Dawn came thin and gray over the fort, the kind of light that didn’t warm so much as reveal. Breath fogged in the air as Asil and Abby cut across the yard, boots whispering over grit and frost. Tina was already ahead with two guards, her slate hugged close like a shield.

  The fort felt wrong. Not quiet from rest, quiet from held breath. Heads turned as they passed, then quickly looked away. The hum of Myriad along the inner walls was steady, but it sounded, today, like a heartbeat counting time to something you didn’t want to name.

  “Here,” Tina said, guiding them into a narrow alcove near the southern wall, half-hidden behind stacked crates and a slab of buckled masonry. Merl lay there, propped awkwardly against stone as if he’d sat down to rest and forgotten how.

  His eyes were open. They always were, in Asil’s experience. She knelt, thumb gently lowering lids that were already cooling. A single wound punctured his sternum; not wide, not ragged, precise. Around it, a fan of black tendrils spread like burned roots beneath the skin.

  Abby crouched on the other side, breath steadying as her hands went to work. “Entry point clean. Blade narrow, triangular. No defensive cuts.” She brushed two fingers around the dark veining, then drew them back, frowning. “Not a normal venom. There’s corrupted resonance threaded through it.”

  Tina, pale but collected, pointed to a rust-brown smear beside the wound’s edge. “Fast-acting. We found no sign of struggle. Merl didn’t shout; the sentry on the next turn heard nothing.”

  Asil stayed kneeling a heartbeat longer than necessary. “He was saving for a cottage near the east field,” she murmured. “Talked about it every watch change. He was going to propose this winter.” She let out a breath that wasn’t quite a sigh. “Jessa will need to hear it from me.”

  No one filled the silence.

  “Take him to Petros’s lab,” Asil said, rising. The words came out level; her hands were not. She flexed them once, harshly, until they obeyed. “Abby, I want a full assay. Extract what you can, trace what you can’t. If this toxin has a recipe, we’ll find its kitchen.”

  Two guards slid in with a stretcher. As they lifted Merl, Abby leaned in and tipped his boot with the back of her knuckle. A crescent of fine gray clay flaked onto the stone.

  “That’s upper terrace soil,” Abby said. “The drainage there has silicate flecks. Restricted access after sundown to senior guard and quartermasters.”

  Tina’s stylus scratched a line across her slate. “Cross-referencing gate logs with night posts. I’ll need Petros to pull the Myriad access roll.” Her eyes flicked toward Asil. “Assuming the roll is still trustworthy.”

  “It isn’t,” Asil said. “Not by itself.”

  They watched the stretcher vanish into the corridor. The space he left behind felt colder.

  “This wasn’t random…” Asil went on. “...Merl saw something he should not have. Someone made sure he wouldn’t report it.”

  “Resources,” Tina said quietly. “The missing refined crystals. The altered patrols.”

  “Someone with clearance,” Abby added. “Mid-tier, at least. Maybe higher.”

  Asil turned to the wall and laid her palm against the rough stone. It was damp with the night’s last breath. For a moment, she just stood there, feeling the grit under her glove, the way Myriad’s faint thrum bled into mortar and became part of the fort’s bones. Anjelica had been built out of need and stubbornness and a promise you could almost touch: all of us, under one roof, making something better than we were given.

  And yet.

  “Someone inside our circle,” she said at last. “One of ours.”

  The words had weight. They landed, and no one tried to move them.

  Abby straightened first, drawing a small crystal rod from her kit and sealing it in a leather tube. “I’ll start the resonance series. If the poison uses corrupted mana, its signature will spike against Myriad’s lattice; we might even pick up a drift trail.”

  “Do it,” Asil said. “Tina, lock the fort’s western gates. No movement above E-rank without sign-off from me or Petros. Quietly. I don’t want a panic, or a rumor storm.”

  “Understood.” Tina’s stylus scratched her in her ledger, and it hung there for a moment. “And Jessa?”

  “I’ll tell her now.” The words were softer than Asil intended. She adjusted her tone on the next breath. “After that, we start knocking on doors.”

  Abby slid the tube into her satchel. “You think it links to Freedom?”

