Chapter 1 — Demon
Before they ever hand you a badge, they make you memorize the Tri Edict. Three laws, six sentences, and somehow that’s supposed to cover every demon, every goblin, and every idiot with a summoning circle in his basement across the whole of La’Batre. I’ve had it word-perfect since I was nineteen. I still don’t think whoever wrote it ever had to enforce it at two in the morning in the rain.
Short version, since nobody in Gokrieg has time for the long one: conjuration’s illegal, because it turns out nothing gets created out of nothing—it gets taken, from somewhere, from some other world that didn’t offer it up. Demons don’t get to operate loose in the Realm of Man unless the Council says otherwise, and if one shows up here to corrupt or consume, that’s an easy banishment. And nobody—living, dead, or something in between—gets to touch another being’s life-force. That one gets recited a lot. It gets broken more than people like to admit.
You don’t need the history lesson on how we got here—a hundred years of the Authority poking holes in reality because it turned out it could—but the short version matters. One hole led to demons, and eventually a truce nobody’s thrilled about. One hole led somewhere we don’t talk about. And one led to Medar, which is where Gokrieg’s goblins came from—people who looked at a warzone and a bureaucracy and picked the bureaucracy, and honestly, I get it.
That’s the law. That’s the world I work in.
Somewhere in it tonight is a goblin who calls himself Lutin Hideux—coined the name himself, if the reports are right, and made himself a real problem to go with it.
Somewhere in it tonight is me, about to have a very bad night.
“Have we met?”
Gokrieg is a borough in the great city of La’Batre—established as a refuge for all law-abiding beings who seek shelter from other realms. A maze of apartments, shelters, and mid- to high-end housing, it breathes with the mingled lives of three worlds pressed together under one sky.
Boots splash through the wet, rainy streets. I’m sure they’re loud, but all I can think about is catching the red-eyed goblin who’s coined the name Lutin Hideux. I arrive at the building of the tenant who made the call. I burst through the entry door and rush up the stairs to the sixth floor. Room 603. I stop, press my ear to the door—silence.
“URSIE, STAND DOWN AND WAIT FOR BACKUP!” blasts through my radio.
I hear a crash and a muffled cry. I can’t wait. I wrap my fingers around my baton and kick the door open. It shatters as I lunge through. A blood trail leads from the entry through the hall. I follow it to a horrific scene—several dead goblins, shredded to ribbons.
The sound of claws tearing through flesh echoes from the far side of the room. A shadowy figure hunches over a corpse. It turns, glaring with red eyes full of malice. It rises to its full height—twice the size of any recorded goblin.
“You’re under arrest. Put your mitts behind your hea—”
Before I can finish, a searing pain shoots through my gut. I look down, stunned. A demon quill—an ember quill, glowing and barbed—is protruding from my side. I didn’t even see it coming.
(SMASH)—the creature leaps out of the window.
I grit my teeth, shove the pain aside, and give chase. The downpour is heavier now as I tail the creature through alleys slick with rain. It turns down a street that only leads to the old shipyard. The Galash yard.
That must be where the Port is.
“URSIE, WE’RE ON SITE. WHERE ARE YOU?”
“I’m in pursuit of a large goblin—heading to the old Galash boatyard.”
“DO NOT ENGAGE UNTIL BACKUP ARRIVES.”
I ignore the order.
A huge rusted sign reads GALASH. He’s here—red glow pulsing beyond the fence. I climb over and take cover behind a scrap boat.
The Port hasn’t harmonized yet. He’s stuck.
Now’s my chance.
I charge out, baton in hand. The club smashes into the side of his jaw. A chunk of his false skin splashes into the mud. He drops to his knees. Underneath the torn prosthetic: brindle demon flesh.
I cuff him, activate the stun, and rip away the rest of the disguise.
He grins. “‘Bout fucking time, Ursie. Thought you’d catch up sooner.”
I scan the old scars on his face. “Have we met?”
He lets out a ragged laugh. “These scars? Not from one of you Augers. They’re from being a host—to something with a bloodthirsty vendetta.”
He coughs black blood. His eyes darken—smoky red. “A vendetta that led right to you.”
Then the haze erupts. Red vapor spills from his eyes and mouth. I’m engulfed.
Visions crash through me—realms of warped geometry, snarling beasts, countless deaths that feel like my own. The demon’s essence floods into me, a torrent of memory, rage, and something else—alive, ancient.
When the haze clears, the demon lies dying beside me. “Now that it’s yours,” he rasps, “the creature will come for you. Don’t let it take it from you. If it does… all worlds will fall.”
He exhales one last time.
The sirens grow louder.
My body burns.
Then—darkness.
Chapter 2 — Haze
I wake choking on air too thick to be real.
The haze hasn’t left me. It clings to my lungs, my thoughts—like a fevered whisper repeating someone else’s memories in my voice. The world stutters into focus. I’m lying in a medical ward I don’t recognize. Sterile. Quiet. Lit with the hum of Magitol panels that flicker, trying to sync with whatever pulse is leaking out of me.
My badge is gone. So is my baton.
Then the pain hits. Not sharp, but total—an inferno radiating from inside my chest. I try to scream, but my throat locks. No air. No voice. Just the suffocating burn of something crawling under my skin, fusing with me.
The door hisses open. A man in a long gray coat enters, followed by a heavily armored guard and a woman wearing an obsidian mask polished so black it reflects nothing. I can’t tell how she breathes through it—or how she sees. The mask’s surface ripples faintly with runes, each glowing and fading in rhythm with my pulse.
The coat rustles as the man checks a set of instruments near my cot. None of them look at me as a person. I’m an experiment.
“She’s stabilizing,” the doctor murmurs. “The essence is taking to her system faster than we calculated.”
The guard’s filtered voice grinds out of his helmet. “She’s still conscious.”
The masked woman tilts her head. “Record everything. I want to see how long she can hold before the essence starts burning through the host.”
The doctor glances at a monitor. “Her vitals are erratic but strong. She’s enduring it.”
“Good,” the woman replies. “Then we’ll see how much of her survives.”
I can’t move. Every nerve screams, but no sound escapes. The world narrows to light and heat until I feel my thoughts flicker apart like ash. My vision tunnels into red glare and shadowed silhouettes. Their voices blur into one droning rhythm.
