Origins: Kerrowyn Lightfoot - Part V

Part V: Severance

Welcome, Master Lightfoot

The Heart of the Tower did not resemble the chambers above, nor any corridor or alcove within the Capitol’s mundane boundaries. It was a room built for no one, and therefore perfectly suited to the rare moments when one of the Tower’s own needed to be remade.

The stairs spiraled inward, not upward, tracing a logic that only the magical or mad could comprehend. At the base, Kerrowyn found herself standing on a floor that was not a floor at all, but a seam in the world’s fabric—a raw, exposed place where the city’s leylines bled into one another and pulsed with all the delirious clarity of a thousand voices humming at once. The air here was thicker, heavier, as though every breath risked inhaling not just the elements but the forgotten memories of everyone who had ever stood in this chamber.

Kerrowyn braced herself, not for the ritual, but for the feeling of being watched. The Heart had that effect; it sharpened the awareness of self until there was nothing left but bone and want.

Alric was already waiting. He stood in the center of the sigil, hands folded behind his back, his ceremonial robes—tower indigo shot through with white lightning—billowing in a draft that did not exist. He turned as she entered, and though his face was as open as ever, she detected something rare and precious in his eyes: pride, and beneath that, something almost wistful.

“Good morning, Kerrowyn,” he said, his voice echoing farther than the room should allow. “Are you ready?”

She considered lying, but there was no point. “Not even remotely,” she replied.

He laughed, the sound caught and refracted by the walls until it became a choir of Alrics, each amused at a different version of the joke. “That’s the correct answer,” he said. “Shall we?”

Kerrowyn stepped forward, the soles of her shoes prickling on the sigil’s etched lines. Every rune glowed faintly, but the colors shifted with her movement: deep violet to sickly green to a pure, almost holy white. She felt as though she was walking across the exposed nerves of the world.

“Do you know the history of this place?” Alric asked, as if they were starting a lesson instead of an ordeal.

She shook her head. “The archives were… fragmentary.”

He smiled. “They’re always fragmentary, and half of them are deliberate fictions. The truth is, the Tower has had many hearts. This is only the latest. Each time a master is made, the room changes a little to fit the new resident. Today, it will be yours.”

She did not know whether to be honored or terrified.

They began the ritual in silence. Alric gestured, and the floor’s sigils spun up into the air, encasing them both in a lattice of light. Kerrowyn’s task was simple in theory: she must call to the leylines, shape the flow, and hold it in a conjuration of her own making. But the theory had always been easier than the practice.

At first, she reached for the lines like threads in a loom, manipulating them with the careful precision of a locksmith. But these were not the docile streams of a laboratory experiment; they roared and twisted, full of old resentments and bitter memory, and they seemed to know her, to recognize the scars on her soul as the mark of their own kind.

She faltered, for a heartbeat, and the lines slipped. The room warped; her vision split into a hundred simultaneous presents, each one a fragment of a life she might have led. In one, she was still with her mother, plotting the next grift. In another, she had never left Kerric behind. In still another, she saw herself as she was now—standing in the Heart, surrounded by power, but never quite whole.

Alric’s voice cut through the dissonance. “Hold it steady. You’re not a prisoner here.”

She drew a ragged breath and focused. The leylines bucked, but she bent them, not with force, but with the practiced give-and-take she’d learned from years of living in a world that never wanted her. The light webbed around her arms, then wrapped her torso, then plunged into her chest, cold and exhilarating as a river in spring thaw.

The chamber responded. The walls shimmered, runes spinning in time to the pulse of her heart. A low thrumming filled the air, building toward a resonance that threatened to peel the flesh from her bones.

Then, with a final snap, the leylines fell into place, and the Heart stabilized.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Kerrowyn opened her eyes, blinking away tears she would never admit to, and found that Alric was no longer beside her. Instead, a figure stood at the edge of the circle: humanoid, but shimmering, as if each limb and feature was an afterimage, never fully resolved. Its eyes were vast and bottomless, and its hair, if it could be called that, was a field of midnight flicked with stars.

It smiled—a slow, unsettling thing—and the voice that issued forth was both male and female, both ancient and childlike, and carried with it the weight of every secret the Tower had ever held.

“Thou hast called, and so I have come,” said the apparition. “What is thy petition, Kerrowyn Lightfoot?”

She tried to speak, but her tongue was numb. The entity waited, utterly patient.

“I… I wish to serve,” she managed. “To become a Master.”

The smile widened. “Ambition. A fine trait. Yet there is more to mastery than mere will. What wouldst thou give in exchange?”

Kerrowyn thought of her mother, dangling from the gallows. She thought of her brother, and the gap between them that grew with each day she spent in the Tower. She thought of the city itself, and how it had shaped her from nothing into—well, into this.

“I will give whatever is asked of me,” she said, and this time, her voice did not tremble.

The entity laughed. The sound was a shimmer in the bones, a bright wind that swept the chamber clean.

“Well said, little gnome. Thy kind seldom disappoints. But know this: the Tower is a hungry thing. It takes, and takes, and only sometimes gives back. Dost thou accept?”

Kerrowyn hesitated only a moment. “I do.”

The figure raised its hand, and a corona of light blossomed above its palm. It extended the hand, and Kerrowyn, compelled by some deeper sense of ritual, took it.

A bolt of energy lanced through her, searing a path from her branded shoulder to the core of her being. She gasped, but did not let go.

The entity leaned closer, its breath like a thunderstorm. “Then arise, Kerrowyn Lightfoot, Master of Conjuration. Weave thy will upon the world. And remember: the Tower remembers all.”

It released her, and the light collapsed. The apparition faded, leaving only the faintest scent of ozone and a ringing in Kerrowyn’s ears that might never leave.

She stood alone in the Heart, the sigils at her feet slowly dimming, and knew that she had crossed a threshold from which there could be no return.

Alric appeared at her side, his face pale, but his eyes full of something like awe. “You did it,” he said.

She nodded. “So it seems.”

He clapped her on the shoulder, gently, as if uncertain whether she was still entirely corporeal. “Welcome, Master Lightfoot.”

Kerrowyn smiled, and this time, it felt almost real.

They left the chamber together, and as she climbed the stairs—upward, now, always upward—she could feel the Tower shifting to accommodate her. Doors appeared where none had been before. Hallways lengthened or shortened in response to her steps. Even the air tasted different, alive and a little bit dangerous.

At the top of the stairs, she paused. “Alric?”

He turned.

“Does it get easier?”

He shook his head, but there was a kindness in the gesture. “No. But it gets better.”

She considered this and found she could believe it.

Outside, the city sprawled beneath the tower, unchanged and eternal. But inside, in the Heart, something new had taken root. Kerrowyn felt it—an itch beneath the skin, a sense of being watched and welcomed in equal measure.

She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and went to meet her new life.

The Story That Sells

Kerrowyn’s quarters resembled the aftermath of a diplomatic siege. Her desk, already too small for the piles of spellwork and correspondence, sagged under the additional weight of newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsheets—each one emblazoned with some variation on her name and her improbable rise through the Tower’s ranks. Headlines bristled with invention: “Thief Turned Thaumaturge: The Redemption of Kerrowyn Lightfoot.” “From Gutter to Glory: How a Gnome’s Grit Transformed the Capitol.” “Council Sponsors Street Urchin, Gets Master Arcanist in Return.”

She leafed through them with increasing violence, the delicate skin between her thumb and forefinger rubbed raw from the cheap ink. Occasionally she stopped to snort at the more egregious entries. One article, in the Voice of the Capitol, claimed she’d been found “starving in a workhouse,” and that “her benefactor” (presumably Alric, though they spelled his name with two k’s) had “rescued her from a life of petty crime.” Another, from the Watchman’s Gazette, went so far as to suggest her induction into the Tower was part of a “broader Council campaign to reform the lower classes through public charity and magical education.”

Kerrowyn crumpled the paper and lobbed it at the wastebin. It missed, joining a dozen other failed shots. She slouched in her chair and let her gaze wander to the window. Outside, the Capitol wore its new independence with a kind of nervous pride: banners on the Council Seat, more foot patrols on the streets, and a hundred small businesses with new, hastily repainted signs boasting “City of Free Enterprise.” The Empire, so long the organizing principle of the world, had collapsed in less than a year, leaving in its wake a vacuum of authority and a glut of narratives eager to fill it.

Her own story, apparently, had been selected as the official parable of the era.

She felt a weight on her shoulder and glanced to see Lynx, the pseudo-dragon, nuzzling against her neck. The familiar’s scales reflected the late-afternoon sun in bands of iridescent lavender and blue, and her tail, as always, flicked with an emotion somewhere between amusement and concern.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Kerrowyn muttered, scratching Lynx between the horns. “If you had to read this much horseshit about yourself, you’d be crabby too.”

Lynx snorted a small jet of perfumed smoke, which curled up to join the dust motes above the desk. She licked Kerrowyn’s ear, then settled herself into the crook of her arm, purring with the particular, judgmental rumble of a creature who had seen her charge through far worse.

Kerrowyn closed her eyes and let her mind drift. She should have been content, she supposed. She had outlived the expectations of everyone she’d ever known, even herself. She had power, influence, a platform from which to shape the world—not just for her kind, but for all the gutter orphans and would-be conjurers who’d ever dreamed of better.

And yet.

The knock came, soft but insistent. Lynx hissed, then resumed purring as the door creaked open and Alric entered, balancing a bottle of wine and two mismatched glasses in one hand.

“I come bearing gifts,” he announced, his usual bravado tinged with something softer.

Kerrowyn glanced up, arched an eyebrow. “If it’s another press clipping, you’ll have to sweep up the pieces.”

Alric laughed. “No, no, nothing of the sort.” He set the bottle and glasses on the only clear corner of the desk, then surveyed the chaos with a theatrical sigh. “They do love a story, don’t they?”

She grunted, not trusting herself to speak without swearing.

Alric poured two glasses—one for each of them, though Kerrowyn suspected he would end up finishing both. He offered her the first; she took it, raised it in an ironic toast, and downed half in a single go.

“They make it sound like you plucked me out of a gutter,” she said, her voice tight. “Like I was some pathetic waif you took pity on.”

Alric’s gaze flicked to the window, then back to her. “You know that’s not true. I just… I think the Council likes the optics. Makes them look magnanimous. Helps them sleep at night, thinking they can polish up a misfit and call it reform.”

She slammed the glass down, hard enough to chip the rim. “I wasn’t a project. I wasn’t a charity case. I got here because I’m better than they are, not because someone took me on as a lost cause.”

Alric nodded. “I know. And so do the people who matter.”

They sat in silence for a while, drinking and listening to the far-off bells of the Clock Tower. The city, even free, still ran on a schedule; the chimes kept the illusion of order alive, even when the rest of the world teetered on chaos.

After a time, Kerrowyn stood and paced to the window, Lynx trailing after her like a fragment of living shadow. She watched the city’s lights come on, one by one, and wondered how many people out there would ever know the truth behind the stories printed in black and white.

“I didn’t need saving,” she said, softly, to no one in particular. “I made a choice.”

Alric stepped up beside her. “And now you get to choose what comes next.”

She nodded, her purple eyes reflecting the city’s uncertain glow. “Yes. I do.”

He squeezed her shoulder, a gesture that was both mentorly and—now, finally—equal.

Behind them, the Tower’s walls seemed to breathe, the magic settling around Kerrowyn in a way that felt, for the first time, like a home.

They stood together for a long time, watching as the city reinvented itself, and waited to see if the world would catch up.