  “I think someone wants us to tear at our own seams,” Asil said. “Freedom profits most when we’re busy bleeding ourselves.”

  Tina looked up from her slate, jaw tight. “Then we treat this like a siege. Internal.”

  Asil nodded. “We’re past treating it like a bad coincidence.”

  They stepped out of the alcove. The yard had woken in the space of a few minutes, the small, ordinary noises of a place doing its best to be ordinary: bootlaces tightened, a kettle clacking against a stove ring, someone swearing about a bent nail. The sound steadied Asil more than any speech could have.

  She paused at the threshold of the corridor and glanced back into the shadowed niche where they’d found him. The dark veining on the stone was already fading where Abby’s reagent had lifted it; what remained looked like the ghost of a stain: a warning, or a promise.

  “Seal the terrace,” Asil said, without looking away. “Cross-check every name that set foot there after the second bell. I want their patrol paths, their gate pings, their alibis. If Myriad’s logs are scrubbed, we corroborate with boots, eyes, and mouths.”

  Tina started to move. Asil caught her sleeve lightly. “One more thing. Quiet-watch rotations for the next two days, shuffle them. Anyone who objects too hard gets eyes.”

  Tina’s mouth twitched. “Noted.”

  Abby headed for the lab at a run, the set of her shoulders saying she’d already started the autopsy in her head. Tina peeled away toward the gatehouse, slate flickering with commands. Asil turned alone toward the east wing.

  Jessa’s door would be three turns down, second on the left, the wreath of woven rivergrass still tied against the jamb with red thread. She pictured it and made herself keep walking.

  The news went over as Asil expected. Jessa didn’t speak at first, just stared as if the words were a language she’d never heard. Then the sound came, small and shattering, and Asil caught her before she collapsed.

  They sat together for a long time on the edge of Jessa’s bunk. Tears soaked through the front of Asil’s tunic until the fabric clung cold to her skin. She held her tighter, whispering nothing words, because nothing real would help.

  When Jessa’s closest friends arrived, drawn by whispers that spread faster than fire through kindling, Asil felt the smallest, sharpest pang of relief. She cursed herself for it even as she stood, smoothing the woman’s hair and turning her over to the comfort of others.

  Duty waited, and duty didn’t care who you lost.

  Back in Petros’s lab, the air smelled faintly of old ozone and powdered chalk. Runes pulsed dimly around the perimeter, holding a steady hum of preservation. On the center table lay Merl’s body, his features calm, almost peaceful, framed by the soft blue shimmer of the enchantments. The table itself was one of Petros’s creations, an experiment repurposed into a sanctum for the dead.

  “Rigidity hasn’t fully set,” Petros said absently, adjusting one of the runic lenses. “The enchantment will keep him intact indefinitely.”

  Abby didn’t answer. She stood beside the slab, sleeves rolled up, eyes cold and sharp as a scalpel. Her alchemist’s tools were spread neatly on a tray: glass vials, pipettes, and a folded runecloth to draw residue from the wound. The silence between her movements was clinical, reverent, almost prayerful.

  Asil entered quietly, boots soft against the stone. “How long?”

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  “Three hours since discovery,” Abby said without looking up. “The decay’s been completely halted. The runes are stable.”

  Petros stepped back, leaving the women to work. He could read the line of Asil’s jaw, grief anchored behind command, and knew better than to interrupt.

  Abby leaned close over the wound, murmuring small incantations to trace lingering resonance. The light from her spell flickered once, silver, then violet, and faded. She frowned, scribbling notes into a small leather journal.

  “Nothing?” Asil asked.

  Abby exhaled through her nose. “It’s… something. But not anything I recognize. The reaction isn’t matching any known toxin. There’s residue, yes, but it doesn’t behave like poison. No alchemical pattern, no elemental decay.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning if it’s man-made, it’s something I’ve never seen before.” Abby looked up, her expression unreadable in the lamplight. “And if it isn’t…”

  “Then it’s worse,” Asil finished quietly.

  A thin silence stretched between them. The hum of the runes filled the room like the faint ringing after a struck bell.

  Finally, Abby capped the sample vial and set it aside. “I’ll isolate what I can and run resonance layering overnight. Maybe Petros’s instruments can amplify the trace enough for an imprint.”