“Run the resonance test.”
“Mark response at phase three.”
“Don’t intervene yet.”
The edges of reality dissolve.
Vision — Lutin Hideux
The world swims into focus behind closed eyes that aren’t hers.
Rain. Not falling—running. Water streams down the sides of buildings in thick, patient rivulets, pooling on streets that gleam with reflected neon. Above, traffic moves in layers—vehicles with no wheels, just clean lines of light gliding across elevated roadways, their trails streaking the darkness red and blue and poisoned green. The sky is wrong. Too dark, too close, like a bruise pressing down.
Her feet move forward. Not her feet.
The hood of a raincoat—a poncho thing, heavy and worn—frames her vision. Her hands are shoved deep in pockets that aren’t hers. There’s a weight at her sides, familiar in a way that makes her skin crawl: the quills. The blades. She knows these weapons from the wrong side of them.
She realizes, with a sickening lurch, that she’s looking through his eyes. Lutin Hideux’s eyes. This is his memory, his body, his desperate forward momentum down a street in a world that has no name she knows.
She can’t move. Can’t speak. Can only watch as he walks with absolute purpose toward something he’s decided is worth dying for.
The alley entrance yawns ahead—pipes running like veins through the building walls, pavement slicked with that omnipresent water. As he steps into it, the sound changes. The neon hum fades. The footsteps of passersby disappear. There’s only the sound of water and something else. Something wet.
A squelching. Organic. Raw.
He slows. Ahead, maybe thirty feet down the alley, a black silhouette wraps itself around a figure—one of the inhabitants of this world. Small. Frail-looking. The kind of being that probably has a name, a family, intentions that extended further than this moment.
The creature holding it is not one thing.
It’s a bundle of tubes—black and impossibly dark, interlinking segments of silver at the joints, wrapping around the inhabitant’s arms, coiling up the torso. One tube has threaded over the figure’s head like a parasite asserting dominance. And the inhabitant—gods, the inhabitant looks withered. Like something has been pulled out of them. Like they’re a husk with a heartbeat.
Ursie tries to scream. Nothing. She’s a ghost in Lutin Hideux’s skull, watching him pull two old blades from beneath his coat—demon quills, the same quills that would later taste her blood in a rainy Gokrieg apartment. His hands move with the certainty of someone who’s fought before. Someone who knows how to bleed and keep moving.
He steps forward. His boot scrapes the wet pavement.
The creature freezes.
For one suspended instant, nothing moves. The tubes don’t writhe. The inhabitant doesn’t twitch. Even the water seems to pause in its endless streaming down the alley walls.
Then the tubes unwrap.
The inhabitant drops like a bag of bones, because that’s what they are now, just bones in a skin envelope, everything useful drained away. The creature shifts. The tubes that were wound around the victim now bunch and coil, forming something closer to shape. Something closer to intent.
Three of the tubes angle toward him.
Eyes open in those three tubes, not eyes exactly, but something that looks at. Something that recognizes him as a threat.
The creature reassembles itself. Legs form from twisted tubes locking into rigid angles. A torso emerges. Arms. It doesn’t move the way living things move. It flows. One moment it’s a pile, the next it’s here, having crossed the space between without ever stepping, as if distance itself agreed to fold for it.
Then it lunges.
The movement is so fast it almost doesn’t register as movement, it’s just suddenly there, wrapping itself around him, tubes coiling like serpents, cold and searching. Ursie feels the pressure on his ribs, the burn of being constricted, the animal panic that comes with realizing you can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t do anything but exist inside something else’s grip.
His blades slash. Once, twice, the old demon steel finds purchase, but the tubes just part and reform, endless, always more, always coming. He’s strong—she can feel that strength, the raw physicality of a body that’s spent centuries fighting—but strength means nothing against something that doesn’t care about damage because it has no singular form to damage.
The creature climbs.
One moment his feet are on the pavement. The next, the tubes are gripping the walls of the buildings, pulling him up, his body dragged vertically, the alley spinning below as more hoses wrap around him, encasing him, building a cocoon of black and silver that smells like ozone and something older, something that predates the concept of flesh.
He’s inside it now. Completely. Darkness. The pressure is everywhere.
Then—two tubes.
One slides out of the bundle like a tendril, and Ursie sees it with a horror that crystallizes in her chest: it’s an eye. Just an eye, hanging at the end of a tube, iris spinning, pupil dilating as it looks directly at him. At her. Through her.
The other tube widens.
It unfolds like an umbrella, but instead of cloth there are fangs, chitinous and black, and at the center of this blooming maw is a throat, or what serves as one, and Ursie understands in that moment that this is how it feeds. This is how it takes.
The worm-thing, there’s no better word for it, it’s massive and segmented and hungry in a way that goes beyond biology, launches from the bundle and latches onto his face.
The suction.
It’s not just pulling air from his lungs. It’s pulling everything. She can feel it, that specific violation, the sensation of something being drawn out of him that isn’t breath, that isn’t blood, that’s something more fundamental. His essence. The Red inside him, glowing and burning and fighting, but even the Red is being pulled, thread by thread, into that throat.
He’s going to die. They’re going to die. The realization is so complete, so final, that Ursie almost surrenders to it.
Then, the creature’s grip loosens.
Just for a moment. Just enough.
His foot comes free. His hand, still gripping one of the demon blades, still fighting even as everything is being drained away. The blade drops from his fingers, intentional, she realizes, not a mistake, and his foot, with the last ounce of strength he has, kicks.
The quill flies true.
It drives into the primary tube at the base of that obscene mouth, and the creature screams. Not a sound, not exactly, but a vibration that travels through the cocoon, through his body, through the Red inside him, and everything goes white with pain and rage and release.
The worm retracts.
The tubes go slack.
He tears free, blade in hand, and slices. The mouth-tube parts like soft fruit, and instead of blood, a gel spills out, thick, silvery-black, gooping down onto the pavement like the creature itself is weeping. The creature convulses, and in that moment of weakness, he pulls. He tears himself free from the bundle, tubes still clinging to his arms, his legs, his back, but no longer holding him, no longer pulling him deeper into that darkness.
And then, the heat.
His body ignites.
