The Outer Court's streets throbbed with twilight commerce, lanterns flickering to life like fireflies trapped in glass. Astris wove through the crowd, her uniform swapped for a charcoal-gray cloak to blend with the evening bustle. The air hummed with the tang of seared meats and mana-infused spices—vendors hawked skewers of griffin sausage, their carts adorned with Cybele's lion motifs, while apothecaries sold vials of dungeon-glowing moss to light the way home.
She passed the Silversmith's Row, where artisans hammered delicate filigree into mana-crystal jewelry, their forges roaring with captured dungeon flames. A dwarven merchant bellowed, "Pendants to ward off wraiths! Guaranteed or your soul back!" Next door, a gnome peddled clockwork songbirds that trilled ballads about forgotten heroes.
At the Crossroads Bazaar, the scent of rosemary and burnt sugar tangled in the air. A street performer juggled orbs of liquid light, their glow reflecting off the scales of a caged inkwyrm—a serpentine creature that spat iridescent dye for tattoo artists. Astris tossed a copper coin into the performer's hat, earning a wink and a fleeting orb that hovered beside her until it dissolved into mist.
She turned down Cinder Lane, where greasy smoke curled from chimney stacks and blacksmiths' apprentices doused glowing blades in troughs of enchanted ice. A hobgoblin baker shoved a tray of ash-dusted rye loaves into her path. "Fresh from the kiln! Best this side of the dam!" Astris declined, but the scent followed her like a ghost.
Finally, she reached The Gilded Gryphon, its sign creaking in the wind. The tavern squatted between a pawnbroker's den and a boarded-up alchemy shop, its windows fogged with laughter and pipe smoke. Inside, the floorboards groaned under the weight of off-duty adventurers, their armor dented and their pockets clinking with dungeon coins.
Theo Doran stood behind the bar, his sleeves rolled to reveal forearms inked with nautical knots and faded runes. He was polishing a tankard with the intensity of a swordsman honing a blade, his dark hair tousled from a day of dodging rowdy patrons. When he spotted Astris, his stern face cracked into a grin.
"Look what the inkwyrm dragged in!" He slid a steaming mug of spiced cider across the counter, its surface dusted with cinnamon stolen from a merchant's caravan. "How's the palace treating its newest scribe?"
Astris sank onto a stool, her shoulders loosening for the first time in hours. "Like a pack mule treats a thorn," she said, sipping the cider. The warmth seeped into her bones.
Theo chuckled, drying a glass with a rag that had seen better centuries. "That good, huh? Let me guess—Seth Guilladot's as charming as a goblin with gout?"
"Worse. He threatened to bind a guild master's soul to a cheese tax ledger today."
"Sounds like Tuesday." Theo leaned forward, his voice dropping. "But you're holding your own. I heard rumors—something about Kaufmann signing a truce?"
Astris shrugged, tracing the rim of her mug. "A truce written in disappearing ink. It'll unravel by the next moon."
Theo snorted. "Then you'll stitch it back. You've always had a knack for…" He gestured vaguely, "…untangling things."
A shout erupted from a corner table where a pair of miners arm-wrestled over a disputed dungeon map. Theo sighed, hefting a cudgel from beneath the bar. "Duty calls. Try the lamb stew—it's mostly lamb this week."
As he strode off, Astris watched the tavern's chaos—the clatter of dice, the off-key lute ballad, the way the firelight caught the dust motes like tiny stars. For a moment, the weight of quills and clauses faded. Here, in the shadow of spires and schemes, the world felt simpler.
A hand clapped her shoulder, warm and familiar. "There she is! The palace's newest ink-slinger!" Grace Doran slid onto the stool beside her, her curls escaping a hastily tied kerchief and her apron dusted with flour. She smelled of cinnamon and hearth smoke, a portable storm of energy even after a day manning the tavern's kitchens.
Astris smiled, the tension in her shoulders dissolving. "Grace. Shouldn't you be terrorizing the dish-boys?"
"They're hiding. Something about 'exploding pie crusts.'" Grace flagged down Theo for two more ciders, ignoring his eye-roll. "Now talk. How's the job? Is Seth Guilladot as much of a goblin as they say? Does he actually sleep in that office?"
"He might. I've seen a cot behind a stack of tax ledgers."
Grace gasped, delighted. "A cot? That man's a tragedy waiting for a ballad. And your apartment? Please tell me it's not one of those moldy crypts near the docks."
"It's… cozy," Astris said, dodging. The truth was her tiny flat above a potion shop rattled with every carriage passing below, and the walls were stained with suspiciously glowing moss. But it had a view of the dam's misted waterfalls, and the potion maker downstairs had taken to leaving herbal tonics at her door like offerings.
Grace narrowed her eyes. "Cozy. Right. You've got a broom closet with delusions of grandeur. But the city itself? Better than those stuffy university towers, eh?"