Who She Left Behind

The air in the Lightfoot warren had gone from stale to suffocating, thick with the invisible weight of all the deals and betrayals that had transpired in its cramped belly. Once, this place had buzzed with the reckless energy of a family that knew itself indispensable; now, it was more crypt than clan house, every corner haunted by the ghosts of cousins lost to the Guard, to the gallows, or—worst of all—to the slow erasure of irrelevance.

Kerric Lightfoot sat hunched at the end of a scarred table, the latest edition of the Capitol News spread before him like a death sentence. The headline, black as cinders: “Gnome of the Hour: Kerrowyn Lightfoot Named Tower Master.” Her face, caught at an unflattering angle, stared up at him from the centerfold. The smile was her mother’s, but the eyes were all her own—sharp, restless, already plotting a way out.

He read the article twice, then a third time, trying to find some evidence that it was all a hoax, a cruel joke by the city that had always delighted in tormenting his kind. No luck. The words were undeniable, the message clear: his sister had succeeded where he—and everyone else who mattered—had failed.

Around him, the last dregs of the Lightfoot leadership brooded in sullen silence. Lorre, his cousin and onetime rival, flicked a dagger in and out of his sleeve with the twitchy patience of a man waiting for someone else to solve his problems. Beside him, old Maudlin peered through spectacles so smeared with grime that they may as well have been painted black. The rest were a mix of new blood and leftover troublemakers, none of whom had the nerve to speak first.

Lorre broke the silence. “She’s done well, our Kerrowyn,” he said, not bothering to hide the acid in his tone. “The Council couldn’t have chosen better if they’d scoured the whole city.”

Kerric grunted, but did not look up. He traced the lines of his sister’s face with one chewed fingernail, as if searching for a flaw. “She left us,” he said, voice flat. “Doesn’t matter how high she climbs; she’s still a Lightfoot who turned her back on the clan.”

Lorre rolled his eyes. “That’s exactly the point, cousin. She’s up there, with the keys to the city’s vault. She could do more for us now than any of us could do for ourselves.”

Maudlin cleared her throat, a sound like wet paper tearing. “You want to ask her for help, don’t you?”

Lorre’s smile was all teeth. “Why not? She owes us. Owes you, Kerric. After what happened to your mother—after all the clan did to put her where she is—she can’t just pretend we don’t exist.”

Kerric wanted to argue, to point out that Kerrowyn’s rise was the result of her own work, not the clan’s machinations. But the words stuck in his throat, bitter as gall. The truth was, he did feel abandoned. They all did. Every empty chair at this table was a reminder of someone who’d once called the warren home, now gone for good.

“She won’t help us,” he said, finally. “She’s gone soft. Gotten ideas above her station.”

“Soft?” Maudlin repeated, incredulous. “I saw what she did to the Skarn gang last summer. She turned them inside out with a word. That’s not soft, that’s dangerous.”

Kerric shivered, remembering the day he’d heard the story—how Kerrowyn had walked into a den of cutthroats, smiled her crooked smile, and walked out with every one of them trailing behind like whipped dogs. The rumor was she hadn’t even raised her voice.

Lorre pressed his advantage. “She’s dangerous, yes. But she’s also one of us. Blood is blood, Kerric. And you’re her brother. If anyone can get through to her, it’s you.”

The room shifted, the weight of expectation settling on Kerric’s shoulders like a shroud. He looked around, saw nothing but desperation in the faces of the once-mighty Lightfoots. They were counting on him—not to restore the clan’s glory, but to buy them a little more time before the inevitable extinction.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Lorre leaned forward, the glint in his eyes a match for any knife he’d ever carried. “Write to her. Ask for a meeting. Tell her you want to make amends. She’ll come—she always was sentimental about family.”

Kerric’s stomach twisted. “And then what?”

Lorre shrugged. “We see what she offers. Gold, secrets, protection—doesn’t matter. The important thing is we get her thinking like a Lightfoot again. Once she remembers where she came from, she’ll do what’s right.”

Kerric doubted it. But he had no better ideas, and the hunger in the warren was a hunger he’d felt all his life.

He nodded, once, then rose from the table. The others watched him go, silent, as if afraid that even the sound of their voices might spook the fragile hope now hanging in the air.

In the privacy of his office—a closet, really, but one he’d claimed as his own—Kerric dug out an ancient writing kit. The ink was half-dried, the quill chewed to a splinter, but it would do. He stared at the blank paper, imagining his sister’s face on the other side of the words.

He started three times, tearing up each draft and tossing the shreds to the floor. At last, he wrote:

Wren—

It’s been too long. The clan is not what it was. I am not what I was.

If you remember anything of the old days, if you still care, meet me where we used to trade stories.

No tricks. Just words.

—Kerric

He read the letter twice, absorbing every word with focused attention, then skillfully folded the paper into a delicate origami bird. The intricate creases formed wings and a beak, a tangible reminder of their shared tradition. This was how all their correspondence had been exchanged since childhood, each note transformed into a small work of art. It was a cherished ritual that bound them together, at least until she left, leaving behind a silence as poignant as the intricate paper birds they once shared.

As he prepared to send the message, Kerric felt the old anger flare up: at the city, at the Council, at Kerrowyn most of all. But beneath that, something else lingered—a hope so frail it was almost unbearable.

He doused the lantern and sat in the dark, waiting for the next move to be made.

Messenger Bird

The Tower’s corridors were empty at this hour, save for the errant ghost or dust mote that lingered too long in a beam of gaslight. Kerrowyn drifted through the halls, her thoughts more scattered than her feet were steady. The day’s meetings had left her head pounding—a parade of arcane debate, Council intrigue, and the kind of ego politics that would have driven her mother to murder or drink, probably both. She let herself into her quarters, expecting the usual silence.

Instead, there it was: a scrap of the past, perched on her desk as if it had always belonged.

It was an origami bird, perfectly folded, its wings etched with an ink design so fine that it could only have been made by a Lightfoot.

“Unusual, is it not, to receive a messenger-bird within one’s own stronghold?” The voice rang out from everywhere and nowhere at once. Hallione, in one of her more intrusive moods.

Kerrowyn smirked, setting her bag down. “Only if you think the Tower isn’t porous. You know it better than I do.”

A pause, as if the building itself had to process the compliment. “I placed the bird on your desk. Arrived via a courier from the outer gates. I did not open it. I thought you would prefer the surprise.”

Kerrowyn ran a finger along the bird’s back. The paper was stiff, high quality—expensive enough to be a statement in itself. She peeled apart the folded belly, her hands shaking just enough to irritate her, reading the missive within, written in handwriting that was as familiar as her own.

She sat heavily, the note fluttering from her fingers onto the desk. Lynx, sensing distress, slithered from her perch atop the bookcase and landed with a practiced grace on the desk. She sniffed the air, then batted at the bird, as if trying to dislodge a hidden poison.

Kerrowyn stooped to pick it back up and read the message again, then turned it over to examine the reverse. Nothing. Not even a secret code, which was itself a code. She stared at it for a long time, memories flooding in: the smell of musty blankets in the warren, the way Kerric would fold his notes even when he could have spoken them aloud, the hours spent devising signals for the sole purpose of outwitting adults.

She stood and paced, hands clasped behind her back. Lynx followed, tail twitching.

“What do you make of it?” she asked, directing the question to Hallione, though she doubted the Tower would answer directly.

A beat, then: “A summoning of sorts. How quaint. Would you like me to send an observer in your stead? I have excellent illusions available.”

Kerrowyn considered, then shook her head. “No. If he wanted me dead, he’d have managed it already. This is… something else.”

“Your confidence is almost touching,” Hallione replied. “Perhaps you will both survive the encounter. That would be a novelty.”

Kerrowyn smiled grimly. “Stranger things have happened.”

The rest of the day crawled. Every idle moment sent her back to the message, the cadence of Kerric’s hand, the impossibility of seeing him again as anything other than a rival, or a shadow, or a wound. She went through the motions of Tower life—reviewed paperwork, corrected novice exercises, sparred with Lynx using harmless cantrips. But her mind was elsewhere, spinning scenarios of the reunion, each one more disastrous than the last.

Alric showed up at sunset, bottle of something blue in hand, eyes bright with his usual conspiratorial good humor. “I heard you got a letter,” he said, plopping into the chair opposite her.

“You hear everything,” Kerrowyn said, and did not mean it as an insult.

He poured them each a measure, then slid a glass toward her. “Want to talk about it?”

Kerrowyn shrugged. “It’s my brother. He wants a meeting. No tricks, he says.”

Alric’s brow furrowed. “And you believe him?”

She hesitated. “No. But I want to. Which is worse.”

Alric sipped, then leaned in. “You know the Broken Barrel is a hole. Councilmen get stabbed there for fun.”

She let herself laugh. “That’s why it’s perfect. No one would think to look for me there, and if they did, they’d be too scared to interfere.”

He nodded. “You’re going, then.”

She drank. “I have to.”

He studied her, the old mentorly concern surfacing. “Do you want backup?”

Kerrowyn shook her head. “If I don’t go alone, I’ll never hear what he has to say. This isn’t business, Alric. This is—” She searched for the word, found none, and settled for, “family.”

He nodded again, more solemnly this time. “Just… be careful, Kerrowyn. The world doesn’t always let you have both.”

“I know.”

They finished their drinks in companionable silence, watching the last light fade from the city below.

That night, Kerrowyn prepared with the meticulousness of a heist: she swapped her Tower robes for a nondescript cloak, pinned her hair up, tucked a handful of coins into her boot, and tied the origami bird into the lining of her jacket. Lynx prowled the perimeter of her rooms, not so much agitated as expectant.

As she readied herself to leave, Hallione’s voice floated down: “He awaits you. There is a leyline that runs beneath the Barrel. Will you permit me to watch?”

Kerrowyn smiled, for real this time. “Could you stop yourself?”

A pause. “No. But it is polite to ask.”

She slipped out, closing the door behind her. The Tower’s corridors were mercifully empty; she navigated them with the ease of long practice, each shadow and turn an old friend.

When she reached the outer gates, she stopped to compose herself. The city was alive with the anticipation of night—shouting vendors, clanging bells, the perpetual war between celebration and violence. She felt the old familiar thrill: the knowledge that the world outside the Tower was wild, unpredictable, and utterly indifferent to who she’d become.

She smiled at the thought, then vanished into the dark, her hands steady, her mind sharper than ever.

The bird pressed against her side, a silent promise that some things could still be mended, or at least survived.

What Remains

The Broken Barrel was a toad of a tavern, squatting in the dim crotch of two alleyways at the westernmost edge of the warehouse district. Kerrowyn paused a half-block away, shoulders hunched in her cloak, her chin sunk deep in a scarf dyed to a bruised blue. The sign above the door—the famed barrel, split open like a wound—had lost most of its paint, and now swung gently in the night air, creaking a steady, arrhythmic pulse. The windows, what glass survived, had long ago surrendered any pretense of transparency, instead offering a murky lens into the candlelit interior, more shadow than light.

She watched the entrance for a full minute before crossing the street. Two dockhands slouched against the wall, sharing a bottle; one of them grunted a half-hearted catcall as she passed, the other simply stared with the particular hostility reserved for those who looked like they might be better at surviving than you. Kerrowyn ignored them both. The cold kept her fingers stiff, but she curled them into fists and willed the tension to stay in her hands, not her face.

The door groaned open with a shudder that set her teeth on edge. Inside, the air hit her like a brick—years of condensed breath, sweat, spilled liquor, and the subtle, ammoniac reek of wood left too long to its own rotting. Light pooled in sticky blobs on each table, the source being squat candles set into the bottoms of emptied rum bottles. The floor was a pockmarked graveyard of ancient stains, each with its own lineage and legends. She saw, with a mixture of relief and disappointment, that none of the regulars in view gave the impression of being on the clock for murder tonight.

