcome; the city required them to feel every inch of it in their marrow. The wind clawed at Kerrowyn’s face, slipping through the seams of her coat and slicing through her gloves as if they were a polite suggestion.

The streets, hard, geometric, scrubbed of any color that might admit the possibility of joy, were empty of all but a few guards making their rounds. Even the lamps seemed to resent their own existence, casting down sickly wedges of light that made every alley look like an open grave.

Kerrowyn stepped out onto the stoop, boots skating for half a second on the glazed cobblestones before she caught herself and resumed moving. She stuck close to the walls of buildings, trusting the coat’s runes and her own smallness to shield her from the notice of the guards. She followed the map in her mind, an imperfect, years-old impression, but the skeleton of the city had not changed. At each corner, she paused, eyes half-lidded as she watched the movement of the shadows. Not the obvious ones, cast by candlelight or the architecture, but the other ones: the liquid, silent crawl of darkness that stuck to the ankles of lamp-posts and the ragged fangs of iron fencework. She knew what to look for, and it was not the guards.

She moved south, threading a route between the squat, slate-roofed buildings and the high, iron-wrought fences that marked out the old noble compounds. The cold bit at her nose and ears, and she pulled the collar higher, careful to keep her hands exposed and ungloved, less suspicious, easier to show submission if stopped.

Kerrowyn stalked through the streets, every muscle in her body alive with the old, predatory anticipation.

This was her element.