A hero, by definition, takes things onto himself. Burdens great and small are borne by the pure of heart with at-the-most reluctant complaint. Some heroes, in fact, are able to take the whole world on their shoulders - be that world balanced on a mission or a plague or a quest or just one life's happy ending. And they don't do it for vengeance or glory, pride or punishment, but because they're there, and they're heroes, and in the end that really is all there is to it.

If anyone tells you otherwise? That's not a legend. That's just PR.

That was why when Gregory Forrest huddled into himself and cursed the uncaring grey of the heavens for this horrible, glaring, deceptively pure-white cold... he wasn't complaining. Since heroes don't do that, you understand. Not real ones. A hero suffers in the stoic silence, his spirit strong enough to rise above everyday hassles and do the things that no one else can do - heroic things. The things that go beyond those day to day actions that keep the world spinning and really matter.

So... yeah. Right. He wouldn't dream of whining or blaming or complaining, then, since that would be really against his ideals. But he just had to say that still, even though he was handling this all very maturely as a test of his mettle...

It was really really really really really COLD.

Colder than the ice-chest at the butcher's. Colder than the river in winter. Colder than the heart of the King's Own Executioner. Cold cold cold cold cold.

Chasms of ice dove and gaped and refracted the winds on each side of his floating, carriage-shaped, unheated, and (above all else) cheap magical transport. The snow blew across them like a funerary shroud, matching mountings of stone that had been worn down to a corpselike alabaster. Forrest took a perverse pleasure in opening one of the windows and looking directly down at it all. The view made the whole trip seem more exotic than claustrophobic, and the perturbed and alarmed looks he got from the large bundles of cloth about him that had swallowed several merchants didn't bother him too much. He was pretty lucky that Grandfather had given him this big giant broadsword before he set out.

That was good. The being left alone, that is. If the traveler were going to freeze to death - and it had gotten to the point that he could no longer feel the additional torture of windburn - then he might as well enjoy it. He had to admit that the scenery was pretty darn cool. White and grey and death all over - not a living thing in sight for miles.

An hour ago they'd flown over the bleached copper bones of a fallen craft. Their mage (mage!) flyer (flyer!), a bored-looking man named Thompson, said that they'd run into a rough updraft and their pilot hadn't had the power to suppress it. The passengers had died - not on impact, but hours later as their signal fires wafted to sleep. If you looked carefully, you could see the tundra impossibly charred.

One couldn't help but thinking that they'd desecrated this place with their deaths, somehow, by bringing to it such heathen things as fire.

They'd left that site behind swiftly. This carriage (was it a carriage?) was faster than a horse. Faster than anything, really.

The merchants huddled tighter. They were looking at him kind of funnily. Also kind of... murderously. Why would closing the window he was at make any difference? If he was going to be this cold he might as well be as cold as he could possibly be, and therefore gain the maximum cold-related experience a guy could have in order to put it to odd yet perfectly valid uses in later unforeseen situations. Didn't these people know anything about adventuring? When would an opportunity to freeze like this come again? Maybe soon, but maybe never, and most importantly, maybe after it was TOO LATE because they'd been led to a HORRIBLE ICY DEATH by their lack of cold-related knowledge.

....

What? It could happen!

How was he supposed to have known enough to pack those big giant coat-things anyways? The coldest it ever got at home was when the clouds blocked out the sun for a spell and you could smell the rain on the wind. In his mind, snow was supposed to have been kind of... sticky. Ice was sort of like glass. And there were snowmen everywhere, because he'd always figured it'd be fun to make a snowman and if you had lots of snow right there why wouldn't you make lots of snowmen? Er, unless snowmen were really grotesque man-shaped ice golems crafted by the vicious mages of Atelier to disembowel virgins for them like Jamie-Burns-Who'd-Lost-His-Leg-At-Sea said. If anything, however, this whole not-so-warm debacle had taught Forrest that Jamie-Burns-Who'd-Lost-His-Leg-At-Sea probably wasn't as credible a travel expert as the cool peg-leg and rum-based alcoholism had suggested. He figured that he was safe for the time being from the armies of the arctic netherworld. It was kind of too bad, though. Armies would be cool. Armies would mean that there were people here, instead of only desolate freezing wastelands composed of fissures plunging hundreds of ominous meters below you that... well... weren't so cool. Pretty.. but... to be honest...

Cold. Hauntingly cold.