Kerrowyn kept her hood low and made for the far corner, choosing a seat with both a wall and a clear line to the exit. The chair wobbled, but she sat anyway, stretching her legs and letting her boots float above the sticky, beer-slicked planks. She folded her hands and waited.

The barkeep, a slab-shouldered human with a jaw like a split log and a scar that rendered his left eyebrow into two combative halves, wandered over with a towel that looked like it had been rescued from a fire. “What’ll it be?” he grunted, eyes flickering over her figure with the clinical indifference of a man who had seen every possible shape and none of them worth remembering.

“Ale,” Kerrowyn said, “as close to fresh as you’ve got.”

He gave a huff—perhaps amusement, perhaps wind—and stomped back behind the bar. She watched him pour it from a battered cask, the slosh of liquid almost drowning out the distant, uneven piano from the upstairs parlor. When he returned, she paid with a single silver, not looking for change, and cupped the mug in her palms, letting its tepid warmth leech some feeling back into her hands.

The next fifteen minutes unraveled in slow, suspicious increments. Kerrowyn counted the number of times the front door opened (three), the number of patrons who lingered at the threshold to survey the room (two), and the number of conversations that dropped to a hush when she entered earshot (all of them). It was not a dangerous silence, but it was the kind that built up in greasy layers, ready to catch fire with the right spark.

She drummed her fingers on the table, a rhythm that started out anxious but soon became methodical, her old trick for passing time without letting her mind circle the drain. The noise of the tavern swelled and receded: laughter here, a curse there, the staccato clatter of dice against wood. She eavesdropped out of habit, but none of the voices belonged to Kerric. She wondered, for the dozenth time, if he would even show.

He did not arrive until the hour was nearly up, and when he did, Kerrowyn almost missed him. The boy she remembered was gone. In his place was a man with the same sharp chin and wild hair, but none of the reckless, giddy light she’d counted on to identify her brother in a crowd. His eyes—once a quick, dancing grey—were now recessed, rimmed with red, the kind of eyes that lived on the edge of fatigue and found the world to be consistently, exhaustingly disappointing.

His clothes were a surprise: a jacket of black wool, well cut, with real bone buttons, and beneath that a shirt with the faint sheen of imported cotton. Neither looked new, but both looked better than anything a gutter rat could fence. It was only at the collar and cuffs that the truth leaked out: the fraying, the stains, the evidence of repair jobs done by someone either in a hurry or too proud to beg for help. His boots had been polished, but not recently.

Kerric scanned the room once, then twice, and then he found her. His mouth didn’t move, but his eyes did, and for an instant, she glimpsed the old smirk: the one that dared you to call his bluff, even when he was out of chips. He walked toward her table with a measured, deliberate stride. Kerrowyn did not rise to meet him.

He stopped at the edge of the booth, standing a moment as if evaluating whether the table was booby-trapped. After a breath, he slid into the seat opposite her, their knees almost touching beneath the battered wood.

“Sister,” he said, and the word was both a greeting and a question.

She tipped her mug in his direction. “Kerric. Still on time, I see.”

He nodded. “And you’re still fond of the corners.”

Kerrowyn shrugged. “Some habits never die.”

He leaned back, one arm slung over the top of the bench, the other flat on the table. He looked her up and down, taking in the cloak, the scarf, the gloves. “Thought you’d be in fancier dress by now. Master of Conjuration, wasn’t it?”

She let herself smile, but kept it small. “I have fancier, but it tends to attract attention.”

“Here?” he said, with a glance at the crowd. “No one here would know silk if you strangled them with it.”

He wasn’t wrong. Kerrowyn scanned the room, then brought her gaze back to her brother. His hair was longer than she remembered, the lines in his face were new—small notches at the mouth, a vertical furrow between the brows. She wondered how many of those were her fault.

“Didn’t think you’d come,” he said.

She snorted, a dry, hollow thing. “If you’d wanted me dead, you’d have sent someone better than a courier with paper birds.”

The barkeep approached, took Kerric’s order, another ale, and came back after a few moments, passing Kerric the glass. Kerric watched him go, then shifted his attention back to his sister.

“You’re not drinking,” he observed, nodding at her untouched glass.

“Not yet,” Kerrowyn said. “Never drink before the main event.”

He arched an eyebrow. “And what would that be?”

“You tell me,” she replied. “You called the meeting.”

Kerric looked away, eyes unfocused, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. It might have been awkward, but they had trained for this—years spent in the Lightfoot den, communicating in silences more than words, passing hours in the company of siblings who knew the value of an unspoken threat or a well-timed pause.

Finally, he broke the spell. “You heard about Mother,” he said.

“Of course.”

He nodded, as if satisfied. “You know they blamed me.”

Kerrowyn blinked. “They always blame whoever’s left behind.”

Kerric’s mouth quirked in the semblance of a smile. “True enough. But the clan’s not what it was. Not after mom went.” He picked at a splinter on the tabletop, eyes down. “Most of the old guard are gone, either dead or drunk or gone off to peddle their tricks to someone who still cares.

Kerrowyn caught the tightness in his jaw, the way he said “went” instead of “died.”

“I could have told you that at age ten,” she said.

“Klaudia left a gap no one could fill, least of all me,” Kerric said. There was a bitterness to it that might have cut glass. “You know, she was proud of you. She used to tell the new kids about her genius daughter at the Tower. How you broke the window and made it all the way up the hill, even with half the clan on your heels.”

Kerrowyn blinked. She did not know how to feel about that. “I have a hard time believing that. She never told me she was proud of me, at least not directly.”

Kerric shrugged again, this time with less force. “She wasn’t good at saying things.”

They lapsed into another quiet. The bar’s ambient noise filtered in: a dice game two tables down, the slow scrape of a chair, the barkeep’s desultory cursing as he pried a rat out of the bottle rack. Kerrowyn sipped her ale, just to have something to do with her hands, and was immediately sorry—the stuff tasted like boiled bread and regret.

“So why’d you leave, Wren? Really?”

Kerrowyn looked at her hands. “You know why.”

“Because you’re special,” he said, no bitterness in the tone, only fact.

“No,” she replied, voice gentle. “Because I wanted to be. There’s a difference.”

He let that settle. The air between them was now thick with the ghosts of old arguments and older regrets. She felt, for a moment, the ache of the past—the nights spent counting coins under the lantern, the endless hunger, the way their mother’s voice could both wound and heal in the same breath.

“Doesn’t feel any different, being Master?” he said.

Kerrowyn considered. “No. But the rooms are warmer, and the locks are harder to pick.”

He nodded, as if that explained everything. “You could have written.”

She shrugged. “So could you.”

He smiled again, softer. “Guess we’re both Lightfoots after all.”

A crash from the bar cut through their détente—a glass thrown, a curse shouted, two men shoving each other over the merits of different stevedore unions. The barkeep let it ride for a few seconds, then intervened with a growled word and a slap of his broad, paddle-shaped hand. The room returned to its previous simmer.

For a full minute, neither spoke. The silence was not empty, but packed to bursting with memories: nights spent hunched over stolen ledgers, the slow, methodical dissection of other people’s secrets, the way mother’s rage could fill a room and leave no air for anyone else. Kerrowyn watched her brother’s hands—bigger than hers, roughened by a different kind of work—resting on the sticky edge of the table. She waited for the tremor, the telltale shake she remembered from childhood, but his fingers were still.

She smiled awkwardly. “You remember when we swapped the Uncle’s logbooks for blank ones? Got three days off the ledger before anyone noticed?”

That got him. He grinned, sudden and wide, and for a split second the years fell away. “You spelled the inkwell so it wrote only in invisible ink. Took them a week to figure out why all their reports came back empty.”

“You’re the one who taught me the trick with the lemon juice,” Kerrowyn said.

He held up his glass. “And you’re the one who set it on fire.”

She clinked his glass with her mug, a hollow echo in the half-empty tavern. “We made a good team.”

He studied the liquid in his glass. “I miss that.”

The admission hung between them, weightless and heavy at once. Kerrowyn looked away, unable to meet his gaze. “I didn’t want to leave you, Kerric. Not really.”

He nodded, slow and deliberate. “But you did.”

“Had to.” She said it quietly, not expecting forgiveness.

“So what happens now, Wren? You go back to your tower, I go back to… whatever’s left?”

She shrugged. “If that’s how you want it.”

He thought about this, a long time. “Maybe it is.”

For a while, they sat in companionable silence, the years between them shrinking and swelling with each passing second.

But Kerrowyn couldn’t shake the feeling that her brother was holding something back. His eyes kept flicking to the door, to the bar, to the people around them. She wondered if it was fear, or caution, or something darker.

She was about to ask, but he beat her to it.

“You know,” Kerric said, almost offhand, “Mother wasn’t the only one who missed you. Even after you left, there were rumors. About the things you could do. About the things you did.”

Kerrowyn tensed, unsure if he meant it as a warning or a compliment. “People say a lot of things.”

“They say you summoned a familiar that ate a man alive.”

She rolled her eyes. “It was a pseudo-dragon, and it only bit his ear. He deserved worse.”

He grinned again. “That’s the Wren I remember.”

Kerrowyn matched his smile, but only for a second. “So why now, Kerric? Why send for me after all this time?”

He hesitated, and for a heartbeat she thought he wouldn’t answer.

But then he did. “Because I’m tired of hiding. And you’re the only one who ever made me feel like that was okay.”

She felt her throat tighten. “I’m glad you came.”

He nodded, and for the first time, Kerrowyn saw her brother as he was: older, sadder, but still the same person she’d grown up with. Still her brother.

They sat together, sharing the silence, each knowing that whatever happened next, it would be better than being alone.

Beneath the Folds

The illusion of reconciliation shattered on the word “money.”

Kerric had let the conversation meander, watched Kerrowyn’s guard drift down, then struck. “The clan needs money, Wren. We’re barely surviving.”

Kerrowyn didn’t answer at first. Her features closed like a fist: the softening gone, replaced by a look as cold as the coin he was begging for. She stared at him for a long moment, long enough that Kerric had to look away, pretending interest in the rain streaking the tavern’s one unbroken pane of glass.

“So this isn’t about making amends,” she said finally, her voice flat. “It’s about the take.”

Kerric’s cheeks flushed, but he didn’t back down. “It can be both,” he said. “You left. You left me to run the place, to clean up after the disaster you made escaping. You have no idea what it’s been like—watching the whole thing unravel, piece by piece, every cousin and friend either turning on you or turning up dead. You left me with Mother’s debts, her enemies, her legacy. And now you sit up in that Tower, safe, while the rest of us—”

“You’re wrong,” Kerrowyn said, and her voice, while quiet, was sharper than glass. “You always had a choice. You could have left when I did.”

“Someone had to stay!” Kerric spat, loud enough that the table of dockhands turned to look. He lowered his voice, but the anger stayed. “Someone had to keep the Lightfoot name alive.”

She shook her head, disbelief mixing with disappointment. “So you called me here to what? Shake me down for old times’ sake?”

“No.” He set his jaw. “I want you to help us. Just this once. With your magic, or your connections, or—hell, just a bag of coin. You could do that, easy. You owe us that much.”

Kerrowyn’s gaze didn’t flicker. “The Tower’s resources aren’t mine, Kerric. I’m not a master thief anymore—I’m a master conjurer, and everything I have belongs to the Tower, not to me.”

“I know what you used to be able to do,” Kerric replied, bitter. “You could get anything, go anywhere. You can’t tell me you’ve lost the knack.”

“I haven’t,” she said. “But I have lost the taste.”

Kerric leaned forward, voice low and conspiratorial. “If you don’t help, the clan dies. For real this time. Is that what you want?”