Not fire, not exactly, but something from the Red inside him, a defensive reflex so primal it bypasses thought, bypasses will, becomes pure survival. His skin radiates. Steam rises from the tubes still wrapped around him, the black material beginning to smoke, to retract, to let go.
He runs.
Down the alley, away from the creature, toward the open street. His body is screaming, but it’s his own scream now, not the creature’s, not something borrowed. The Red burns inside him like a second heart, keeping him alive, keeping him moving, refusing to let him stop.
Behind him, the creature follows. He hears it before he sees it, the clang of tubes against metal, the screech of claws on concrete, the sound of something hunting. It scales the buildings like a spider, and he knows, with absolute certainty, that it will catch him if he stops. If he hesitates. If he lets the pain and exhaustion win.
He doesn’t.
The alley opens onto a street alive with traffic and lights and people. He stumbles out, his vision blurring, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and sees it: a bike with no wheels, just a sleek platform that glides above the wet pavement. There’s someone on it, one of the inhabitants, looking confused, looking like they have no idea what’s coming.
He doesn’t apologize. He just moves.
The inhabitant spills off onto the wet street. Ursie watches, trapped in his perspective, as Lutin Hideux throws himself onto the bike and twists something at the handlebar. The platform accelerates.
The chase begins.
He can hear the creature behind him, demolishing everything in its path. Cars flip like toys. Buildings shatter. The sound is the sound of something that doesn’t understand the concept of restraint, that sees obstacles only as things to be removed. The Red keeps him focused, keeps his hands steady on the controls, keeps his eyes on what matters: forward. Always forward.
Around a corner. Through a plaza. The creature grazes his back with one of those tubes, and he feels cloth shred, flesh tear, but the pain is distant, muffled by the Red’s insistence that this doesn’t matter, keep moving.
The bridge comes into view.
It’s grand, impossibly so, spanning a river that glows with its own bioluminescence, and Ursie understands without being told that this is his target. This is where he’s meant to go. The Red knows. The Red always knows.
His vision blurs. His hands shake. Every cell in his body is screaming that he can’t make it, that he’s already dead, that the only mercy left is to let go.
But the Red won’t.
No, it says, wordless and absolute. Not yet. Not here.
He leans into the turn.
The bridge rushes toward him. The creature, faster now, closer now, one of its tubes lashing out and slicing across his back, shredding the last of his raincoat. He doesn’t even flinch. He’s already past pain. He’s already past everything except this: the bridge, the center point, the moment.
He rides past the center. The creature’s tube snaps at his heels, missing by centimeters.
Then he swerves.
Hard. Sharp. Violent.
The bike flies off the bridge.
He jumps.
And there, there, in the space between the bridge and the water below, a doorway opens. Not gradual. Not negotiated. Just there, a square of light the size of a person, humming with resonance that tastes like home and like leaving and like something ending.
Water runs into it. He doesn’t hesitate.
He dives.
One of the creature’s tubes follows, wrapping around his ankle, pulling, trying to drag him back into that other world. But he’s already through, already falling, and the doorway snaps shut behind him with a finality that feels like a severing.
The tube disconnects. Falls into the river. Floats, empty and useless.
He crashes into stone. A cave, carved and maintained, walls of deep brown rock studded with technology that looks almost familiar, almost civilized. He lies there for a long moment, gasping, bleeding, burning from the inside out.
The Red is the only thing keeping his heart beating.
He knows this now, understands it with the clarity that only comes when you’ve been unmade and put back together by something that refuses to let you stay broken. The Red isn’t parasitic. It’s symbiotic. It’s keeping him alive because it needs him alive. And he’s going to honor that debt.
He sits up, each movement agony, and reaches back to feel his back. It’s torn. Not just cut, shredded. He should be dead. By every law of biology, he should be a corpse leaking out onto this stone floor.
Instead, he’s alive. And he knows, with the certainty of the Red’s whisper in his mind, that he doesn’t have much time left. Days, maybe. A week if the Red is generous. But enough time to prepare.
He stands. Walks to where the tube still lies, that empty black and silver snake, and picks it up. Turns it over. Looks inside.
Nothing. Just emptiness. Just a vessel that used to carry something but doesn’t anymore.
The Red moves through his thoughts like smoke: We need to go. We need to find the next step. We need to prepare.
He walks deeper into the cave. To a room that looks like it was meant for sleeping. To a closet that holds old things, forgotten things. And there, at the bottom, a leather bag. He opens it and inside finds what he’s been looking for, what the Red has been leading him toward all along.
A prosthetic. A face. A way to walk into another world and not be hunted.
He pulls it out, runs his fingers over it, and understands.
The Red isn’t done yet. It’s just waiting.
He carries the bag to another section of the cave, to a wall that gleams like polished stone, and looks into it like a mirror. His eyes are red. Not metaphorically, not symbolically, red, glowing with that same smoke-light that filled the Gokrieg apartment when he transferred the burden to an Auger named Ursie Gatineau. The Red is visible in him. It’s alive in him.
He puts his hands on the wall.
The Red surges through him, heat and will and ancient hunger, and the wall responds. It ripples. It peels back. And at its center, a portal opens, not haphazard, not desperate, but deliberate. Made with intention.
Through it, he sees streets he recognizes. Gokrieg. The borough of interdimensional refugees and broken things looking for shelter.
He understands now. This isn’t escape. This is infiltration.
He steps toward the portal.
And as his foot crosses the threshold, as the other world pulls him toward its neon-soaked streets and rainy alleys, Ursie’s vision cracks like glass.
Then—silence.
When I wake again, the light is softer—gold instead of blue. My body aches, but the fire has quieted to embers. I’m in a smaller room now. The hum of magitol is faint, replaced by something warmer—something human.
The door creaks open.
Ben stands there.
Relief hits me like a wave. Real. Familiar. Alive.
He hesitates in the doorway, eyes searching mine as if he’s not sure I’m really awake. “You’re alive,” he says softly. “You scared the hell out of everyone.”
My voice comes out cracked. “How long…?”
“Two days.” He steps closer. “Doc Zarrin said your vitals went insane. You were burning up, no one could explain it.”
“I—” I pause, the memory flooding back. The pain. The mask. The woman. “There were people here,” I say hoarsely. “A man in a coat, a soldier, and a woman in a black mask. They said something about resonance. About the essence taking to my system.”