The young man rubbed his thinly-gloved hands together, daring to pull one off and suffer the extra bite of chill just long enough to check out the skin on the back of his hand. That white color didn't look entirely... natural. Was that supposed to happen? Had all this time with his skin hidden from the sun caused him to undergo some kind of strange reverse-tanning? Hmmm. Whatever it was it probably wasn't a good thing, but he'd have to worry about that later when he wasn't thinking about the possibility of slow and painful death.

In the distance a few specks caught his eye, orbiting a crest of ice jutting out from one of the mountains their pilot was cross-leggedly concentrating on not floating them into. Wow. So something was living. Way to go, birds!

Whoa. Wait a second...

Suddenly, the ice shattered into a cloud of frost like stardust, scorning the wind to gather into a sphere when the tiny flying crows - no, people! good Goddess, people! - raised their arms. Then it unwound itself, the cloud unraveling into a breadcrumb trail of glass leading to a place where....

The sky was broken.

That was really the only way to describe it. The young swordsman didn't dare close his eyes even when the tears threatened to freeze in them.

The sky was broken - twisted and misplaced in some wicked parody of a greenhouse dome. A thousand needles were shattering the horizon. They were taller than any building had any right to be and patterned in rows of brick and iron and fine-spun steel. The sky was broken and nobody seemed to notice it, the transports coming into view just beyond them moving in and out as if it were nothing at all. They converged nonchalantly at a great granite wall that marked the edge of the impossible, where nature stopped and an opalescent sheen marked the borders of a place that rejected the wind and the rain and the earth and all the omnipresent forces of the Great Mother for its own lesser gods. Her clouds were left to wander outside forlornly while the sun shone down on the threads of water that wove towers together in midair. They spiraled layer by layer, higher and higher...one thousand crossroads hung like stars.

The Impossible City. Someplace warm and glowing where death was beautiful and dust unheard of. Yet this wasn't just a city. He understood that now. The witches and all their miracles hadn't just set themselves apart from wars and politics - they'd exiled themselves from the mundane little world of the rest of humanity entirely. And he understood too what they'd all said, and why he'd had to come here. All of the tales were true. The sky was broken and the earth was still and no one should ever live in a place like this. There just shouldn't be a place like this. Because a place that looked so much like dreams as this could make you a True Believer in magic, or a god, or devils, or whatever could do something so perfectly counter to sense as crack open the sky like a robin's egg.

Gergory Forrest had made it.

He'd finally made it.

It hadn't really hit him - what he'd be seeing - until the monolith was right above him. It hadn't hit him when he was in the pubs along the way and heard the rumors, hadn't hit him when he'd seen that one powder at the fair that turned wine into drinkable water. Not even when he was flying had he really grasped what the names all meant. But he knew now.

Dear Goddess, he'd finally made it.

Atelier. The Impossible City. The kind of place where people didn't live lives - they lived destinies.

Blood Libel
00 // the setup

"So you're sure this is the one?"

"No doubt about it. Whoever or whatever it is, something's gonna happen here today, and it'll be important. Baaaaad mojo kind of important. We have to stay here until it does."

The Reverend Lucian Jones could be found, on cloudier days, on a stool at the Empty Cauldron sipping a tumbler of cider with a pinch of Liquid Happiness. From there his gaze would dart back and forth over the ragtag crowd of shady characters keeping a metronome's perfect rhythm as his glances grew regular and automatic. To be perfectly honest, it made him look a little off... but that was alright. It wasn't as if he didn't know. The Reverend Lucian Jones was one of the few people in the bar who did not have to affect a world-weary aggression, hot-blooded swagger, or smirking roguishness just in order to look slike he could handle himself.

He happened to be a natural, thankyouverymuch.

Today, however, was not your typical cloudy day. In point of fact, it was actually quite sunny. Accordingly, the Reverend was not looking for any old danger to strike, opportunity to knock, or soul to save from his usual seat. Today he had been given a sign.

"But you're absolutely certain, Mel? The gates'll be wide open today - the month's convoy has, I believe, just come in from Troia. There'll be a lot of excitement down here today. It would be easy for you to make a mistake," inky black curls bobbed in time with his gesture to the man perched beside him on a worn wooden stool much like his own. Mel Provenza was invaluable and, more importantly, the closest thing that the Reverend had to a friend who did not think him half-mad.

"I just know, alright? It feels... right. It itches. Like a storm is coming. I can't explain it very well beyond that - like you mage types can never explain all the mojo shit."

"Fair enough," the Reverend shrugged.