Kerrowyn exhaled through her nose, as if the very notion was physically unpleasant. “The clan was dying long before I left. Mother started it. You’re just finishing the job.”

“Don’t talk about Mother like you knew her,” he snapped.

This time, Kerrowyn’s laugh was a single syllable, barbed and bitter. “Nobody knew her. Not really. She was always playing a part. Even with us.”

Kerric recoiled, as if slapped. “That’s not true.”

She looked at him, and for a moment, she wanted to say otherwise, to spare him. But he was her brother, and the Lightfoot way was honesty, even if it tasted like poison. “It is, Kerric. She used us. Both of us.”

His hands curled on the table, knuckles white. “I could tell them, you know. The Watch. The Council. I could tell them about the things you did. Before you were so respectable.”

Kerrowyn smirked. “You think they don’t know? They have my file in the Council archives, a whole folder just for me. Everything I did for the clan, every little scam and big con. They don’t care about my past. They care about what I do now, and how well I do it.”

Kerric’s face darkened. “You’re not even afraid,” he said, wonder and disgust mingling.

“Of you?” she asked, arching one pale eyebrow. “Never.”

He let the silence stretch, then tried one last time: “Please, Wren. I’m your brother. You can’t just leave me to—”

“I already did,” she said. “Years ago.”

He flinched at that, the words landing heavier than any threat. The table between them seemed to widen, become a gulf. The moment of warmth from earlier was gone, and in its place was only the old rivalry, the old bitterness, the old story of Lightfoots eating their own.

Kerric pushed his chair back, stood. “You’ll regret this,” he said, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

Kerrowyn watched him go, her hands folded, her expression unreadable.

He paused at the door, then turned, as if to say something else, but thought better of it and vanished into the night.

The tavern’s noise swelled in his wake. Kerrowyn sat, motionless, for a long time, then took a final sip of her ale, grimaced, and left a silver on the table for the trouble.

Outside, the air was cold enough to bite. She wrapped her scarf tight and started toward the Tower, her mind already filing the night under “inevitable.”

She didn’t look back.

She’ll Understand

The city had a way of blurring edges at night: walls melted into shadows, footsteps diffused into the hum of distant traffic, and the wind reeked of river and promise. Kerrowyn kept to the main avenues, her boots quick on the flagstones, cloak drawn tight, senses tuned to any sign of pursuit. She told herself it was just old instinct, but the prickle on the back of her neck said otherwise.

She passed the Clock Tower—two minutes slow, always—and turned up the lane toward the Tower gates. She was nearly there when she heard the footsteps, not hurried but insistent, following a half block behind. She kept walking, slowed her pace, then ducked into a side alley, heart thumping in the silence.

Kerric emerged from the shadows, hands raised in surrender.

“Wren,” he said, breathless. “Wait.”

She should have run, should have called out, but she didn’t. She let him approach, watched him with the wary affection you give a dog that has bitten you before.

“Why are you following me?” she asked.

He stopped three paces away, not close enough for comfort, but too close for anything else. “Because I can’t let you leave like that.”

She snorted. “You made your point.”

He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.” His voice was tired, almost gentle. “You think you’re so much better than us, but you’re still a Lightfoot. You’re still a thief. You just changed what you steal.”

She crossed her arms. “If you want to try your luck, go ahead.”

He reached into his jacket, and for a split second, Kerrowyn tensed—expecting a knife, a blackjack, a handful of iron dust to cut her from the leylines. Instead, he pulled out a small crystal vial, stoppered with wax.

She eyed it. “Poison? Really?”

Kerric smiled, sad and lopsided. “No. Not poison. Not for you, anyway.” He unstoppered the vial and, with a steady hand, poured its contents onto the cobbles. The liquid hit the stone and fizzed, releasing a smell both sweet and metallic.

“What is that?” Kerrowyn asked.

Kerric’s eyes, hollow and tired, met hers. “The antidote.”

The world tilted. Kerrowyn’s vision blurred, and she felt a slow, sinking weight creep up her legs, filling her bones with cold honey. She staggered, caught herself on the alley wall.

“You… bastard,” she managed, voice slurring at the edges.

He watched her, face impassive. “I’m sorry, Wren. But you wouldn’t listen. And the clan comes first. It always has.”

She tried to speak, but her tongue was a lump of cotton. The world warped, sound going watery, every light a smear. She tried to focus, tried to reach for the familiar burn of leyline power, but her mind slipped off every thought like oil on glass.

Kerric stepped closer, caught her as she sank to the ground. “You’ll sleep,” he said. “A few hours, at most. I had to do it. We need you.”

She tried to fight—tried to claw, to spit, to curse him—but all she managed was a breathy, hollow laugh. “Always the coward,” she said, or tried to. It came out a whisper.

He brushed her hair back from her forehead. “No. Not this time.”

The world shrank to a slow oscillation of light and shadow, the wet cobble pressing a chill into her side.

The last thing she saw was Kerric’s face: not angry, not sad, just resolved. The face of a man who had made his peace with the necessary.

Kerric waited until her eyes started to glaze, then put his mouth next to her temple, speaking so softly it might have been a prayer or a condemnation. “You always said you were different,” he whispered. “Better hope the ones you sold us out for think you’re worth more alive than dead.”

After Kerrowyn’s consciousness slipped away, night closed in with a thick, deliberate hush that even the city’s usual restlessness failed to disturb. Kerric worked quickly, hands steady even as the rest of his body trembled with a residue of guilt. He checked her pulse first—old habit, old superstition—then the movement of her breath under the scarf. Satisfied she would wake, eventually, he set about the task of unmaking her.

He took the ring first, twisting it off the knuckle with care. The lapis glimmered even in the guttering streetlight; it was the only thing she ever wore that might be called beautiful. He let it fall into a pouch at his hip, then opened her jacket, methodically emptying the pockets: a handful of coin, a miniature spellbook with pages still soft from use, the origami bird, and a strip of blue ribbon that seemed out of place among the arsenal of a Master Arcanist.

He heard the signal, a single, low, two-tone whistle from the mouth of the alley. His own reply was soft, practiced—a note that didn’t belong in this city, a vibration that carried only to those with the right ear for it. Moments later, Lorre stepped out from behind a stack of spent fruit crates, his silhouette squat and menacing in the sodium glow. Two more followed, neither remarkable except in their capacity to be unnoticed and, when needed, unforgiving.

Lorre made a show of examining Kerrowyn’s collapsed form, then grinned, teeth a bright line in the night. “Didn’t think you’d have the nerve,” he said, voice pitched so low it barely disturbed the air. “Thought you’d go and get sentimental.”

Kerric didn’t answer, just nodded toward her. The others set to work. The larger of the crew wrapped her in the heavy canvas they’d brought, tying her wrists and ankles as gently as possible for a job that didn’t allow gentleness. One produced a coil of iron wire and braided it deftly around her neck, a precaution against the rumors they’d heard about what a Tower-trained arcanist might do even while unconscious.

Lorre eyed the spellbook but left it, perhaps out of superstition, perhaps out of respect. He took the blue ribbon, though. “She always was a sentimental case,” he said, tucking it into his vest. “Pack her up. We don’t have long.”

The two underlings hefted Kerrowyn between them, handling her with the same casual brutality reserved for fragile, inconvenient goods. Lorre gave Kerric a long, searching look, as if trying to decide whether this capitulation was a final descent or a turning point.

“She’ll kill you for this, if you give her the chance,” Lorre said.

Kerric shrugged, the movement taut with a weariness that owed nothing to the cold. “She won’t have a chance,” he replied, voice stripped of everything but acceptance. Then, softer, “She’ll understand.”

Lorre snorted, an ugly sound halfway between laughter and a cough. He didn’t bother with further threats. With a final, appraising scan of the alley, he jerked his chin toward the waiting wagon at the curb. The crew moved with a practiced indifference, threading the alley’s length without a word, leaving behind only the froth of spilled antidote.

Kerric hung back, watching until the last of his sister disappeared into the shadows. He pressed a sleeve to his mouth to staunch the taste of what he’d just done. Then, mindful of the next moves—and the eyes that always watched the backs of turncoats—he strode away, boots silent

A flicker of lavender watched. Hallione, corporeal only in the Tower but always present in their Master’s shadow, hovered at the threshold of the alley’s dimension, unable to reach, unable to touch. They pulsed, a vibration against the leylines, their consciousness fragmented into a dozen tiny eddies that circled the event with mounting distress.

They watched Lorre’s crew load Kerrowyn into the wagon, every motion accompanied by the subtle, whispery echo of magic recoiling from iron and intent. Hallione could sense their destination: not the Lightfoot den of old, but a new haven, somewhere in the rat maze of the Warehouse District, far enough from the Tower’s reach and yet saturated with enough ambient power to keep an unconscious arcanist docile if properly contained.

For a full minute, the Tower’s intelligence hovered, contemplating protocols and possible responses as only an intelligence constructed for millennia of arbitration could.

Hallione had seen arcanists lost before, and in centuries past had dispatched shock teams to retrieve or avenge; but watching Kerrowyn Lightfoot, favored of the Tower, bound and betrayed by her own kin, stung in places even the simulated Tower-mind had thought immune.

After the wagon’s lantern winked out into the city, Hallione withdrew their main centroid from the alley and split her awareness: one aspect to the laboratory, where Alric Verenium snored in a pile of lesson plans and half-emptied brandy snifters, and one out into the city, to track the slow proliferation of rumor and counter-rumor that always accompanied a Lightfoot operation. With a kind of ghostly patience, Hallione set about assembling a response.

They woke Alric abruptly, pinging him through the embedded pseudo-telepathy that all Masters—unbeknownst to most—carried as both privilege and leash. He snapped awake, eyes wild, hand scrabbling for a wand that wasn’t in reach. Hallione, as a haze of violet at the room’s threshold, pulsed a warning into the space.

“Your friend has been taken,” they said, using the air and dust to vibrate the words directly into his ear canal.

He processed this, the dregs of sleep burning off in a single, scalded flush. “Where?”

“Likely destination is the old Apex Grainworks, west of the canal, but the route will wind through at least three decoy stops. They have precautions against direct magical tracing—”

“—but not against us,” Alric finished, already reaching for his case of emergency reagents, the dust of them puffing into miniature stormclouds with every lurching gesture. He barked out a curse, then a string of sibilant syllables that made the glassware on the shelves vibrate in sympathy. “Get the Watch? No. They’d be six hours late and a witness short.”

They offered a final data detail: “They are using iron. She is dormant. Be judicious.”

Alric, who had never managed a proper thank you in Hallione’s presence, simply nodded and split for the stairs.

It was, Hallione decided, going to be a beautiful disaster.

The Weight of Wire

It was always the scent that woke her first: damp rot, the sour exhalations of old stone, and underneath that the musk of too many bodies sharing air for too long. Kerrowyn came to in the darkness, lying prone on what felt like bare earth, her face pressed against the ridged lines of an unfinished plank. The pain in her head was immediate and expert—a blend of drug and impact, administered with more than casual proficiency.

She made a careful inventory, starting from the outermost edges inward. Ankles bound, wrists likewise, trussed tightly behind her back. The wire at her neck was the real cleverness—a thin cord wound with a jeweler’s precision, set to dig if she so much as turned her head too sharply. She could smell the metal, could almost taste it, the bite of iron singing in her nose with every breath.

She shifted incrementally, and the world around her came into focus in the way only total blackness could. There were crates, stacked to the ceiling in ragged towers, many stamped with the old Lightfoot logo—three interlocking shoes, a design she’d drawn herself at age twelve as a joke. Water dripped somewhere, intermittent but insistent. The air was cold, humid, unmoving. From above—perhaps two floors up—voices filtered down, muted but unmistakably gnomish. The cadence of command, a thread of laughter, and the regular thump of a heavy boot. She listened, counted, catalogued. Old habits held.