Ben’s face changes—first confusion, then concern. “Urs, there was no one here but me and the doc. We found you alone.”
I stare at him, searching for any sign of deception. Nothing.
“I saw her,” I whisper. “The mask… it didn’t reflect anything, or even hear her breathe.”
He sighs, pulling the chair closer. “You’ve been through something brutal. It might’ve been the fever, or shock. The brain plays tricks when it’s under that kind of stress.”
I shake my head weakly. “She was real. All of them were.”
He studies me a moment longer, then says quietly, “Then maybe they don’t want us to know they were there.”
For a long while, neither of us speaks. The quiet hum of the equipment fills the space like a heartbeat.
I lie back, staring at the ceiling. Then I notice it—a rune, faint as a bruise, burned into the metal frame of my cot just above my head. Not printed. Not stamped. Burned, from the inside out, like something hot had pressed against it from beneath the steel. I reach up and touch it. Still warm.
“Ben.”
He leans in.
“What made that?”
He stares at it for a long moment. His jaw tightens. “I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I don’t know what that is.”
Neither do I. But I know it wasn’t there when they brought me in—I’ve been in enough intake wards to know they check the frames. Whatever left that mark was here after I arrived. Maybe while I was burning.
“They weren’t just a dream,” I say.
Ben nods slowly this time. No hesitation. “No,” he says. “I don’t think they were.”
He sits beside me quietly after that, his usual sarcasm gone. He’s studying me like he’s afraid I might shatter.
“Ursie,” he says gently, “you’ve been through something brutal. Doc Zarrin said your brain was lit up like a reactor core. You were in a coma. Whatever you saw—it might’ve just been your mind trying to rebuild. Except for that mark.” He glances at the frame again. “That one I can’t explain.”
I tighten my grip on the blanket. “I wasn’t hallucinating, Ben. I was somewhere else. And someone—or something—was speaking through me.”
He exhales slowly. “I believe you.”
The silence thickens, but it’s a different silence now—less dismissal, more dread.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” I ask.
“No,” Ben says, without hesitation this time. “But I think something wants you to think that. And I think whatever was in that room made sure to leave a reason why you shouldn’t.”
I nod slowly. The itch under my skin fades a little, the fire dimming to a dull hum.
Ben shifts in his chair, clearing his throat. “So… about Lutin Hideux.”
I blink, dragging my thoughts back. “What about him?”
“He wasn’t a goblin,” Ben says. “Forensics confirmed it—what’s left of him anyway. He was a demon in full disguise. The prosthetic was advanced, but old. Pre-civilization old.”
I frown. “How much did they recover?”
He shakes his head. “Not enough. The Red—or whatever was inside him—withered him from the inside out. By the time they bagged the remains, there wasn’t much left. No DNA, no tissue, nothing. The autopsy team said it was like his body burned itself out.”
My stomach tightens. “So no ID.”
“None. The demon consulate says they’ve only seen quills like that in their tombs.”
I stare past him, the memory of that final moment replaying in my head. If he was a demon—what the hell did he give me?
Ben leans back, studying me. “Everyone’s just glad you made it. Half of Gokrieg lit candles when they heard you were stable. Even Captain Brax stopped by.”
I can’t help but smile faintly. “Brax? That old bastard doesn’t even like birthdays.”
Ben grins. “Guess you’re special.” He pauses, then pulls something from his coat pocket—a folded piece of parchment.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Your dad was here,” he says quietly.
My heart skips. “What?”
“He showed up right after they brought you in. Didn’t say much. Handed me this, told me to give it to you, and said you’d know what to do. Then he was gone before I could ask questions.”
I take the letter, fingers trembling. The paper is unwrinkled, cool to the touch. I already know the feel of his handwriting before I open it.
The Letter
Dearest Daughter,
I regret that I cannot be with you during your recovery. The tensions between the Board and the higher authorities have required my presence near Central Command. Still, I was relieved to hear of your survival and remarkable rate of recovery—no one has ever gone toe-to-toe with a demon of that stature and lived to tell the tale.
Regarding the change in your eye color, both the attending doctors and guild-certified alchemists have confirmed no detrimental effects. Please ensure that any further changes—physical, mental, or otherwise—are reported promptly to myself, your supervisor Ben, or any authorized medical practitioner or guild alchemist.
That said, Ursie… please, wait for backup next time. I don’t know what I would do if I lost you.
I trust Ben has delivered this letter along with your next assignment. I understand how quickly this is all happening, and yes, you deserve rest. But we must also recognize the rare opportunity before us. The goblins have offered further collaboration once they’ve secured their own borders—unfortunately, their regions have suffered increasing attacks by trolls, illicit conjurors, and whispers of necromancy.
They’ve requested a small team of authorities and one trusted Auger—someone who will not waver in the face of challenge. I can think of no one better suited than you.
Once you’re cleared for duty, report to the PCA. I’ll be there to see you off personally.
I love you, Ursie. May your recovery be swift.
With pride and love, Col. Pat Gatineau
My throat tightens. I read it twice, three times.
I set the letter on my lap and watch the rain streak down the window, thoughts tangled in anticipation and unease. This assignment came too fast—too sudden. Representing my people, my father—on a new frontier? It’s a lot to carry.
I stare at the signature at the bottom, the bold strokes of Colonel Paton Gatineau—official, distant, unyielding. It feels less like a father’s message and more like an order.
“I’m not an assassin,” I murmur, more to myself than to Ben.
He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You’re not,” he says quietly. “That’s not why they’re sending you.”
I glance at him, doubtful. “Then why me? Because I survived something they can’t explain?”
“Because this isn’t a simple op. It’s diplomacy, politics, and danger all tangled together. They need someone who won’t lose their head when the lines start to blur.” He pauses, watching me closely. “You’re the only one they trust to handle something this complex—and not turn it into a war.”
I huff a breath somewhere between frustration and acceptance. “You make it sound noble.”
Ben gives a half-smile. “It is. You’ve got more integrity than half the Authority combined. That’s what scares them—and why they need you.”
I look down again at the letter, fingers tightening around the paper. The words still burn, but Ben’s voice steadies the edges of it.
“Maybe,” I say quietly, “but it still feels like a test.”
He shrugs. “Then pass it your way.”