"It's fallen into placealready. I promise you... there's no way something's not gonna go down," the shorter man pushed down emerald-tinted glasses so that he could hold the bridge of his nose as he sighed. The circles under his eyes did not bode well for the health of the 'dreams' he could never quite explain. Neither did the nearly empty mug of noonday ale which he was pushing halfheartedly around the bar while he winced. "And now I've got a goddamn headache."

All this the Reverend Lucian Jones saw from a reflection in the shield of a passing Outwaller bodyguard. Mel could handle himself as he see fit. The Reverend had to keep watching.

"I'm sure you do, from the amount of marks you spent on absinthe last night," a third party, bulkier than the other two, settled into the empty stool at the Reverend's right. Though from any other person this exclamation would have sounded aggravated and long-suffering, Francis Maddox was not just any man. Not rain nor snow nor sleet nor hail nor storm of blood could even hope to disturb him. His eyes remained as placid and reflective as pools of thick black oil - his voice preserved in honey.

Poor bastard. Accidents do happen.

"We can't wait around here all day because of these hunches of yours. You only have visions when you're on the absinthe, and with that shit in your system you could have just as easily seen your Grandma giving lapdances as something I care about. This is a waste of time. Spending another day sitting around in the pub with you is going to get us nowhere with Verbena. I've talked to Morag - she says she can pull together a decent posse with a couple of hours notice. Or what about assassination? We could take out a hit on her. Fuck, I'd do it myself. Create an anti-oxygen bubble and lodge it in her throat... bitch'd never see it coming. Either way, something would actually happen instead of this..."

"Look, Francis - do we really have to go over this again, and again, and again, and again, until I'm finally driven mad?" Mel pleaded, evidently attempting to overcome tiny explosions at the base of his skull by kneading them. Francis might not be able to talk angrily, but he was certainly capable of making up for quality with quantity. "Can you please just this once shut the fuck up?"

The Reverend fought to suppress his amusement. Unlike Mel, Francis did think him half-mad... along with most of the rest of the planet. Personally, however, Jones felt homicide the less sane choice.

"Kings and Martyrs, Francis! Cut it out," he 'suggested'. "Even if she weren't untraceable under heavy shielding to keep the Corps off her back, you know I don't like killing. I won't have you bringing it up every time we need someone out of our way. There's a reason we don't use Black Magic in this organization - the reason that we're an organization in the first place. If you disagree I'm sure there's a place for you back with the Biryukov... if they'll have you. And they probably would, one way or another."

"He's talking about anal rape," Mel snarked helpfully.

"Fuck off, Mel," Francis - restrained from pouting or scowling by force of a potions overdose he'd taken as a young boy - chose to express his put-out sulkiness by sinking into a pint of weak beer and pointedly refusing to watch the crowd. Hmm. The Reverend supposed he'd just have to let this blow over. Francis too was also invaluable in his own way, even if he did figure the Reverend for stark-raving. That wasn't an assessment that the Reverend could consistently disagree with.

"...So what's the plan for when this hypothetical shit hits the hypothetical fan?"

The Reverend, pleased to be back to a topic that wouldn't drive one of his lieutenants into a capital-M Mood, settled back on his elbows more comfortably, "As responsible, law-abiding citizens of the Citadel of Atelier, it's no less than our civic duty to call in the Furies in if there were to be some sort of disturbance, don't you gentlemen think?"

***

This had to be the most boring, mundane place on the entire frigging planet... which was, of course, why he was there. They couldn't just put him in manacles or on the rack or something so at least he'd have some mindless pain to focus on and narrow his days and lead up to a decent righteous vengeance crusade against the inhumane oppressors who gave him his Rugged Torture Scars. Noooooooooo. Atelier was too "advanced" for a proper dungeon. Which meant that he was stuck. Here. With nothing to do. For months and months and months. And somewhere, somehow, he just knew that someone was laughing about this, because this faceless and colorless mediocrity was surely the most sadistic punishment ever.

Erebus Correctional Institute - the underground penitentiary known is less reputable circles as the Hole - was one big giant torture chamber of beige.

Beige. The bastards. It just had to be beige. No blood reds or bruise purples (and he wasn't a masochist, really, but if he was beaten the crap out of at least he'd get to blackmail the guards for fun and profit). Not even a goddamn taupe. No sky, no plants, no blue and green ... except for hair, of course, but that didn't count, since after a week in this little gauntlet of pain you were either ready to cheerfully strangle the sullen, ignorant mass of freaks around you or obviously brain-damaged anyways. The festering hate sort of canceled out any possible color-appreciation. In that respect it was sort of like the times when his tutors had tried to make him learn about art history, except here there was nothing he could light on fire for amusement.