She tried to roll over, then stopped when the iron wire burned a fresh, urgent line into her throat. Gritting her teeth, Kerrowyn slowed her movements to a snail’s pace, dragging her elbows and knees along the dirt until she could prop herself against a crate. Her fingers were numb, but she flexed them until feeling returned, then tested the knots with a careful, sideways stretch. The cord was hemp, standard-issue, but double-wrapped and reinforced with a second lashing of slick black twine. Kerric’s handiwork, she realized. He always preferred overkill.

The familiar itch at her back—a sullen, relentless discomfort—reminded her of the brand. She could feel sweat trickling down the letter “C,” now scarred smooth by years, and she willed herself not to scratch at it. They had stripped her to a thin underblouse, probably for a search, and she imagined the old injury glimmering faintly in the dark, a beacon for anyone who cared to look.

She closed her eyes, steadied her breathing, and reached out with the part of herself that was not entirely physical. The bond was there, as it always had been—a bright, unwavering line to Lynx, awaiting her return in the Tower, alert and impatient. She summoned, in the mind’s tongue, a single command: Come.

The answer, when it came, was a shock. Pain—raw, blinding, like biting into a live wire. Kerrowyn jerked back, almost gasping at the intensity, and bit her lip to keep from crying out. She had known the iron would inhibit her magic, but had hoped a simple summoning would require such a small amount of leyline energy that the iron would not interfere. Clearly, she was wrong.

So magic was out altogether, at least until she managed to get the wire off.

She swallowed the first wave of panic, then the second. This was not the time to panic. She had been in worse positions—though none that she could recall with both dignity and accuracy. Instead, she cycled through the basic arcanist triage: scan, measure, hypothesize, test.

There was little to recommend her immediate surroundings. The crates closest to her were stenciled for cheap liquor and preserved fish; she could smell both through the cracks, neither inviting. A line of ancient shelving ran the length of the wall to her left, the shelves bowing with age, their cargo forgotten except for a scattered collection of mildewed books and the remains of what might have once been a lantern. The ground was dirt, packed hard and dry but layered in places with moldy sawdust. No windows, of course, and only a single door at the far end of the room, flush against the wall and sealed with a padlock so massive it bordered on decorative.

She set to work on the bonds. The rope was tight enough that she could feel her pulse hammering against it, but it wasn’t airtight; she flexed her hands, one finger at a time, until she could slide her left pinky into the slack of the knot. Slow, precise, relentless. Above, the voices grew louder, then faded, as if the room’s owners had retreated to a farther corner of the building. Good.

Kerrowyn explored the floor beneath and behind her inch by inch, careful not to dislodge the iron collar. Each motion was accompanied by the low, grinding protest of the cord against her skin, but she kept at it until she found, buried in the detritus, a single protruding nail. It was rusty, bent, and all she could hope for.

She braced her wrists against the nail, grinding the cord back and forth, careful to keep her movements in the shadow of the largest crate. Sweat pooled at her temples, stinging her eyes, and the “C” at her back burned anew, but she kept at it, the sensation of progress a distant, hypothetical hope.

Minutes passed. Maybe hours. She lost track.

The voices above shifted—someone was coming down. She froze, heart thudding, and waited. The footsteps stopped at the door, then a key rattled in the lock. The padlock thumped open and the door creaked, letting in a thin line of sickly yellow light.

Lorre entered first, his silhouette unmistakable: a body built for violence, face hidden behind a scarf and goggles, like he was ashamed of being recognized. Two others flanked him, neither remarkable except for their size. Lorre didn’t look at her at first; he prowled the perimeter, sniffing the air, before fixing his gaze on Kerrowyn.

“Wren,” he said, voice low and even. “I see you’re awake.”

She resisted the urge to spit at his boots. “I see you’re still compensating for something.”

The heavies exchanged glances; Lorre only smiled, cold and white.

He stepped closer, then crouched, staring at her with a reptilian stillness. “We’re not here to hurt you,” he said, though the way he said it suggested the opposite. “We just want to make sure you don’t run before the meeting.”

Kerrowyn flexed her wrists against the nail, now hidden in her palm. “And if I do?”

He shrugged. “Kerric’s orders. No harm unless you try something stupid.” He glanced at the wire wrapped around her neck. “But you always were the type.”

She grinned, showing teeth. “You’d be bored otherwise.”

Lorre stood, gestured to the others, and the two goons began to set out a folding chair, a table, even a small lamp. “We’ll be back in an hour,” Lorre said. “Kerric wants to talk. Until then, just relax.”

He turned to go, then paused. “You should know—he didn’t want it this way. You forced his hand.”

Kerrowyn didn’t bother to respond. The door slammed shut, the lock clicked, and she was alone again.

She went back to the nail, ignoring the pounding in her head and the taste of iron in her mouth. With every pass, the cord frayed a little more.

Her hands were bleeding by the time she stopped, but the knot had loosened. She flexed again, harder this time, and the cord gave, just enough to slip her left hand free. She tested the movement, then stopped—too loud. She needed to wait.

She pressed her cheek to the cool dirt, breathing shallow. Above, the voices returned, now angry, now resigned. She closed her eyes, steadied her heart, and waited for the next opening.

In the meantime, she catalogued every shadow, every sound, every shift in the air. Every weakness in the Lightfoot den.

She would not be caught again.

Executive Suite

There was a time when the Lightfoot Clan’s upper councils had met in velvet-draped parlors, with cut-glass decanters and enough candlepower to shame the moon. These days, the “executive suite” was a plywood box above a liquor warehouse, lit by two bare bulbs and the watery light that filtered through a half-busted window. There were no servants, no decanters, and the only furniture that might qualify as a chair was the upturned crate that Kerric Lightfoot currently occupied.

He hunched over the table, fingers steepled, eyes flicking between the maps laid out before him and the men—no, not men, not anymore, just the dregs of what the clan had been—assembled on either side. The table was an ancient oak job, scarred by decades of illicit accounting and more than a few knife fights. It rocked under the weight of the maps, of expectation, of failure. Ink stains spattered the surface, but it was the stains of sweat and blood that set the tone.

Lorre sat at the right, sharp as a hatchet and twice as cold. He watched Kerric with the smile of a man who’d already won the argument, waiting only for the paperwork to catch up. The three elders flanked them: Maudlin, her hair gone from blue-black to iron in the space of two bad years; Guff, the one-eyed remnant of a clan that had never learned to play nicely; and old Rill, whose trembling hands belied a mind still keener than most. They were a sorry sight, and they all knew it.

On the wall above, a child’s drawing—three shoes, interlocking—was tacked among the wanted posters and the hand-drawn ledgers. Kerrowyn’s old joke. Even now, Kerric could almost hear her cackling.

Lorre was the first to break the silence. “You’re making this too difficult, Kerric. She’s one of us, but she’s also a Tower asset. We can’t afford to treat her like some precious keepsake.”

“We’re not mutilating her,” Kerric said, voice level, gaze fixed on the spread of the city grid. “She’s my sister. You think they’ll care about a finger?”

Maudlin’s mouth puckered. “They might. These people—” she tapped the Tower District in the map’s center, “—they like their shows of force. The Council never negotiates unless you give them blood first.”

Kerric shook his head, biting off the retort. “We’re not dealing with the Council. We’re dealing with Alric. He’ll come if he knows she’s alive. We just have to convince him she’s worth more as a person than a symbol.”

Lorre barked a laugh. “You always think people are better than they are.”

“That’s why you’re not in charge,” Kerric said. He didn’t raise his voice, but the room went quieter anyway.

The gray-haired Guff exchanged a glance with Rill, whose shaking intensified as he leaned in to whisper. Kerric caught only the last, sibilant syllable: “—weakness.”

Kerric turned, pinning Guff with a stare. “Say it out loud. I dare you.”

Guff rolled his tongue over the gap where his front teeth had once lived. “It’s a waste, is all. We had leverage, and now—” He shrugged, palms up, as if to wash his hands of it.

Rill cleared his throat, the sound wet and reedy. “We move her tonight. If the Tower tracks us, we lose our only card. Lorre’s right about one thing: these aren’t the days for gentleness. She’s more dangerous to us than the Watch.”

“And if she gets loose?” Maudlin pressed.

“She won’t,” Kerric said. “I made sure of it. The wire will stop any magic, and I swapped out her usual rope for Kerriston braid. Unless she’s grown a third hand, she’s staying put.”

Lorre eyed him, skeptical. “You’d bet the clan on it?”

Kerric exhaled, running a thumb along the map’s edge. “I’d bet myself on it.”

For a long time, nothing moved but the breath in the room and the play of dust in the light. Then Lorre leaned forward, voice gone colder. “Fine. No finger. But if she gets even an inch of advantage, you’re the one who deals with it. And I mean personally.”

Kerric did not blink. “Agreed.”

He swept a hand over the maps, tracing a line from the warehouse to the canal, then up through three sets of back alleys. “We rotate her between these three stops. One per night. We used to use them for product; nobody even remembers the old sign-ins. Alric’s not an idiot, but he’s predictable—he’ll go straight to the source. If we don’t make contact by dawn, we go to ground, and we keep rotating until the payment is in hand.”

Maudlin snorted. “And if the Tower sics their pets on us?”

Kerric smiled, a little too wide. “I made a trade. A black market wizard, friend of a friend. Got us anti-divination charms, rated for three days.”

A murmur of grudging admiration circled the table. Guff, who’d spent his whole career prepping for the day the Tower would burn them, actually managed a grunt of approval.

Maudlin clapped her hands. “So we wait. And then what, we send a note? Send them singing courier?”

Kerric ignored the sarcasm. He pulled a sheet of paper from under the map, slid it toward Maudlin, and placed a pen on top. “We draft the ransom. Gold, magical items, no cops. If they don’t meet us, we start sending parts—hair, teeth, whatever doesn’t kill her. But not until I say.”

Lorre gave him a sidelong look. “You want her back, don’t you.”

Kerric stared at the table, not answering. The others saw it—Maudlin with her narrowed eyes, Guff with a lipless sneer. Rill just trembled, waiting for the next shakeup.

After a long, slow breath, Kerric said, “She’s Lightfoot. Like the rest of us. You don’t throw away family. Not unless you have to.”

“And if she chooses the Tower over us?” Lorre asked, genuine curiosity in his tone.

Kerric closed his eyes, the gesture tired and ancient. “Then she’s made her choice. We just make sure she knows what it cost.”

Nobody spoke for a while. The map sat between them, a silent promise of all the escapes and dead-ends they’d ever known. Maudlin, who’d always been the practical one, picked up the pen and began drafting the note, her handwriting small but precise.

Guff watched the process with open skepticism. “I don’t trust it. Never have. But I’ll go along. For now.”

Rill nodded, the motion barely perceptible. “We move at midnight.”

The council adjourned, leaving the table scattered with plans and half-formed regrets. Lorre hung back, eyes on Kerric. “You’ll have to kill her if it comes to it. You know that.”

Kerric stared at the wall, at the child’s drawing, at the three shoes—Kerrowyn’s joke, his only sibling, the last piece of childhood left to him. “I know,” he said, voice so low it might have been a prayer or a curse.

Lorre left, footsteps soft as a lie.

Kerric sat alone for a long time, listening to the sounds of the warehouse settling, the faint echo of water, the memory of a laugh that used to fill rooms like this. He read the ransom draft, correcting a phrase here and there, but left most of it as Maudlin had written. He rolled it into a tube, sealed it with a strip of old blue ribbon, and set it on the table.

When the time came, he would send it. He would play his part, as he always had.