My mind drifts to Irdock. He always cared, even when he was pushing me past what I thought I could handle. He was the one who showed up—at training, at the hard moments, at the years when my parents’ arguments split the house wide open and my mother was nowhere to be found. Irdock was there. Relentless and demanding and present in a way Paton never quite managed to be.
And then one day he walked through a Port and didn’t come back.
Status unknown. File classified. Move on.
I miss him.
Ben doesn’t speak. He just waits, patient as ever.
“There’s one more thing,” he says finally. “About the port—the one Lutin was using.”
I look up.
“According to Port Control, it wasn’t anchored. No tether. No destination. Just… floating.”
“That’s impossible,” I say. “Every Port needs a relay or core energy to stabilize.”
Ben nods. “Exactly. This one was different. The harmonics were erratic, like it was meant to collapse mid-transit. A decoy, maybe. Or a trap.”
I look back at the letter. “Or maybe he never meant to escape.”
Ben doesn’t answer. The idea hangs in the air.
He stands, smoothing the front of his coat. “I’ll let you rest. Try not to melt any doctors with your demon eyes, alright?”
I smirk faintly. “No promises.”
When he leaves, the silence returns—thick and heavy, but not empty.
I glance once more at the burned rune in the cot frame. Still warm. Still unexplained.
Later that night, I dream again.
The obsidian mask. The woman’s voice echoing without sound. The faint rhythm of runes pulsing like a heartbeat in the dark.
They weren’t just a dream.
Chapter 3 — The Assignment
I don’t go home right away.
Instead, I walk through Gokrieg’s crooked alleys and glowing archways, past red-lit windows and small shrines where humans and goblins whisper blessings to the lost. The borough buzzes with life, but it all feels distant now—like I’m already half gone.
I turn down the last alley before my building, boots splashing through the same runoff that never seems to drain. Something shifts at the mouth of it—shadow peeling off shadow.
Red eyes. Brindle skin. The quill already moving.
I’m reaching for my baton before I register that my baton isn’t there anymore—it’s evidence now, bagged and tagged in some Authority locker. My hand closes on nothing.
Then the shape is just a stack of crates, rain-slick and indifferent, and a cat bolts out from under them into the dark.
I stand there a second too long, heart going, breath uneven. The haze hasn’t left me. It’s just learned to wear other things.
I keep walking.
At my apartment, I pack light: a field journal, a few essentials, and my old Authority duffel. I pause when I see Irdock’s old badge still pinned to the inside flap. I run my thumb over it.
He’d probably tell me I was taking too long to pack.
In the corner sits a trunk with a note on top: Ursie, from the city of La’Batre.
The trunk is old, brass-edged and seal-stamped. I unlatch it. Inside: a new reinforced black duster, sleek and weight-balanced. Underneath, a pair of heavy-duty boots and gloves with sigil-linked knuckles. Functional. Tactical. Beautiful.
My radio crackles. “Ursie, you decent? I’m out front.”
“Be down in five,” I reply.
Outside, Ben waits in an unmarked Authority transport. I slide in. The scent of scorched coffee and old field gear fills the cab.
“Nice coat,” he says.
“Better than the hospital gown.”
We drive in silence until the city gives way to the fortified skyline of Port Authority No. 2—a fortress-terminal of stone and magtek glass.
“This is it,” Ben says quietly.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “Time to see what they really want from me.”
“Whatever it is,” he says, “they’re lucky to have you.”
I smile faintly and step out.
The building hums with energy. Runic glyphs pulse across the floor, directing travelers and Council agents. The scent of ozone mixes with incense.
“This is where I leave you,” Ben says, leading me down a corridor to a sealed briefing room. “Try not to scare the gobbies too much.”
“Thanks for the ride, Lieutenant.”
“Good luck, Ursie.”
He leaves. The door seals shut behind him.
A faint click echoes in the quiet room. Then, the projector hums to life.
The wall lights up with a grainy, overexposed image—the Port Authority’s old “Safety First” training reel. A cheerful brass jingle plays, accompanied by the faded logo of the Authority spinning in low resolution.
A narrator’s voice, stiff and overly polite, begins its monologue: “Welcome, travelers, to Port Authority No. 2! Please remember: always maintain eye contact with your assigned Adjudicator, declare all foreign resonant matter, and never attempt to open a Port without clearance.”
The vintage footage cuts between smiling workers in outdated uniforms and cartoonish safety mascots demonstrating proper portal etiquette. One even waves as a small animated troll gets zapped by a containment beam.
I laugh under my breath. Can’t help it. Haven’t seen this since training—back when none of it felt real yet. Back when the worst thing I’d ever pushed through a Port was a scanner and a lunch bag.
The reel plays on. Containment drills. Resonance inspections. Authorized equipment handling. All the things I know by heart. All the things that are supposed to make this feel routine.
The laugh fades before it’s finished.
Because I’m sitting here with a rune burned into my memory, a demon’s last words still rattling around in my skull, and eyes that used to be brown. And the screen is showing me a cartoon troll getting bounced by a beam of light like it’s all very manageable. Like there’s a protocol for this. Like whoever made this video had any idea what actually comes through those gates.
The reel ends with a cheerful “Safety First—For A Brighter Tomorrow!” and the projector winds down with a soft whir.
“Yeah,” I say to no one. “Brighter tomorrow.”
A light blinks on above the door to my left—soft amber, the kind that means proceed, not wait.
I push through into a narrower room, windowless, lit low. A long table sits at its center, draped in a gray cloth, and on it, laid out with the kind of precision only quartermasters ever manage, is an assortment of tactical gear—standard-issue, the sort I’ve buckled into a hundred times. Vambraces. A chest harness. Field webbing for a belt I don’t own yet.
I start toward it, already cataloguing pieces out of habit, when something stops me.
The armor plates are different.
Not the shape—the shape is regulation, the same silhouette I’ve worn since training. It’s the material. Where there should be matte-black composite, there’s something pale and faceted instead, throwing back the room’s dim light in fractured little glints, like someone had cut armor plating out of quartz. I run a thumb along one edge. It’s warm. Not body-warm. Warmer than that, like it’s been sitting in sunlight that isn’t in this room.
I don’t recognize it. I’ve handled every standard-issue material the Authority fields, and this isn’t one of them.
I start buckling in anyway, because that’s the job, and because standing still in a room like this gives my head too much room to wander.