And so there he was. All alone. Without color. Submerged in a battle of wits with the diabolical, viruslike force of beige.

Beige.

Beige.

Beige walls, beige floors, beige bars, beige clothing. And, considering the distinct lack of sun, a decent amount of beige people.

It was enough to make a guy upset. And Inaan Tiresias O'Reilly, youngest scion of the O'Reilly family/corporation/dynasty/society-for-the-oppression-of-the-weak, was truly talented when it came to that particular occupation.

This stupid Hole was too clammy.

Hmph.

O'Reilly missed the sun more than anything - staring down at them from the cerulean roof of an icefield that had never seemed to really be there. How could it, from within the walls of the most pleasant city in the world? He was used to the sun and the wind, and the rain, and the cool hard marble of an uptown loft. He was used to knowing what time it was. He was used to voices that hadn't deepened to maturity and a nigh unintelligible accent at the age of thirteen. Books that hadn't been read through thrice over, food that wasn't conjured en masse by cut-rate hacks armed with substandard conjuring spells and the magical prowess of the common garden slug. Lights whose glimmer was to illuminate rather than to reveal, gazes which deferred rather than stripped... Smells, sounds, tastes, sensations, and the silky feeling of magic saturating his skin had all been lost to sensory deprivation.

To beige.

The magician hated beige.

Passionately.

O'Reilly despised the bunk which was beige, with springs that crawled up his spine to tease at the sensitive skin along the nape of his neck. A mockery of the comfort of magical loft, they were undoubtably beige - supporting beige covers which in turn warmed his beige-clad body. Beige too was the novel resting in his uncalloused hands, bland light refracted through the enchanted panes of his glasses to reach two slightly myopic eyes. They were not beige - nay, topaz was the word - but the content entering said orbs through black print was so thoroughly well used and uninteresting as to be beige not only in parchment base but in spirit. A corrupting influence.

When the mage was released he would have his apartment cleansed of all things in that horrible, cloying blend of cream and tan. The help would make a bonfire, and oh, would it burn.

Beige was not pleasant. Beige was depressing. So, actually, was the unwashed pleb that had taken it upon himself to try and keep O'Reilly company. He wasn't so wrapped up in the "The Memoirs of Aubergine O'Reilly - a GREAT SORCERER unlike YOU, the BAD SON, who ought to read more literature like this, " as to miss those particularly elephantine steps.

O'Reilly considered, briefly, whether or not throwing the Memoirs of Aubergine O'Reilly at the approaching fool would be for better or for worse. He really hated that book.

"Care to enlighten me as to why you're fouling up my cell?"

Perhaps the worst thing about prison was that you were never left alone. No privacy whatsoever - degrading and entirely unsuitable. Sigh. At least his family hadn't disowned him so thoroughly that they would refuse to bribe the guards to drive away all the various "Snakes", "Planks", and "Blades" that might be the the market for a new girlfriend.

Not that O'Reilly couldn't take care of himself.

Not that taking care of himself was what had gotten him in to this mess.

"Shut up, punk. What're ya gonna do, tell your mommy on me?"

O'Reilly blinked, not quite understanding what exactly about the situation this evolutionary throwback didn't understand. "Well... yes, actually. I could probably swing a hit on you. How does next Thursday sound?"

"Whatever you say, m'lord. The Ol' Man wants his payment. You wanna be the one that tells him his rep ain't getting no respect here?"

"Ugh - okay, look, you wanna talk about respect? How about we talk about respecting me, and the myriad of exciting ways in which that can help you and your family not die?" O'Reilly struggled ignore the fact that this guy had apparently picked up his eeeevil threatening prison 'lingo' from the Legendary Kingdom of Generic. Sigh. The harassment, the gangs, the... beige. Was there some kind of secret pact to make this place as cliché as humanly possible that he hadn't yet been brought in on? That was rather disappointing. If there was anything an O'Reilly should be good at, it was joining mysterious cabals.

"The only name that matters here is O'Reilly- as in the O'Reillys that own YOU, your soul, and probably you firstborn too. Why on earth wouldn't I pay your 'Old Man'? Why are you threatening me? Do I look stupid to you? Am I not paying off half of this prison? Would your judgment matter? Do you have a lot of time on your hands? Okay - obviously yes - but...."

"Whatever, bitch." Mr. Steriod-Abuse looked blank and then stalked away with a rude gesture. " An' now it's two thousand more. Cuz I don' like your face, y'pansy-assed punk."