  Asil nodded absently, eyes on Merl’s still face. “He didn’t deserve this. None of them do.”

  “No,” Abby agreed, softening. “But we’ll find out who did.”

  Asil didn’t move. The lamplight caught the edges of her hair, turning the dark strands copper. “He was stabbed near the southern wall, behind the quartermaster’s stockpile. The alcove’s restricted access. Whoever killed him had clearance and knew where to hide a body until morning.”

  Abby’s fingers drummed against the table once, twice. “An inside job, then.”

  “Almost certainly,” Asil said. “Freedom wouldn’t risk infiltration this close to command. Not yet. This feels smaller… closer. Someone is trying to cover their tracks before we see them.”

  Abby studied her commander. “You’re taking this personally.”

  “Everything’s personal now,” Asil said, voice low. “We built Anjelica on trust. On hope that the worst of Earth’s divisions wouldn’t follow us here. And now we’re standing over one of our own, murdered inside our walls.”

  For a long moment, Abby didn’t speak. Then she reached for a cloth and gently wiped the bloodstain from Merl’s armor. “You always say trust is a blade. Useful, but sharp enough to bleed you if you’re not careful.”

  Asil looked away. “I didn’t mean it to be prophecy.”

  Abby offered a small, sad smile. “No one ever does.”

  They stood in the lamplight together, the faint hum of runes echoing like a heartbeat in stone. Somewhere beneath it all, a thread of something darker lingered in the air, something even Abby couldn’t name.

  Asil turned to leave. “Keep working,” she said softly. “And be careful what you touch.”

  When the door closed behind her, Abby placed one hand over the wound and felt the faint pulse of residue beneath the skin, warm, alive, and whispering.

  She withdrew her hand quickly, heart hammering. “That’s… impossible,” she whispered to the empty lab.

  But the runes flickered once, just for a second, black instead of blue, before settling back into their steady, innocent glow.

  A sudden wave of agony tore through Asil.

  Her knees buckled before she could catch herself, the air rushing from her lungs as if her very soul had been struck. Abby was at her side in an instant, catching her just before she hit the floor.

  “Asil! What is it?” Abby’s voice was sharp with fear.

  Asil’s fingers dug into the floorboards, her whole body trembling as she gasped for air. Tears welled unbidden, streaking down her cheeks. She looked up at Abby, eyes wide with something beyond pain…loss.

  “The bond…” she whispered, voice raw. “I can’t feel it.”

  Abby blinked, unsure she’d heard right. “What do you mean…?”

  Asil’s breath hitched, her gaze unfocused, searching for something far away. Then, brokenly:

  “I can’t feel Jack.”

  The mess hall felt different that morning, quieter, heavier. The usual clang of dishes and hum of chatter had given way to low voices and long stares. Lucy sat with her team, Gary, Selena, and Sebastian, picking at her breakfast half-heartedly. None of them had much appetite.

  The news had reached them before dawn, delivered in Tina’s clipped, sleepless tone during an emergency briefing: A guard found dead within the fort. No suspects. Investigation ongoing.

  No one had to say Merl’s name for the silence that followed to be understood.

  Sebastian was the first to speak. “He wasn’t just some watchman,” the elf muttered. “We used to grab drinks at the tavern after drills. He’d talk about buying land east of the gate, build a vineyard, he said.” His voice cracked. “Gods, a vineyard.”

  Selena rubbed his back gently, her face pale. Lucy reached across the table, covering Sebastian’s hand with hers. The dwarf across from them, Gary, shifted uncomfortably, staring down at his untouched plate.

  No one else spoke after that.

  When breakfast was finished, Lucy stood. “Let’s take the morning. Clear our heads. Meet back after lunch. We’ve still got that potential fifth to interview.”

  They nodded, dispersing quietly into the gray light filtering through the hall’s high windows.

  Gary lingered in the courtyard, heart thudding far louder than his boots on stone. He glanced around once, twice, then slipped into a narrow alley between the baker’s shop and the weaver’s stalls. The smell of yeast and wool faded behind him, replaced by the damp scent of iron and earth.

  He followed a winding path through the back lanes of Anjelica, keeping to shadow and silence, until he reached the rear of the town’s enchanting shop, a small, nondescript building whose windows were perpetually shuttered.