But in the dark, when the council had gone and the maps were folded away, he allowed himself one silent moment to mourn—not just for his sister, but for the clan they’d both already lost.

Race to Release

The spell was one he had only ever tested on rats, and even then, half the time the rats burst. But tonight, Alric Verenium needed speed, not subtlety, and so he twisted the braid of leyline power around his legs, slammed it through his spine, and let the world tilt under his feet. The city snapped into overdrive: every footfall landed a block farther than it should, every blink telescoped the streetlights into strobing comets. He didn’t so much run as skip across the city, the shockwaves of his passing knocking hats from heads and sending untethered shop signs spinning.

He hurtled through the Council Quarter, scattering a pack of off-duty Watchmen who had been arguing over a game of cards. One tried to raise a hand in warning, but Alric was gone before the word finished forming. He pinballed off a newsstand, tumbled over the hood of a delivery cart, then streaked down a side avenue so narrow the hem of his robe sparked against both walls. At the intersection by the Clock Tower, he ricocheted off a statue, cursed at a cluster of startled nuns, and then took the final, breathtaking leap that landed him flat-footed on the rooftops above the city’s eastern slope.

The spell was meant for emergencies only, and every step cost him—his breath ragged, his vision streaked with white-hot pain, the magic inside him snarling and pulling in directions he had not meant. It was like riding a stampede of wild horses, except the horses were angry, and some of them had teeth.

He gritted his jaw, felt something crack, and pressed on. Hallione’s warning echoed in his skull: “She is alive. The iron is working. Do not be late.” He took the stairs two at a time, then three, then abandoned the stairs altogether and rode the momentum down an open stairwell, crashing through the glass of an abandoned observatory dome. The shards stung, but not as much as the thought of Kerrowyn alone, shackled, stripped of her magic.

He cut through the university green, where the grass steamed in the midnight dew, and nearly collided with a couple making out behind a hedgerow. “Sorry,” he called, voice shredded by the wind. “Wizard business.”

The streets got uglier as he moved east, the buildings lower and meaner, the air reeking of canal and rotted fruit. His feet found every pothole, every uneven flagstone; sometimes he landed so hard his vision blacked, but the spell kept him upright, even as his muscles screamed for relief.

At the edge of the Warehouse District, he slowed—because he had to, and because the terrain was no longer a race but a minefield. Every building looked the same: brick, boarded windows, iron-shod doors. Only the Lightfoot crew would know which one mattered, and Alric had to trust Hallione’s information to get him the rest of the way.

He ducked behind a stack of shipping pallets, hands shaking as he tried to coax more power from the depleted spell. He looked down at his robes—smeared with city filth, ripped at the sleeve, singed along one edge. His staff hummed with residual energy, but he doubted it would manage more than a parlor trick before it blew a fuse.

For the first time since leaving the Tower, he hesitated. He should have sent for help—should have rallied the Masters, or even just the Watch. But Kerrowyn, his friend, and the thought of her alone in the dark, surrounded by old enemies and new betrayals, was a pain sharper than the one in his legs.

He drew a careful breath, trying not to gag on the chemical tang of the district. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He forced them to stillness by wrapping his knuckles white around the staff, and willed himself forward.

He skirted the perimeter of the first warehouse, scanning for signs of sentries or magic. There was nothing—no wards, no ambient hum, not even a lookout. That worried him more than a gauntlet of guards would have. He pressed on, past two more nondescript brick hulks, then ducked into the alley Hallione had marked for him. The entrance was hidden behind a rusted-out delivery van, its wheels long since looted, its interior now a nest for the kind of rats that didn’t burst so easily.

The basement window was just where Hallione had said it would be—a grate half-cut, just enough for a man of Alric’s frame to wedge through. He risked a glance inside. It was pitch dark, but he could sense the outline of a life inside: heartbeat sluggish, but present; a spark of magic, battered and raw, flaring in desperate pulses. Kerrowyn.

He tried the window. The grating came away with only a little effort. He slid inside, boots crunching softly on the stone, and felt his way forward, staff raised in case anyone had left a welcoming committee.

The air inside was close, acrid with old sweat and new fear. He moved slowly, one hand guiding him along the wall, until he saw her: slumped against a stack of crates, wrists bound behind her back, neck ringed in iron, but eyes clear and wild with anger.

She saw him at the same moment. “Alric,” she hissed, voice hoarse but unbroken. “If you so much as touch that wire, you’ll set off the whole block.”

His foot froze mid-step as moonlight glinted off a wire so thin it might have been spun by spiders. His heart slammed against his ribs as he traced the deadly line to a stack of barrels in the corner—their metal bands rusted, their wooden slats sweating with condensation. The stench hit him then: caustic, throat-burning chemicals and the unmistakable sulfurous reek of military-grade blasting powder: enough to vaporize the basement and everyone in it.

He stopped, considering, before gingerly stepping over the line. Carefully, he approached Kerrowyn, murmuring a few arcane words and waving his staff over the floor in front of him to detect any other traps.

He whispered, “Can you move?”

She grinned, bloodied but defiant. “Only if you brought cake.”

He grinned back, then—without another word—set about unwinding the iron wire from her neck.

Above them, in the warehouse proper, he heard footsteps. Multiple. The window had probably been rigged with some silent alarm. The Lightfoots had not wasted time.

He turned back to Kerrowyn, eyes burning now with adrenaline and the promise of disaster. He worked faster, his fingers burning from contact with the iron, finally undoing where it was wound shut, and pulling it off her.

She wasted no time, summoning Lynx with her first free breath. The lavender beast arrived with a puff of smoke and an indignant growl before she started gnawing relentlessly at the bindings around her master’s wrists and ankles. Her sharp teeth cut through the rope faster than a knife, and far more efficiently than the nail she had been using before.

“Ready?” he whispered.

She nodded with determination, and together they steeled themselves for the impending clash, adrenaline coursing through their veins. The footsteps grew louder, a thunderous drumbeat in the silence, and the sound of a key scraping into the lock reverberated like a battle cry through the tense air.

Inferno’s Edge

The door exploded inward, not from any spell or siege engine but with the brute force of three Lightfoot clan enforcers at the point, each barreling through in a cluster that trampled the lock and left the hinges spinning behind them. Lorre came first, as always—head low, shoulders hunched, his right hand already palming the flat of a long blade. The shock of seeing Kerrowyn free, iron collar unwound and her familiar perched on her shoulder like a heraldic ornament, stopped him cold for a single, tactical breath. He recalibrated in that instant, signaling the two behind him to fan left and right, boxing his cousin in from both sides, as if she were still a child cornered in the attic.

Kerric followed in the next rank, flanked by a half-dozen irregulars—some trueblood cousins, others just debts paid in muscle and loyalty. He looked older than he had upstairs, his eyes rimmed with fatigue and the edges of a plan already unraveling. Behind them, the passage to the upper floor filled with the hum of barely-repressed violence: whispers of knives, the scrape of crossbows being loaded, the shuffle of boots that had always been a few sizes too big for their wearers.

For a split second, the whole tableau froze, everyone recalculating: Kerrowyn upright, ropes bloodied but off; Alric crouched over her, his staff glowing with a barely-contained fury; Lynx, hackles raised, a narrow tongue of violet flame already dancing in her mouth. Lorre’s eyes narrowed, reading the room like a crime scene, and then he made his decision.

“Wren,” he said, voice echoing through the silence, “you never could just sit still, could you?”

Kerrowyn’s response was a smile that showed too many teeth. “You never could just win fair, could you?”

The moment ruptured.

The first two attackers came in low, standard pincer. Kerrowyn ducked the left, rolled behind a crate, and let Lynx take the right; the pseudo-dragon hit the man’s face like a sack of razors, claws carving pink slashes while the familiar’s breath ignited the air in tiny, stinging bursts. The man went down hard, shrieking and pawing at his own eyes as Lynx danced away, tail a blur. The left-side attacker had barely registered the shift before Kerrowyn flicked a discarded, half-full wine bottle at his head; it shattered on his brow, the contents sluicing over his eyes, and then she was on him, knees to his chest, hands scrabbling for the dagger at his belt.

Lorre advanced not toward her but Alric, seeing immediately that the real threat was not blood but fire. Alric stood, slow and deliberate, the usual smirk erased from his face.

He did not waste time on preamble. He extended his staff toward the sweating stack of barrels in the corner—the ones reeking of sulfur and the particular acid funk that signaled homebrew concussion powder. The runes along the staff burned with a sharp, mathematical blue as he spat a phrase of banishment. In the blink of an eye, the entire pile—barrels, wires, the trip-line bomb Lorre’s crew had rigged—winked out of existence, displaced to a pocket dimension specially reserved for things that should never, ever detonate.

The sudden subtraction of the threat caught everyone off guard. Lorre’s plan to leverage the barrels—either as a hostage gambit or as a last-ditch self-immolation—vanished with them.

Alric pivoted, uttering a single, precise word—just a fragment of language, enough to ignite the air between him and the oncoming Lightfoots.

A wall of flame erupted, bright as sunrise and twice as hot, cutting the room in half. Lorre staggered, hair curling at the edges, jacket smoking, but did not break stride. Behind him, two crossbow bolts hissed through the blaze—Alric caught one with a casual ward, the other he dodged, letting it bury itself in a crate of pickled herring.

The room became a vortex of heat and violence. Kerrowyn, still pinning the blinded thug beneath her, grabbed the dagger, kicked off the man’s chest, using the momentum to vault over the nearest crate. She hit the floor rolling, came up with the dagger reversed, and stabbed it clean into the thigh of another attacker, who had been trying to line up a shot at Alric. The man howled, but before he could retaliate, Lynx was on him, gnawing at his ear with the same casual, efficient malice as a housecat with a mouse.

Alric, meanwhile, had not stopped moving. With his staff, he traced lines in the air, each gesture carving out another wedge of searing, pressurized magic. When three more Lightfoots tried to flank him, he spun the staff overhead, muttered a word that crackled like a snapping whip, and sent a fan of fire screaming across the room. The lead attacker went down first, his beard igniting in a blue-white flash; the two behind him staggered, shields up, but the heat was so intense that the metal bands of their shields warped and seared the flesh beneath.

Kerric, still at the rear, watched this all with the hollow fascination of a man who had seen a dozen plans fail in as many minutes. He shouted an order—“Circle! Cut them off!”—but most of his crew were either rolling on the floor in agony or trying to find escape routes not already blocked by fire.

Kerrowyn locked eyes with him, then gestured at the burning door behind him. “Bad day for fire escapes,” she called, loud enough for the whole room to hear.

He grimaced, then pulled a length of iron chain from his coat, swinging it in a tight arc as he advanced. “You always liked the fancy words, Wren,” he said. “Let’s see if they save you now.”

She didn’t bother to answer. Instead, she flexed her hands, feeling the familiar tug of leyline energy at the edges of her skin. With the iron wire gone, the current of magic returned, hesitant at first but then roaring in with the intensity of a homecoming. She drew a quick sigil in the dirt with her boot, then spoke a name—not a word, not a spell, but a name, deep and cold as the city’s aqueducts.

The ground at her feet buckled, and a miniature water elemental erupted from the dirt, all gnashing teeth and roiling limbs. It surged forward, catching Kerric’s chain in its jaws and freezing the links solid with a single exhalation. Kerric stumbled, dropped the chain, and barely avoided the follow-up attack, rolling to the side as the elemental swept past.

Across the warehouse, Lorre and Alric had closed the distance to hand-to-hand. Lorre moved with the heavy grace of a lifelong brawler, every punch and kick telegraphed but devastating; Alric, lighter, danced away from each blow, using his staff as both shield and lever to redirect the force. Their duel became a blur, flames flickering with every near-miss, the very air shimmering around them with spent magic.