Astris glanced around the tavern—the miners arm-wrestling over a loaf of bread, the bard butchering a ballad about a lovesick hydra, the way the firelight softened the edges of everything. "It's louder. Messier. But… alive. At the university, the only debates were about which ancient philosopher's ghost haunted the library."
Grace snorted. "Here, the ghosts just demand better ale. Speaking of!" She shoved a plate of honey-glazed roast pheasant across the bar. "Eat. You're too thin. Palace feeding you parchment and remorse?"
Astris obliged, the meat tender and rich with juniper smoke. "They serve a lot of jellied eel."
"Crimes against cuisine," Grace declared. "I'll send Theo over with a proper stew. And a lamp that doesn't whisper insults. Saw one at the market—rune-carved, keeps out rats and snooping neighbors."
Astris laughed, the sound strange to her own ears. "You've met Mrs. Voss, then?"
"The woman who 'accidentally' scries through keyholes? Please. She'd fold under a five-minute chat with Seth." Grace leaned closer, her voice softening. "Seriously, though. You're… alright? No cursed contracts? No midnight dungeon raids?"
"Not yet. Though today I threatened a guild master with heresy charges."
Grace's grin widened. "That's my girl. Always knew you'd terrorize the powerful before you turned thirty."
Theo reappeared, slamming down two steaming meat pies. "On the house. And you—" he pointed at Grace, "—owe me three silvers for the cider."
Grace waved him off. "Put it on my tab."
"Your tab's longer than the dam ledger," Theo muttered, but there was no heat in it.
As the night deepened, the tavern's chaos swirled around them—a drunkard singing a dirge for his lost sock, a stray dog stealing sausages with military precision. For the first time since arriving in Lismore, Astris felt anchored. Not by laws or quills, but by the warmth of Grace's laughter, the clatter of Theo's kitchen, the way the city's heartbeat thrummed in the sticky cider and smoke-stained walls.
Grace raised her mug, her eyes glinting. "To surviving the palace, outsmarting fools, and finding the best loophole of all—family."
The walk home was a descent from warmth into silence. Lismore's streets had shed their daytime clamor, leaving only the whisper of wind through alleyways and the distant clang of the night watch's bells. Astris kept to the cobbled lanes lit by mana-crystal streetlamps, their blue-white glow pooling like spilled milk on the stones. Above, the palace loomed, its spires clawing at a sky choked with stars.
She passed the Moonlit Market, where nocturnal vendors sold curios to insomniacs and thieves—dried wyvern scales, lockpicks forged from frost-iron, vials of dream smoke that shimmered like liquid starlight. A hunched crone beckoned her closer, rattling a necklace of finger bones. "A charm to quiet restless minds, dearie?" Astris shook her head, but the crone's cackle followed her like a curse.
Her apartment perched above Briar & Bane Apothecary, its sign creaking on rusted chains. The stairwell reeked of sulfur and wilted rosemary, the steps groaning underfoot. Inside, the single room was a mosaic of chaos and order: parchment stacks towered beside a narrow bed, quills bristled from chipped mugs, and a cracked mirror hung askew, reflecting fragments of a woman she barely recognized.
The potion maker downstairs had left another tonic on her windowsill—a vial of something indigo labeled For Nightmares. Astris set it aside, untouched. With a flick of her Phoenix Quill, she lit a candle, its flame casting jagged shadows on walls stained with bioluminescent moss. The moss pulsed faintly, a relic from the last dungeon breach, its light-tinged green like a fading bruise.
She tried to unwind. Stripped off her ink-stained gloves, brewed bitterroot tea, and even attempted to read a novel Grace had thrust into her hands—The Rogue and the Runecarver, its pages dog-eared and smudged with pastry grease. But the words blurred. Her mind circled back to Jack Kaufmann's smirk, Seth's simmering frustration, and the hospital's half-built skeleton looming over the eastern district.
Thirteen years of tax exemptions. Heresy charges. Shadow Weavers.
The anxiety tightened like a vice. She paced, her boots echoing on warped floorboards, until she knelt beside her bed and dragged out a locked iron chest. The key hung around her neck, hidden beneath her shirt—a cold sliver of metal that burned with every heartbeat.
Inside lay contraband.
A grimoire bound in wyvern hide, its pages scrawled with glyphs that squirmed under candlelight. Maps of forgotten dungeons, annotated with warnings in a dead scholar's hand. And a slim, illicit volume titled Mana Siphon: The Art of Life-Force Crystallization.
She'd stolen it from the university's forbidden archives years ago, tucked between treatises on crop rotation. Its pages detailed relics that defied Cybele's laws—aetherium crystals that stored raw mana, soul anchors carved from necrotic ore, even whispers of a Voidwell, a fabled artifact that could drain life itself. The margins bore her own notes, frantic and precise:
Dungeon cores emit residual energy. Harvestable?