It wanders anyway.
Two days ago I was bleeding out in a boatyard. Since then it’s been fever dreams and doctors and a burned rune I still can’t explain, and nobody—not Ben, not my father, not one single person in a coat—has asked me if I’m all right. Not really. Just are you stable, are you cleared, are you ready. I haven’t had thirty seconds to sit with any of it. The demon’s voice. The Red pouring into me like something with its own opinions about where it wanted to live. The obsidian mask that didn’t reflect anything—at least, I think it was a mask. I think.
The thought sits wrong in my chest, the way a swallowed stone sits wrong.
I think it was a mask.
Heat climbs up the back of my throat before I understand what it is. Then my hands are shaking, and it isn’t nerves, it’s temperature, my palms suddenly too hot to be my own palms, and I look down and the edge of the gray cloth beneath the vambrace I’m holding has started to curl and blacken, a thin worm of smoke rising off it before I even register the smell.
“No—no, no—” I drop the vambrace like it bit me, and that doesn’t help, because it’s not the armor. It’s me.
My skin feels stretched too tight over something too hot to be blood. My pulse is a drumbeat in my ears, except it isn’t just my pulse—it’s voices, dozens of them, and for one lurching second I think the Red has finally cracked me open for good, until I understand what I’m actually hearing.
Guards. Down the corridor. Three rooms away, at least, through what has to be close to a meter of reinforced concrete, and I can hear every word of a conversation about someone’s lunch shift like they’re standing next to me.
That’s not possible.
“Okay.” My own voice comes out thin. “Okay, that’s—that’s not—”
The cloth is properly smoking now. I stumble back from the table, my vision swimming at the edges, heat radiating off my skin in waves I can feel bending the air.
Footsteps. Fast, on the other side of the door.
It slams open.
“Ursie—”
My father crosses the room before I can find any part of a sentence to hand him. He doesn’t hesitate at the heat coming off me—doesn’t so much as flinch—just wraps both arms around me and holds on, and I feel the fabric of his uniform sleeve start to singe where it presses against my shoulder, feel him not let go anyway.
“I’ve got you,” he says, low, steady, the Colonel gone completely out of his voice. “I’ve got you. Breathe. You’re not there anymore. You’re here.”
I don’t know how long it takes. Long enough that the heat finally bleeds out of me in slow, humiliating waves, long enough that I can hear my own pulse again instead of a stranger’s lunch conversation through solid concrete. When I finally pull back, there’s a scorched handprint on his sleeve in the exact shape of my palm.
He looks at it. Then at me. And for just a second, underneath the composure, I see something that looks a lot like fear wearing his face.
“That’s never happened before,” he says. Not a question. “Has that happened before?”
“No.” My voice cracks on the word. “Never.”
He’s quiet for a moment, jaw working, and when he speaks again it’s careful, like he’s choosing each word off a very short list of good ones.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I am. I know this is happening too fast, and I know you haven’t had a single moment to sit with any of it.” He stops, then starts again, slower. “But I need you in Fruul in full, Ursie. Not half-present, still turning all of this over on the ride there. Full.”
He rubs a hand across his jaw, and for a second he looks less like a Colonel and more like a man doing arithmetic he doesn’t like the answer to. “Werral’s on that team because Director Hoffer pushed to put him there. Not as an alchemist—as an undisclosed representative. I only confirmed that this week.” Something flattens in his voice on her name—the particular tone of a man who’s spent years watching a career politician play every room in the Authority like an instrument. “Hoffer doesn’t move a piece onto the board without three reasons she hasn’t told anyone yet. What I found out yesterday is that some of those reasons might not even be hers. She’s somebody’s hand in this. I don’t know yet whose.” He shakes his head, like the words don’t sit right even coming out of his own mouth. “I don’t fully trust her, and I haven’t for a while. And I need you there precisely because you don’t know what she—what any of them—are actually doing. You’re the only one walking into that room without an angle somebody’s already picked out for you.”
He pauses. “But that’s not the only reason anymore. Not after this.”
I wipe my palm against my thigh, like I can wipe the heat off it. “Then what’s the reason?”
“Because Fruul is old, Ursie. Older than the Accords, older than the Tri Edict, older than half the things we’ve built our authority pretending we understand.” His eyes drop to the scorch mark on his own sleeve, then back to my face. “If anything in this world can tell us what the Red actually is—what it’s turning you into—it’s there. Not here. Not in a lab with instruments that don’t have a name for what just happened to that cloth.”
I look down at the ruined table, at the crystal plates still throwing back the light like they’re watching, and something else occurs to me. “If nobody here has answers—who does?”
Paton is quiet a second too long.
“Honestly? Probably your mother.”
I almost laugh, except I’m not sure it’s a joke. “My mother hasn’t answered a straight question since I was twelve.”
“No,” he agrees, with the particular exhaustion of a man who’s been married to a mystery for three decades. “She hasn’t.”
“Do you even know where she is right now?”
“Not currently, no.” He says it plainly, the way you’d admit to misplacing a hurricane. “Somewhere she thinks is more pertinent than here, doing something she’ll explain as world-ending, and a good thing she was there to stop it—if we’re lucky, and only after it’s already stopped mattering.”
I almost smile. It’s the first thing that’s felt normal in two days.
Then something shifts across his face—the particular stillness of a man doing math he doesn’t like the answer to. His hand goes to his coat pocket, and he pulls out a gray disc-shaped contraption that looks vaguely like a dial. Definitely something my mother would find and study.
“Your mother called it a Cypher,” he says. “And said it will work when it needs to.”
He holds the Cypher out, and I take it. It’s cool to the touch, like it’s just waiting to be moving again.
I wait for the rest of the explanation. There isn’t one. “That’s it? That’s the whole thing?”
“That’s the whole thing.” He says it with the specific weariness of a man who asked for more, once, a long time ago, and never tried again.
I turn the disc over in my palm, half expecting an instruction manual to fall out of the air along with it. “So. It works when it needs to. Very helpful. Very specific.”
“Welcome to marriage,” he says, and something in his face finally cracks—just for a second, the Colonel sliding off entirely, and I’m looking at my dad instead, tired and fond and thoroughly outmaneuvered by his own wife from however many miles away, using nothing but a note and bad timing.