Kerrowyn, seeing an opening, summoned another elemental—this one air, a spiral of icy wind and grit that she aimed directly at the two Lightfoot thugs regrouping at the base of the stairs. The elemental hit them like a gale, spinning one into the wall and pinning the other against a support beam, where he hung, gasping, as the air was sucked from his lungs.

She turned back to Kerric, who had retrieved his chain and was advancing again, more cautious this time. “Give it up,” he said, breathing hard. “You don’t have the numbers.”

She drew up to her full height. “Your math is off,” she said casually, “two master arcanists are more than enough.”

He lunged, the chain arcing for her head. She ducked, rolled, came up behind him, and slashed at his hamstring with the edge of her stolen dagger. He anticipated, spun, and caught her forearm with a wild, backhand swing. The iron links wrapped around her wrist, biting deep, and for a moment the pain was white-hot, almost sublime. He twisted, forcing her to her knees, and leaned in close, breath heavy with blood and effort.

“I never wanted this,” he said, voice hoarse. “But you left me no choice.”

She smiled through the pain. “You always had choices. You just made the wrong ones.”

With her free hand, she flicked a conjured pinch of earth and glass at his eyes. He jerked back, momentarily blinded, and she wrenched her wrist free, leaving a bloody trail behind. The elemental, now circling the perimeter, surged in to finish the job, wrapping around Kerric’s legs and yanking him off his feet.

Alric, meanwhile, had finally gotten the better of Lorre. The Lightfoot enforcer was strong, but not built for prolonged duels; Alric’s staff caught him in the ribs, then the jaw, then the temple, each blow building on the last. Finally, with a word and a flick of the wrist, Alric brought the staff down on Lorre’s shoulder, the impact sending a shockwave through the man’s body and dropping him, unconscious, to the floor.

The battle’s tempo shifted in a heartbeat. The remaining Lightfoot enforcers—seeing their leaders either incapacitated or entangled—lost their nerve. Two tried for the fire-blocked exit and recoiled, clutching at scorched hands. One tried the stairs, but the air elemental still hovered, a silent, implacable threat. The rest simply huddled behind crates, hoping for rescue or mercy.

The warehouse itself groaned under the strain: flames licking the rafters, smoke billowing up to the old windows, the stench of burning fish and flesh already thick in the air. Kerrowyn wiped blood from her face, then sent the elementals to extinguish the worst of the fire. They obeyed with a sullen efficiency, dousing the flames but leaving the air heavy with steam and the sharp tang of ozone.

Alric walked over, breathing hard but otherwise unmarked. “You good?” he asked.

Kerrowyn nodded, then glanced at her brother, who was still struggling to free himself from the grip of the water elemental. “He’ll live,” she said. “Probably.”

Lynx, now perched on a broken crate, regarded the carnage with a look of deep satisfaction, her tail swishing in a slow, contented rhythm.

For a long moment, neither spoke. The only sound was the hiss of dying fire and the groan of settling wood. Then, from the upper floor, a fresh wave of footsteps sounded—the rest of the Lightfoot council, rallied at last.

Kerrowyn and Alric exchanged a look. “Ready for round two?” he asked, a flash of the old humor returning.

She grinned, wiped her dagger clean, and squared her shoulders. “After you, Master Verenium.”

They turned to face the stairs, two figures outlined in the dying light, ready for whatever the world might throw at them next.

Council of Ash and Blood

The stairs buckled under the weight of the advancing council: not just a handful of bruisers this time, but the real heads of the family, the ones who remembered how to plot and bleed and keep secrets. Maudlin led, her iron-gray hair cinched in a fist at the nape of her neck, her frame surprisingly spry for someone whose liver spots outnumbered her living kin. She tossed a healing potion to Lorre, who was even now coming back to consciousness. Guff was next, one-eyed and thick-necked, his hands already dusted with black powder. Rill, the trembler, brought up the rear, barely managing the steps but still radiating a cold, unsentimental malice.

Lorre, back on his feet and favoring one arm, took his place at the head of their vanguard, teeth red from where Alric’s staff had caught him in the mouth. “Didn’t think you had it in you, Verenium,” he said, voice ragged but loud. “I heard you were all talk.”

Alric didn’t answer. The firelight painted his face in jagged shadows, but his eyes stayed icy, detached from the chaos around him. He watched the council fan out, forming a half-circle that boxed him away from Kerrowyn, who was now pinned behind a toppled barrel and two Lightfoot minions.

“You want to know something funny?” Lorre continued, pacing the line. “When word got out the Tower took in a street rat, we figured it was for show. Never thought you’d actually teach her to bite.” He laughed, then spat a gob of blood at Alric’s boots. “But I suppose even a mongrel can learn tricks, if you whip her hard enough.”

A ripple of mean laughter ran through the council. Maudlin took up the thread, her voice thin but sharp. “Or maybe you just wanted a pretty thing to keep your bed warm. Didn’t expect her to run off and make a name for herself.” She tilted her head, eyes glittering. “How is it, having your protégée upstage you at every turn?”

Alric’s gaze never flickered. “You don’t know the first thing about her.”

Lorre arched a brow, drawing a battered wand from inside his coat. “Maybe not. But we know about you, Verenium. About the little games you play. About what happens to those who trust you.”

For a moment, it looked as if Alric might smile, but his lips stayed pressed in a white line. “If you came for a speech, you’ll have to do better than that.”

He moved first—one long step forward, staff aimed directly at the weapon in Lorre’s hand. He spoke a word, low and tight, and the air between them snapped taut. The tip of the staff burned with blue fire, a cold flame that bled outward and knocked the blade from his hands.

Guff, ever the pragmatist, fired a crossbow bolt at Alric’s heart. The projectile caught a ward midair, exploded into splinters, and left nothing but the singe of ozone. Rill began to chant, weaving a low curse designed to slow reflexes, but Alric twisted his staff in a figure-eight, catching the curse and spinning it back like a tennis volley. The hex hit Rill in the jaw; he sagged, then slumped to the boards, drooling and muttering.

Maudlin was already circling, her hands full of iron tacks and glass beads. She scattered them in a careful arc, each bead blossoming into a cloud of thick, white smoke. The fire in the rafters caught the edge of the fog and lit it from behind, casting the whole scene in an eerie, lunar glow. Lorre used the distraction, lunging at Alric with a hidden blade, the edge shimmering with some foul enchantment.

Alric blocked the first thrust with his staff, the weapon shuddering in his hands as the enchantments clashed. Lorre pressed the attack, jabbing with speed and economy, never letting Alric reset his stance. The two men circled, trading blows, every parry punctuated by the crack of spell against steel. Each time Lorre got close, Alric countered with a subtle, almost invisible twist: a heel hooked behind a calf, a palm strike to the shoulder, a low incantation that made the blade vibrate and sputter.

The other Lightfoot elders tried to close the gap, but Alric’s wards kept them at bay—a shimmering wall of heat, so intense it warped the air and blistered any hand that dared reach through. Still, the council pressed, pelting him with spells and insults, trying to break his rhythm.

Lorre grinned, sweat and blood running down his cheek. “Not bad for a pretty boy,” he taunted, feinting high and then slashing at Alric’s ribs. The blade caught the fabric of his robe, left a scorched line across his side.

Alric didn’t flinch. Instead, he swept the staff in a low arc, knocking Lorre’s legs out from under him. Lorre hit the floor hard, but rolled immediately, knife in hand, and came up swinging. He was fast but the wizard anticipated, stepped inside the arc of the blade, and jabbed the butt of his staff directly into Lorre’s sternum. The crack was audible, a sound like a snapped wishbone. Lorre folded, gasping, but didn’t go down.

Maudlin, seeing her champion falter, unleashed her own spell—a net of razor-fine wires, each humming with necromantic energy. The wires darted through the air, converging on Alric like a swarm of angry bees.

He countered with elegance: a sharp whistle, a twist of the wrist, and a wave of force that bent the wires away, redirecting them into the bodies of two approaching elders. The wires wrapped them tight, binding arms to sides, necks to chests, and then began to constrict. The elders shrieked, then dropped, twitching.

The warehouse, meanwhile, was now fully ablaze. The heat grew oppressive, every breath tasting of char and fear. The floorboards smoked and popped, and the light from above cast long, flickering shadows that made every movement seem doubled.

Alric pressed his advantage, advancing on Lorre, who had lost his knife and now swung a length of chain with a desperate ferocity. The chain whistled through the air, snapping at Alric’s knees, but the wizard hopped it, staff flickering in his hands like a fencer’s foil. He rapped Lorre once on the temple, then again on the collarbone, each blow measured, clinical, designed to debilitate rather than kill.

Lorre, to his credit, stayed upright, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He spat another mouthful of blood, then lunged, aiming for Alric’s throat. Alric caught the chain, yanked it, and used the momentum to spin Lorre around. With a final, contemptuous shove, he slammed the enforcer into a burning support beam. The man’s coat caught immediately, flames licking up his back as he scrabbled at the beam, trying to break free.

Maudlin watched her lieutenant burn, her face blank and unreadable. She reached into her apron, pulled out a tiny glass ampoule, and crushed it between her palms. Instantly, the room filled with the screech of a banshee—a sound so piercing it set Alric’s teeth on edge and drove the remaining conscious Lightfoots to their knees.

He weathered the noise, locking eyes with Maudlin across the chaos. She glared at him, then at Kerrowyn, who was now dispatching the last of the basement thugs with a conjured wind elemental and Lynx’s ruthless efficiency.

“Always the drama queen,” Maudlin sneered, her voice thin but cutting through the wail.

Alric leveled his staff at her. “You’re finished.”

Maudlin’s lips curled. “We’ll see.”

She hurled the ampoule’s remnants at the floor, and in the burst of phosphorescent smoke, she vanished, leaving only a scorched outline on the boards and the faint, lingering scent of poppies and regret.

Lorre, smoldering but alive, dragged himself away from the beam, his hands leaving charred prints on the floor. He looked up at Alric, eyes wild, before dissappearing into the smoke.

Alric straightened, rolling his shoulders, and surveyed the carnage. The warehouse was coming apart by the seams—fire had eaten through the upper rafters, and the whole building creaked with the promise of imminent collapse.

Kerrowyn moved with a predator’s grace, darting between the fire-lit stacks of crates and the melee’s last convulsions. The smoke was a living thing now, writhing in the collapsing upper stories, obscuring the rafters as they bled embers onto the floor. Kerrowyn had learned early how to command a battlefield, and the warehouse was an old friend: every blind alley, every rat-hole escape, she had mapped a hundred times over in her mind.

She barked a sharp word, and a gust of conjured wind tore through the haze, revealing three of her brother’s lieutenants—barely more than boys, terrified and clutching lengths of broken pipe or boot knives as if that would save them. Behind them, her elemental hung in the air, a figure of compressed cloud and levin-bright eyes, its limbs crackling with contained violence. At her gesture, it surged forward, not to kill but to corral, to herd the survivors toward the far wall.

Kerrowyn followed, daggers at the ready, Lynx at her heels. The pseudo-dragon was little more than a shadow now, its lavender scales scorched gray by soot, eyes gone wild with the scent of blood and fear. Together, woman and familiar moved as one, cutting off the lieutenants’ retreat and driving them into a patch of clean air. Kerrowyn slammed one flat with the butt of her blade, disarmed a second with a flick that sent his knife skittering under a burning cask, and then pinned him facedown with her knee on his spine.

“Stay,” she growled. The third boy tried to run, but Lynx was faster, leaping and latching onto his calf with a hiss and a worrying crunch. The boy dropped, howling, and Kerrowyn let him sob there. She scanned for other threats, but the rest of the crew were either unconscious or tangled in the eldritch wire traps Alric had redirected.