Temple vaults—restricted section—hold First Dynasty artifacts.
Cybele's "fertility rites" may mask sacrificial rituals.
Her fingers traced a map of the northern mountains, where rogue miners had reported veins of black crystal that "sang to the blood." The ink blurred as her vision swam.
What are you doing?
The voice in her head sounded like Grace. Like Theo. Like the self she'd been before ink and ambition had etched their price into her bones.
But the pull was too strong. She spread the papers across the floor, cross-referencing dungeon clearance reports with temple decrees, her quill darting like a scavenger bird. The candle burned low. The moss-light dimmed. Somewhere, the Nightwatch called the hour, their voices muffled by mist.
When dawn's first blush crept through the window, Astris sat back, her hands trembling. The moss-light on the walls had dimmed to a sickly gray, and the candle was a puddle of wax, its wick drowned in its own remains. The grimoire lay open before her, its wyvern-leather cover cold as a tombstone. Her notes sprawled like spiderwebs across the floor—maps, equations, and fragments of temple hymns that suddenly read less like prayers and more like recipes.
Mana storage. Life-force crystallization.
The words pulsed in her mind, dangerous and seductive. She traced the grimoire's illustration of an aetherium crystal—a jagged shard of obsidian veined with gold; its core hollowed into a lattice meant to trap raw energy. According to the text, such relics were buried in the heart of "breathing" dungeons, guarded by creatures that fed on ambition. But Astris had parsed enough clearance reports to know where the guilds' adventurers refused to tread: the Shattered Spire, a semi-sentient dungeon in the northern wastes, its walls said to shift like a living maze.
She stood, her legs stiff, and crossed to the apothecary's abandoned tonic on the sill. The indigo liquid glinted, mocking. For Nightmares. She pocketed it instead.
The city awoke sluggishly around her as she navigated the Dawn Bazaar, where night vendors packed their dream smoke, and thieves melted into the crowd. Astris kept her hood drawn, her boots scuffing the dew-damp cobblestones. She paused at Ironmonger's Alley, its stalls clattering with dungeon-forged tools. A hunched tinker sold "purified" mana batteries—crude copper spheres that hummed with stolen energy. Useless for her needs, but proof the black market thrived.
She lingered at a stall draped in moth-eaten velvet, its proprietor a gaunt elf with eyes like tarnished silver. "Seeker's tools," he rasped, gesturing to a display of lockpicks, bone saws, and vials of acid that hissed at the light. "Or perhaps… specialty items?"
Astris hesitated, then slid a sketch across the counter—a rough drawing of the aetherium crystal from the grimoire. The elf's smile revealed filed teeth. "Ah. A connoisseur." He vanished behind a curtain and returned with a clay jar sealed with wax. Inside lay a shard of black stone, its surface etched with faint golden threads.
"A sample," he said. "Harvested from the Spire's outer chambers. The rest… requires a deeper journey."
Astris's fingers itched to touch it, but she clenched her fists. "Cost?"
"Favor for favor. The dungeon's core has been… unstable. Adventurers return mad or not at all. But a scholar with a sharp quill might find use in this." He pressed a crumpled leaflet into her hand—a royal decree offering bonuses for clearing the Shattered Spire.
Desperation, she realized. The crown is terrified of what's growing there.
Back in her apartment, she placed the shard on her desk. It drank the light, casting no shadow. Her Phoenix Quill hovered above it, its tip glowing as if sensing corruption. She dipped it in ink and began to write, the quill's heat searing the page:
Hypothesis: Aetherium can store mana without temple sanction.
Method: Direct infusion via blood sigil (see pg. 47).
Risk: Catastrophic backlash. Soul fracture.
Her hand shook. She'd read enough to know the price of hubris—stories of mages reduced to ash, their essence devoured by crystals gone rogue. But she'd also seen the parchments in Seth's office, the way the crown siphoned mana from the people while the temples hoarded divine power. They all take. Why shouldn't I?
She pricked her finger with the quill's tip, a bead of blood welling. The shard hissed as she smeared the sigil onto its surface, the golden threads flaring hungrily. The air thickened, the moss-light pulsing faster, and for a moment, she felt it—a pull, a hunger—as the crystal awakened.
Then nothing.
The shard lay inert, her blood dried to rust. Astris slumped, equal parts relieved and furious. Not enough. Not yet.
By midday, she stood at the edge of the Clerk's Archive, its vaulted ceilings echoing with the scratch of quills and the clink of tea cups. The public ledgers were a maze of bureaucracy, but she'd learned to navigate them at the university. She requested clearance reports for the Shattered Spire, guild tax exemptions, and—on a whim—temple donations from northern parishes.