  Three knocks. Pause. Two. Pause. Four.

  The heavy latch clicked. A woman’s silhouette filled the narrow crack of the doorway, human, plain-faced, her eyes unreadable. She said nothing, only turned and motioned him inside.

  The door closed with a solid thunk, swallowing the light.

  He followed her down a narrow hallway lined with old runic sconces, the glow from their etchings faint and sickly. At the end, she opened a smaller door, revealing a stairway that spiraled down into darkness. The air grew colder with each step, heavy with the copper tang of spell ink and dust.

  The basement stretched wide beneath the shop, far wider than the building above should allow. Reinforced arches supported the low ceiling, their grooves pulsing with faint red sigils. Benches and makeshift chairs filled the space, enough for a hundred if pressed. This morning, there were twenty-seven.

  Most faces were unfamiliar, a mixture of humans, dwarves, and a few beast-kin who kept their hoods low. A ritual hush clung to them. Whispers ceased when Gary entered. The woman sealed the door behind him with a flick of her wrist, activating a ward that shimmered briefly before fading from sight. The runes lining the walls flared, then steadied, becoming soundproof and perception-proof. A tomb for secrets.

  A man stood at the front of the room. He was tall, broad-shouldered, his dark hair streaked with gray, his posture that of someone accustomed to command. When he spoke, his voice was measured and steady, the kind that could make lies sound like truth.

  “Brothers. Sisters. Outworlders.”

  The murmurs died completely.

  “Before we begin, let us reaffirm what binds us.” He gestured to the silver circlet on his wrist, an instrument known among them as a truth seeker. “Each of you, before being welcomed into this gathering, stood before the seeker. Each of you proved pure, untainted by Aerothanian blood or allegiance. Each of you stands here as a child of Earth, a survivor of betrayal.”

  A quiet ripple of agreement swept the crowd.

  Gary kept his face still, heart slow and careful.

  The speaker continued. “They told us this world would be our second chance. That we would share in its bounty, learn from its people, and build something together. But what has become of that promise?”

  He paused, letting the silence stretch. “We labor while they lead. We bleed while they command. They call us ‘Outworlders’ as though we are guests at their table, but their hands are already reaching for the door.”

  The audience stirred, the words finding purchase.

  “Anjelica’s so-called leadership has forgotten what it means to fight for our own. They hide behind Aerothanian allies and call it diplomacy. They whisper of integration while plotting segregation. And when brave souls speak truth, when we, Freedom, question their rule, they label us dissidents. Traitors.”

  His voice hardened, echoing faintly despite the wards. “Tell me, what does that make them?”

  A few shouted back, “Liars!” Others, “Collaborators!”

  “Exactly,” he said, raising a hand. “Collaborators. Pretenders who bow to creatures that see us as lesser. Ask yourselves this: how long before they decide there’s no room for us in their precious city walls? How long before they escort us elsewhere, for our safety?”

  Murmurs grew into low voices. Someone spat on the floor.

  “They will call it relocation. They will say it is for balance, for peace. But you and I know the truth, it will be exile. They would send us into the wilds to die while they feast on what we built.”

  A woman near the front clenched her fists. “And the guard they killed? Merl? They say it was Freedom that did it!”

  A dark smile touched the speaker’s lips. “Convenient, isn’t it? A man dies, no witnesses, no proof, and already their whispers turn against us. But who controls the reports? Who controls Myriad’s records? Their Aerothanian lovers in the council. They paint us as monsters to keep their own hands clean.”

  He let the silence fall again, deliberate, heavy.

  “They think we’re blind. But we remember Earth. We remember how governments called oppression ‘order.’ We remember how they silenced anyone who refused to kneel. And we will not kneel again.”

  The crowd murmured approval, some pounding the benches softly.

  The speaker raised a clenched fist. “Freedom endures. Freedom watches. And when the time comes, Freedom acts.”

  The room echoed with the phrase: “Freedom acts.”

  Gary repeated it under his breath, lips barely moving, as if afraid to break the spell.

  He wasn’t sure which terrified him more, how convincing the speech had been…or how easily the others believed it.