... Moron. Okay, what about this situation wasn't obvious? The part where O'Reilly was rich, well-born, and completely untouchable, or the part where this waste of air would be eviscerated by the guards if he forgot it? And he was supposed to feel bad about this, because not getting his ass kicked was a black mark on his reputation for all eternity? In prison, he had found, there was no logic besides that of the macho buffoon. That must be how these people could stand to live their own insignificant lives - creating bizarre standards by which to measure their nonexistent accomplishments. There was nothing else to amuse themselves with, after all, in the land of beige.

.... although, on second thought, he probably shouldn't have lied about being able to pay that. Since, uh, he couldn't.

He supposed he'd have to write Mother.

Suddenly, the day was looking up.

The swordsman was having obvious trouble walking, and kept stopping to stare goofily at the skyline behind them. He looked a little lost. He looked a little flushed. He looked exactly like the twenty other obvious newcomers who were stumbling about trying to stay upright and huddling hungrily together for scraps of heat as they waited for their turn to pass the Gatekeepers. The barrier stooped ahead of them was more than a little intimidating.

Forrest, needless to say, was the only one smiling.

Oh... wow. Just... dude. Just wow. Dude. Wow!

"This is so neat!" Forrest exclaimed to no one in particular, shuffling from one foot to another in what was both excitement and an unsubtle attempt to regain feeling in his legs.

"Isn't this neat? This is so... neat!" he gestured, also trying to ignore the large sword he'd strapped on earlier, which was doing strange and terrible things to his lower back. "Don't you think that this is neat?"

Lodged firmly ahead of him in the entrance queue, the man he was addressing either could not or did not want to answer him through his thick woolen scarf. That was okay, though. He was probably really cold. Forrest was cold too, but he was attempting to be stoic about it. Besides... was it really that big of deal? He couldn't even feel his skin after the first hour! These merchant-folk and immigrants and magic people must be soft. It was very un-adventurerly of them.

"I think it's neat," a tiny girl swaddled up in what looked like a nest of furs pulled on his coat from behind, answering him from under a great giant cap. She was clutching a small stuffed elephant that matched her very wide blue eyes.

Awwww.

"See?" Forrest's lips warmed into a grin as he crouched down to say 'hi' to the cute little girl. "She thinks it's neat!"

"Are you here to learn magic? Mommy and Daddy said that I can learn magic 'cause I'm special so I came here to learn magic and I'm gonna blow stuff up with it and fly and it'll be SO COOL. And Janey Martinet says that I'm was selling my soul to the Devil but I think she's just jealous 'cause I can make Ms. Peanuts talk to me and she can't and Bobby from down the street pulls my hair and Mommy says that's 'cause he likes me and then Daddy says that boys are icky," the blue elephant was thrust into his arms. "Do you wanna meet Ms. Peanuts!?"

"Uhm, that's okay thanks," the elephant spread tiny elephant-wings and attempted to jump onto Forrest's head. Which made Forrest blink. And then stare. And then duck. And then blink again. And then gawk up, slack-jawed, at the towers that seemed to rise up into infinity above them. By the time he was done the little girl was long-gone and an irate woman with an umbrella was practically pushing him towards the smaller-door-within-a-really-big-door that marked the front of the queue.

Oh, right. Line.

"Sorry, ma'am," Forrest went on his way, stopping once he reached the entrance and the two black-cloaked men standing in front of it. They looked to be wearing some kind of uniform, except without armor. Weird.

"Do you have anything to declare?" the first sounded kind of surly.

"Declare?" Forrest asked, confused.

"Did you not read the sign?" the second of the two shook his head in muted frustration. Frustration with what? Hunh?

Floating ten paces behind them there appeared to be a large glowing sign.

Oh.

"He didn't read the sign," the second confirmed to the first.

"Okay," the first, a heavyset older man, rolled his eyes before fixing Forrest with a stare chock full of weary reproval. "Well if you'd read the sign you'd know that there's certain things we can't allow inside city walls to harm the citizenry."

The other one straightened, preparing to embark on what looked to be (from Forrest's experience with the schoolhouse teacher) a good long drone, "All unauthorized technological implements and proscribed magical substances will be destroyed on sight by officers of the Fury Corps. Failure to relinquish contraband at the Gate will result in persecution to the full extent of our mandate, with punishment proportional to the crime. Ignorance of or religious objections to the law are no excuse for disobedience. By entering the City-State of Atelier you implicitly agree to obey the law in spirit as well as word and submit all personal rights to regulation at the discretion of the Fury Corps until such time as you exit," a cough, and he was slouching once more. "You really ought to have read the sign... it's on the sign. Why do they never read the sign?"