The pattern solidified: every dungeon surge in the Spire coincided with a spike in Cybele's "blessed" mana reserves. The temples were harvesting, just as she'd guessed. And the crown turned a blind eye, desperate to keep the lights on.
A clerk with ink-stained cuffs sidled up, sliding her a note. Midnight. Drowned Quay. Ask for the Tidecaller.
Astris crumpled the paper, her pulse quickening. The Drowned Quay was a nest of smugglers and soul traders, but it was also the only place to find a guide mad enough to brave the Spire.
She left the archive, the sun a pale coin behind iron clouds. In her pocket, the crystal shard hummed faintly, a dormant star waiting to ignite.
Soon, she thought. Soon.
The Royal Lawyer's Office hummed with its usual chaos—floating quills scribbling in midair, enchanted ink pots bubbling over with clauses, and the rosemary plant muttering critiques from its corner perch. Astris sat at her desk, the aetherium shard hidden in her drawer, its presence a quiet hum beneath the din of parchment and debate.
The door burst open, and the room froze as the Celestaviel delegation swept in, trailing the scent of distant spice markets and exhaustion. Evelyn Laveau led the charge, her rainbow-clad brilliance undimmed by travel, her cursed gem necklace glowing faintly. Behind her, Harvey Spectar lingered, his infernal contracts tucked under one arm, and Lucy Shade trailed, already scowling at the mess of scrolls on Seth's desk.
Gretchen rose from her botanical ledger, ivy tendrils curling into a welcoming arch. "Look who slithered back! How were the silk tariffs? Still exquisite, I hope?"
Evelyn dropped a stack of treaties on the nearest table, her smile razor-thin. "Like negotiating with a hydra. Every head wanted a different bribe." She turned to Seth. "What did we miss?"
Seth leaned back, boots propped on a tower of tax ledgers. "Jack Kaufmann formed a 'Free Trade Coalition.' Tried to hijack the mana conduits. We temporarily neutered him."
Lucy snorted, flopping into a chair. "Temporarily? That peacock's probably already rerouting the hospital's supply lines. If the foundation permits collapse—"
Noah kicked her shin under the table, but she barreled on, "—we'll be healing patients in a tent."
Harvey's gaze drifted to Astris, who had quietly observed the exchange. "New recruit?"
Gretchen swooped in, herding the group like a sheepdog. "Everyone, meet Astris Doran. Survived Seth's temper, Kaufmann's ego, and the begonias' critiques. Astris, this is Evelyn—our walking legal encyclopedia. Harvey—specializes in contracts that bite back. Lucy—loves explosions and terrible ideas."
Lucy saluted with a dagger she'd been cleaning. "Pleasure's mine."
Harvey extended a hand, his smile polished but probing. "Any relation to the Dorans of the Iron Crescent?"
"Distant," Astris said, gripping his palm. His signet ring pulsed faintly, cold against her skin.
Before she could ask about the Celestaviel treaties, the door slammed open again. Camilla Valero stormed in, her ledger's insight spectacles askew, trailed by her assistant Oliver, whose arms overflowed with scrolls screaming red emergency seals.
"What in Cybele's name is this 'Free Trade Coalition'?" Camilla demanded, slamming a report on Seth's desk. "The northern parishes are panicking. If Kaufmann reroutes the mana channels, their crop yields plummet. And Oliver heard rumors—"
Oliver piped up, voice trembling, "—that the coalition's hoarding dungeon cores! The temples are furious."
The rosemary plant hissed, "Told you so."
Evelyn plucked the report, her cursed quill already dissecting clauses. "Kaufmann's overplayed. If he's stockpiling cores, the temples will revoke his sanctified status. No tax exemptions, no guild protections."
Seth smirked. "Then we let the Galli gut him."
"Unless," Astris interjected quietly, "he's bribed the temples to look the other way."
All eyes turned to her.
Camilla adjusted her spectacles, scrutinizing Astris like a faulty equation. "You've proof?"
"Patterns," Astris said, her mind flashing to the grimoire's notes. "Every dungeon surge in the north aligns with temple mana reserves spiking. They're not just blessing crops—they're harvesting."
The room fell silent, the weight of the accusation settling like ash.
Lucy whistled. "So Kaufmann and the temples are scalping each other? Explains why the High Priest's been smiling like a wyvern at a feast."
Gretchen's ivy tendrils coiled into a storm cloud above her desk. "This stays in this room. If the parliament catches wind—"
"They'll burn the evidence and the messengers," Seth finished. He stood, rolling up his sleeves. "Evelyn, cross-reference the temple donations with dungeon clearance logs. Lucy, dig up Kaufmann's contracts with the northern parishes. Astris—" He paused, grudging respect in his glare. "—figure out how deep this rot goes."
As the team scattered, Astris glanced at the hidden shard in her drawer. The Shattered Spire's map called to her, but here, in the eye of the storm, duty came first.
For now.