I laugh. It surprises me, coming out of a body that ten minutes ago was setting a table on fire, but there it is—small, and real. He laughs too, easy, like it feels as good on his end as it does on mine.
“She’s going to outlive us both out of spite,” I say.
“She’s going to outlive the Authority out of spite,” he corrects, and that gets one more laugh out of both of us, worn down now, the kind with nowhere left to go but into something steadier.
“Guess she’s still watching out for me,” I say.
“She always is.” He says it like a man repeating something he’s had to believe for a long time because the alternative was worse.
We both breathe out, the kind of breath that puts a room back in order. He straightens his singed sleeve like it might un-singe itself out of sheer will, and I finish buckling the last of the gear with hands that have finally stopped shaking.
“There’s one more thing,” Paton says, nodding at the crystal plates still laid across the scorched cloth. “Before you ask—yes, those are new. A gift, if you can believe it. Sent ahead from the Goblins of Fruul, the moment word reached them an Auger was being assigned to steady things. They fit into the duster your mother had made for you, one to a panel. Lighter than composite, stronger than composite, and the alchemists tell me they’ll shrug off a resonance hit that would put a hole clean through the old plating. Energy attacks. Magitek discharge. The things that usually go straight through armor like this isn’t there at all.”
I turn one of the plates over in my hand, feeling the faint warmth of it again. “They sent this before I even agreed to go?”
“Hope, I’d imagine,” Paton says. “Or good manners. Possibly both.”
That, at least, is a better reason than anything the Authority’s given me all week.
“There’s a second addition,” he adds, and something in his tone shifts—careful again, the way it went careful before the Fruul briefing. “I can’t give it to you here. It’ll be waiting for you at the Port, in the security corridor, just before you go through. They wouldn’t let even me bring it across security myself—this one’s from the same source as the plates. The Goblins of Fruul again, sent as a gift for being willing to help them. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s quite a thing to see.”
I want to ask what it is. I know that face well enough by now to know he won’t tell me even if I do.
“Alright,” I say instead, and this time my voice sounds almost entirely like mine again. “Then let’s go find out.”
Chapter 4 — The Port
Neither of us says anything after that. There isn’t anything left to say, not really—so we just finish it together: the two of us buckling the last of the plates into place, tightening straps, checking clasps, the kind of quiet work that doesn’t need words because we’ve both done it a hundred times, just never quite like this. His hands are steady again by the time we’re done. Mine mostly are.
We walk out together, side by side, back through the same door he came in by. The hallway beyond is short—short enough that neither of us needs to fill it with anything—and it ends at a door heavier than the last one, gray steel banded in something darker.
Paton stops there.
“I’ll see you soon,” he says. It isn’t a promise, not really, but he says it like one anyway. “Go steady them, Ursie. And come back.”
I press my palm to the scanner set into the frame. It hums, cool under my hand, and a flat mechanical voice reads back a name I’ve heard exactly as many times as I’ve had a badge:
“Ursora Berell Gatineau. Clearance confirmed.”
The door releases with a heavy, final clunk.
“I love you,” Paton says, quiet now, all the Colonel gone out of it. “I’ll be watching.”
I don’t trust my voice for an answer, so I just nod, and step through.
The room on the other side isn’t what I expect.
One whole wall is glass—thick, double-paned, faint grid-lines etched into the surface itself, like someone drew graph paper across the air and built a wall out of it. Nothing moves behind the glass. I can’t tell if that’s because there’s nothing there, or because whatever’s there is very good at being still.
On the floor: footprints, painted and precise, facing the glass.
“Stand on the markers,” a voice says over the intercom—flat, uninflected, the kind of voice that has said this exact sentence to a thousand people and never once cared how any of them felt about it. “Remain until instructed.”
I stand. I wait.
I know what this room is for. Every Port checkpoint has one—a scanning chamber wired heavy enough to end whatever walks through wrong. One bad reading, one signature the wards don’t like, and this becomes a very efficient, very quiet way to make sure nothing gets past this point that shouldn’t.
I used to find that reassuring.
Standing here now, with something new and red living somewhere under my ribs, I find myself doing the math instead. If this room decided today was the day, would it take the Red with me? Or would the Red have other plans—would it just shrug the whole chamber off the way it seems to intend to shrug off everything else from now on, and leave me standing here alone in the ash of an Authority checkpoint, not even sure which outcome I’d have wanted.
It’s a genuinely horrible thing to be curious about. I’m curious about it anyway. There isn’t much else to do with my hands full of nothing and my body full of waiting.
“Clear,” the voice says, and whatever tension the glass had been holding simply lets go. The door ahead opens.
The room beyond is bigger, warmer-lit, open. Just inside the door, set into its own small alcove, sits a locker—metal, unremarkable, my name stenciled across the front in Authority block print.
I open it.
Inside: a single box, plain, waiting like it’s been there exactly as long as it needed to be and not a moment longer. I set it on the bench beside me and lift the lid.
The baton inside is beautiful in the specific way things built by people who actually care tend to be. The handle is dark—black shot through with silver wire, wound in a pattern that climbs the shaft like something between a vine and a circuit, never quite repeating. At its head, instead of a blade or a hammer, sits a small oval of glass, disc-shaped, no bigger than my palm—and inside it, fluid moves. Slow. Black. Alive in a way that has nothing to do with the metal around it.
A folded slip of paper rests beneath the handle.
A gift from Fruul, it reads, in handwriting too careful to be anything but deliberate. Beneath that, simpler still: Use your thought.
There’s a label too, stamped into the bottom of the box itself, small and easy to miss—block lettering, clearly translated from something that wasn’t built to become Batran and doesn’t entirely forgive the attempt.
RATIFIED UN-TROLLER.
I read it twice, because the first time doesn’t seem like it could be right.
“Ratified,” I say, to the empty room. “Sure. Why not.”
But it does its job, whatever else it’s doing—because the second I read the word Un-Troller, I’m not standing in a locker room anymore. I’m back at my first Port breach, staring up at a troll twice my height shouldering through a checkpoint like the checkpoint was a polite suggestion, the useless little baton I’d been issued that day doing absolutely nothing against something that size, and the thought I’d had then, stupid and clear: Something sharp. Something with reach. Anything that could have ended this before it got close.