The elemental, now untasked, shimmered with anticipation. Kerrowyn pointed to a stretch of blazing floorboards by the door, and the elemental dissolved into vapor, recondensing as a sheet of dampness that doused the flames in a stinking plume of steam. She signaled again, and it drifted back to her, loyal as any hound.

Across the room, the surviving Lightfoots—those with the sense to surrender—clustered with their backs against the last intact wall, hands raised, faces streaked with sweat and ash. Several dropped their weapons, the clatter lost in the thunder of the impending collapse. Guff slumped to his knees and began to pray, his voice a hoarse rasp that rose above the crackle of fire.

She spared a glance for the upper walkway, where Maudlin had vanished, and spat. In the history of Lightfoot betrayals this one would be a minor footnote, but it still stung to see the old witch escape. Still, she could not linger on the living when the dead demanded so much of her attention.

Lynx, panting and raw-eyed, paced the perimeter, occasionally swatting at a hand or ankle that moved too quickly. The creature seemed to delight in the chaos, weaving between legs and yowling with savage glee each time a captive tried to stand. Even as the building burned, Kerrowyn and her familiar kept order—brutal, makeshift, but absolute.

Only when she was sure the last of the crew was accounted for did Kerrowyn look up. The fire was overtaking the far end of the warehouse now, lighting the faces of its occupents a lurid orange. There was a clarity in the moment, a hush beneath the violence, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

Kerrowyn turned back to her former kin, huddled together against the wall, coughing and wheezing from the smoke. She narrowed her eyes, then, loud enough to be heard over the fire, she yelled for them to get moving if they wanted to live. “If anyone tries to get in our way, I won’t hesitate,” she hissed in warning, and the Lightfoots bolted.

They pushed forward, picking their way through bodies and burning wreckage, as the warehouse roared and threatened to bury all of their history in fire.

Alric caught Kerrowyn’s gaze. For a moment, in the roaring light, they looked like the last survivors of a doomed world—both battered, both bloodied, but neither defeated.

“Shall we?” he called, voice just loud enough to carry.

She nodded. “Always.”

Wren and Kerric

They met on the ground floor, Kerric emerging from the smoke like a ghost with unfinished business, his knuckles split and his eyes bright with adrenaline and betrayal. Kerrowyn saw him and felt, for a fractional heartbeat, the old sibling bond: the memory of feet pounding through warren tunnels, of breathless laughter in stolen moments, of a time before everything fractured. But he did not hesitate, and neither did she.

“Wren,” he called, using the old name not as an endearment but a curse. “You can’t run forever.”

She snorted, ducking under a swinging timber. “You always said I could. That’s why you hated me.”

He leapt at her, a streak of black coat and wild hair, arms wide for a tackle. She twisted, letting his momentum carry him past, then caught him in the ribs with her elbow. The impact was solid, but Kerric absorbed it, rolled, and came up with a plank in his hands—a makeshift club, studded with a protruding nail.

“You left me,” he hissed, circling her. “Left me to patch the clan together with my own blood.”

Kerrowyn kept her back to the wall, eyes flicking for a weapon. “I left because I had to. If you’d had the guts, you would’ve come with me.”

He swung a club; she sidestepped, letting it whiff past her ear, then darted in with a jab to the solar plexus. He grunted, more from surprise than pain, and let the club fall, grabbing her wrist in a grip that instantly numbed her fingers. He twisted, hard. Kerrowyn dropped to one knee, using her weight to yank him down with her. They tumbled, Kerric landing on top, hands locked around her throat.

She raked her nails across his face, drawing a bright line of blood. He flinched, loosening his hold, and she spat in his eye.

“You always were mother’s favorite,” he growled, wiping his face, “but you never had her spine.”

Kerrowyn laughed, bitter and breathless. “No one did. Not even you.”

He slammed her head against the floor, once, twice, until her ears rang and her vision filled with white sparks. Desperate, she reached out, fingers closing on a cracked ink bottle that had rolled from someone’s satchel. With her last ounce of strength, she smashed it against his cheek. The glass didn’t cut, but the ink exploded, jetting into his good eye.

Kerric recoiled, hands up, blind and swearing. She shoved him off and scrambled to her feet, grabbing the fallen club and swinging it at his knees. A nail embedded in its wood caught fabric, snagging his pant leg and sending him sprawling. He tried to rise, but she kicked him in the gut, twice, three times, until he curled around the pain.

She backed away, not taking her eyes off him. “You don’t get it, Kerric. The clan is dead. Mother killed it before either of us left.”

He wiped ink from his face, smearing it into a mask. “You could have saved it.”

“I didn’t want to.” Her voice was steady now, the old certainty flooding back. “I wanted to be more than another Lightfoot corpse in a gutter.”

He rose to one knee, panting, and spat a tooth onto the floor. “Congratulations,” he said. “Now you’re just a corpse with a better title.”

Their standoff lasted three breaths. Then, somewhere below, the building groaned, a timbershattering crack announcing the imminent collapse of the upper floor.

Kerrowyn glanced at the ceiling, then at her brother. “We have to go.”

He smiled, teeth red. “After you.”

She edged toward the door, club raised, but Kerric didn’t follow. He just watched, face unreadable, as she slipped away.

As she reached the entryway, the floor gave way behind her, dumping Kerric through a cloud of splinters and dust. She heard him land, heard his scream, but didn’t stop. The whole building was coming down, and if she lingered, she’d die here too.

Fire and bodies everywhere; the heat was intense, but the magic kept the worst of the smoke at bay. Out in the street, she could see Alric and Lynx, the latter spitting fire at anyone who came too close. The remaining Lightfoots were either dead, unconscious, or running.

She found her footing, steadied herself, and prepared for whatever came next.

Behind her, the burning rafters rained down in sheets, and somewhere in the wreckage, she thought she heard Kerric laughing.

Conflagration

The warehouse was an inferno now, smoke and magic mingling in a haze so dense that even the rats fled. Kerrowyn skidded to a halt at the center of the street, found her bearings, and conjured a brace of daggers into her palms—a trick she hadn’t practiced since the old days, but the muscle memory returned, crisp as ever. She sent the first two spinning into the chest of a Lightfoot moving to block her path, the blades pinwheeling him to the boards with a wet, sucking sound. Three more, in quick succession, found throats, ribs, and an exposed wrist; each impact was a punctuation mark in the collapsing grammar of the clan’s final stand.

Alric, around twenty yards away, found himself, once again, face-to-face with Lorre. The enforcer was burned, bloodied, but not beaten—he brandished a saber in one hand and a bottle of accelerant in the other, eyes wild with the knowledge that he had already lost. Lynx prowled the perimeter, smoke roiling off her flanks, waiting for an opening.

“You think this ends with me?” Lorre snarled, voice fraying. “You’ll never be rid of us. We’re the only ones who ever mattered to her!”

Alric, sweat plastered to his brow, regarded him with a new, glacial contempt. “Not anymore.”

Lorre hurled the bottle, glass and liquid fire sailing in a rainbow arc. Alric sidestepped, muttered a cantrip, and the burning fluid simply blinked out, as if the air itself had grown bored with the spectacle.

Kerrowyn, from her vantage, saw the pattern: Lorre was baiting, desperate for a distraction. She sent two more daggers into the backs of the nearest threats—neither fatal, but both enough to drop them—and shouted, “Now!” at the top of her lungs.

Alric obliged. With a flourish, he spun the staff overhead, drawing the room’s heat and smoke into a glowing sphere at its tip. Lorre, blinded by rage and loss, lunged for him, saber flashing. Alric released the spell at point-blank range, and the resulting blast didn’t just burn—it erased. Lorre’s body vanished in a column of white-hot flame, leaving nothing but the stench of ash and the molten puddle of his sword.

The remaining Lightfoots—those not dead or incapacitated—scattered.

For a moment, everything stilled. Kerrowyn and Alric stood in the middle of the carnage, twin pivots of calm in a world gone feral. The building behind them groaned, one wall sagging inward as the fire ate through its supports. They barely noticed.

Lynx flew over, bloodied but victorious, and began grooming herself with a dainty precision that belied the violence she’d just performed.

Kerrowyn exhaled, every bone in her body aching. She found herself staring at the bodies—so many familiar faces, now just meat and memory. She felt nothing, then everything, then nothing again.

Alric crossed to her, staff still smoldering. “It’s over,” he said, voice rough.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She wiped a hand across her face, smearing blood and soot into a new, unrecognizable mask.

The fire took that moment to roar, the ceiling collapsing in a rain of embers. They retreated together, picking their way through the corpses and the wreckage, Lynx close at their heels.

By the time they got a safe distance, the warehouse was fully engulfed. The night air was cold and clean by comparison, and for a few seconds, the three of them simply stood and watched the past burn.

It wasn’t a victory, but it was an ending.

Embers and Echoes

Kerrowyn and Alric spent the better part of the next hour doing damage control, containing and then extinguishing the fires. Eventually, nothing but cinders and the skeletal outline of the Lightfoot legacy was left behind. Kerrowyn stepped through the smoldering ruin, boots crunching on shards of glass and scorched bone, looking for any signs of her twin. She found footprints in the ash, winding their way towards the east, and followed them.

She found him in the next alley over: Kerric, hunched and bleeding, one arm cradling the other, a lattice of cuts tracing his jawline. He looked up as she approached, eyes as empty as the warehouse itself.

“So this is it,” he said, voice a ghost of its former bravado. “The end of the line.”

She stood over him, daggers still slick in her palms. “You could have left. You didn’t have to bring it here.”

He spat blood, smiled lopsided. “Neither did you.”

They looked at each other, not as siblings, not as rivals, but as the last two products of a system that never allowed for mercy. He nodded at her daggers. “You gonna finish it?”

She let the silence hang, the weight of years settling in the space between them. Then, slowly, she slipped the daggers back into the dimensional fold, wiped her hands on her coat, and said, “You have three days to get out of my city. After that, I hunt every last Lightfoot that stays behind.”

Kerric stared, uncomprehending. “You’re letting me go?”

She nodded. “I’m not her. I’m not even me, not the way you remember. We’re done here.”

He tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough. “What will you do, Wren? What’s left for someone like you?”

She glanced at the street, where Alric and Lynx waited, both illuminated in the rising dawn. “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “Maybe be the first Lightfoot who dies of old age.”

Kerric shook his head, stunned. “You really believe that?”

“No,” she admitted, “but it’s worth trying.”

He watched her go, and in his eyes was a mix of fury and relief—a man who’d expected to be murdered, and instead got a second chance he never asked for.

Kerrowyn left him there, surrounded by the ashes of their family, and stepped into the cold morning. Alric was at her side in a moment, battered but upright. Lynx wound herself around Kerrowyn’s neck, purring like she was home.

Alric looked at her, carefully. “You could have killed him.”

Kerrowyn weighed the scene, the stink of cinders and treachery, the broken man who shared half her blood. Her mother would have slit his throat without hesitation—would have offered a pithy lesson about “finishing the job,” perhaps with a reminder that sentiment is fatal to survivors. But Kerrowyn, struck by the exhaustion in her brother’s face, the way he clutched his ruined arm, saw in him not a threat but a relic. He wasn’t the villain of her story anymore. He was just the last of a breed that should have gone extinct with the warehouse.

“I could have killed him,” she echoed, voice flat. “But I didn’t because I’m not her.” The sun was rising now, weak and watery, a colorless dawn settling over the blocks beyond the canal. She watched it for a time, letting the silence fill with everything they’d both lost.

Alric nodded, not so much in approval as in understanding.

Together they walked away, leaving the past to smolder and the day to begin again.