I turn the baton over once, testing its weight, and pick it up.
The moment my hand closes around the grip, the fluid inside the disc stirs, like it’s been waiting for exactly that memory and no other.
The black fluid moves.
It doesn’t just shift—it commits, pouring itself along some shape it already seems to know, the disc stretching and narrowing until what’s sitting at the end of my handle isn’t a disc anymore. It’s a spearhead, wicked and asymmetrical, edges that don’t look machined so much as grown, glinting wet and dark like the memory it came from.
I stare at it for a long moment.
“Okay,” I say, to no one. “That’s a lot.”
The next door opens with a hiss that tells me exactly how sealed this place has been—air pressure equalizing, a held breath finally let out.
Beyond it: full suits, sealed head to foot, moving with the particular calm of people who trust their equipment completely. Bailiffs flank the doorway on either side, armored so heavily they barely read as people anymore—more like furniture that happens to be watching you.
I step through. Nobody stops me. Nobody looks especially surprised to see me either, which is somehow worse.
Ahead, a platform rises maybe a meter off the ground, a short run of steps leading up to it.
The chamber opens around me like the inside of a cut gem—not a smooth dome, but a hundred flat panes of stone and dark steel, angled with a precision that has nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with sound. Every surface tilts to catch a wave and throw it exactly where it’s meant to land; the whole cavern built less like a cathedral and more like the inside of an instrument sized for something enormous.
At the chamber’s heart, that raised circular platform holds the true architecture of the room: the Port itself, ringed by a dozen squat black constructs, broad-bodied and heavy, humming low even at rest. Nobody who’s stood this close to them calls them anything but what they look like—subwoofers, built for something the size of a god. It’s not far off. It’s their bass, not magic, that keeps the Port’s throat open. Cut the sound and the whole gate collapses in on itself.
The Port stands at the platform’s center—not a circle, the way I always pictured it in training. A tall rectangle instead, doorframe-shaped, easily three times my height, drawn in smoke rather than stone. It isn’t glass. It isn’t sheets of light. It’s smoke pulled taut into something that holds its shape the way a spiderweb holds dew, threads of pale gray-blue woven so fine they read as a single surface from a distance. Only up close do you see it’s a thousand strands, trembling, never quite still. It doesn’t shine so much as it shivers, and where the threads cross, small private flickers of light spark at each intersection, gone before you can be sure you saw them.
It looks less like a doorway and more like a mirror that never finished deciding what it wanted to reflect—except this one has a frame, tall and rectangular, exactly the shape of every door I’ve ever walked through in my life. Somehow that makes it worse.
Teams of technicians and wardens move along the platform’s edge—checking instruments, marking readings, shouting brief confirmations over the low roar of the subwoofer stacks. The entire space feels alive, half-machine, half-instrument, built by people who understood a long time ago that you don’t open a door like this with light. You open it with noise.
I take a slow breath, feeling the familiar tremor of the Port’s pull beneath my skin. This one feels different—stronger, louder. The resonance vibrates faintly through my jacket, almost like it recognizes me.
The threads at the portal’s center pulse. Just for a heartbeat—in rhythm with the Red inside me.
I tell myself it’s coincidence.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” someone says nearby.
I turn toward the voice, but whoever spoke is hidden behind the glare of the stabilizer array. Before I can answer, the Authority’s calm mechanical voice returns: “Ursora Berell Gatineau. Approach the platform.”
The subwoofers shift pitch, harmonizing into a deep, steady hum that makes the floor vibrate. I walk forward, up the steps onto the platform, boots striking metal. The closer I get, the more I feel the air bending—like gravity itself is reconsidering its loyalties.
A light blinks on beside the frame—soft and steady, the same shade of amber as the one that sent me into the armor room an hour ago. Proceed. Nothing else.
“Step into the Port,” the voice continues. “Proceed normally. Do not hold your breath.”
I swallow, tighten my grip on the weapon Fruul had sent, and nod at no one in particular. The doorway of smoke looms above me, three times my height, patient as something that has done this a thousand times and never once been in a hurry.
Then I walk.
It isn’t pushing through anything, not really. It’s more like the threads notice me—unravel around my shape a half-inch ahead of every step, re-knitting behind me as I pass, patient and precise, like the whole gate is quietly taking me apart and trusts itself completely to put me back exactly where it found me. I don’t feel it happen. I only feel the absence of feeling it, which is somehow worse.
For a moment, I swear I see shapes in the smoke—silhouettes walking beside me, whispering in a language I almost remember. Then—
—impact.
My foot hits solid ground.
I’m standing beneath a sky of pale green clouds and fractured sunlight. The ground is damp—mud and moss, threaded with shallow pools that mirror the canopy above. The trees glisten with iridescent bark, their branches shedding drifting motes of colored light that swirl like tiny fire spirits. It’s beautiful. Too beautiful. Something between dream and illusion.
The faint hum of the Port fades behind me. In its place: birdsong that sounds half mechanical, half alive.
Then, the ground trembles.
A massive coach comes barreling down a moss-covered trail, spraying water and light in every direction. Instead of horses, it’s pulled by a single gigantic wheel—an intricate construct of gears and living metal, its hub sculpted like a serpent’s head, jaws open in perpetual hunger. The thing growls as it spins, carving deep ruts in the soil.
The coach drifts sideways into a screeching stop barely a meter from my face.
I flinch back, just in time to dodge the swing of a heavy iron-framed wooden door as it slams open.
Out steps a thin goblin with a scarred face, his arms absurdly large—hands like carved boulders. Despite that, he’s dressed impeccably: long black coat, crisp vest, polished brass buttons, and boots too fine for the terrain. He stretches, joints cracking like gunfire. As his coat falls back, I catch the gleam of a holster at his side—holding what looks like a wand fitted with a pistol grip.
He snorts, spits into the mud, then scans the forest lazily until his eyes land on me.
“You Ursie?” he rasps, voice rough but confident, his accent thick and earthy.
I blink, still half-stunned from the transit. “That depends. Who’s asking?”
He grins—a crooked, gap-toothed smile full of charm and trouble.
“Bop Harren,” he says, extending one of those enormous, calloused hands. “Pleased t’meet ye.”
I hesitate, then take his hand. His grip feels like stone and static.
Welcome to Fruul.