"So, kid," the surly one asked. "You got anything to declare? Any of these 'machines' we should know about?"

"Ummm... no?" Forrest ventured hopefully, still trying to wrap himself around that big long speech he'd been given, on account of he'd been staring at someone juggling balls of fire on the other side during most of it.

"He looks like he's shady or on drugs or something - look at that vacant stare! I want him searched."

"Augh, hey!" Forest found himself jolted back to reality as his small packsack was unceremoniously snatched away from him, while the declaration-person rooted through it. That was kind of rude! And... Forrest was not shady!

"I am not shady!"

"Yu-hunh," the guard held up a small wooden box for scrutiny. "And look what we have here."

"B-but - it's just a music box," the swordsman earnestly tried to explain, not liking the way that the burly enforcer was banging it against the side of the entrance. "My girlfriend gave it to me to remember our village and..."

" JUST a 'music-box', eh? How can a BOX be musical?" he held out the delicate assembly of oak carved with stars to his partner."Does this look musical to you Hank?"

"Can't say as it does, Rob," Hank shrugged.

"Does it SOUND musical to you, Hank?" Rob shook it vigorously.

"That would also be a 'no', Rob."

And then it was gone, in puff of smoke and a crackle of thunder.

Forrest would later deny entirely that it had made him want to jump, run away, or jump up and run away.

"Right. Listen, kid - I don't know if you were paid to bring this in or just stupid..." the mage who'd just vaporized something out of existence entirely addressed him. Him. Gregory Forrest. Gregory Forrest who was being talked to by a guy who VAPORIZED....

"I KNEW he didn't read the sign."

"...but don't be a mule, m'kay? They might offer you whatever weird shit passes as Outwaller cash, but it ain't worth it. You better get used real quick to this city, and it ain't no human one. There are people here that can rip your tongue out from two miles away without breaking a sweat. Am I making myself clear? 'Cause if I'm not making myself clear, then I'll add that those people who can eviscerate you are US. The Fury Corps," Rob said, casually threatening Forrest in a sort of paternal away. Er, assuming your dad was as scary as Forrest's was. "Just so as we're clear. We are clear, aren't we kid?"

Forrest nodded, what with not wanting to be VAPORIZED and all.

"That was kind of sad. You really thought you'd get away with sneaking a gear system into here? Oi."

"Eh, leave him be. His kind's harmless. Now go on, kid - you're holding up the line."

There was a particularly fine art in involved in writing letters to the matriarch O'Reilly. It bore, in ll honesty, a very close resemblance to the practice of skipping stones on water. That was what was so great about it. The only thing that made putting quill to paper worthwhile in the first place was the elevated craft of pissing her off as much as humanly possible without actually being disowned. It was a very fulfilling hobby, really. That was why the mage had developed it to a near science. As an O'Reilly he felt that he might as well be the best at something his brother Godrick couldn't do.

Stupid Godrick.

The magician had it on very good authority that his efforts caused a sort of ripple effect, and took some comfort from the fact that even though he'd been callously removed from society there were dozens of innocent people being harassed and/or insulted by their superiors ever day as his very own bad mood worked its way down the city's chain of command. When O'Reilly signed his name legions of bureaucrats trembled. Gaggles of schoolchildren cowered in fear at the superintendent's vindictive, bad-presentation-inducing surprise inspections. Brace upon brace of Furies lost their weeksend nights to the corralling of depressed and surly drunks. The stroke of his pen and tiny, miniature kingdoms of emotional stability and office politics fell to his insidious wrath!

Bwahahahaha.

Plus? In jail nobody could give him dirty looks for it like they did at home. They could give him other sorts of dirty looks, of course, but those weren't worth dignifying with his acknowledgment. Unless they were the "I'm going to fucking kill you" sorts of dirty looks, that is. That was when Inaan liked to start taunting them. It was fun and usually ended in some sort of guard/prisoner riot (always an adventure of new and exciting makeshift weaponry).

The aristocrat snickered gleefully at his handiwork, feeling quite pleased with himself. This was not abnormal. He was rarely, if ever, pleased with anyone else.

O'Reilly was above all a man of simple pleasures.

Aimlessly wandering the streets of the City of Magic was, sadly, leading Gregory Forrest far more quickly in the direction of hunger and fatigue than word of kingdoms in peril or mystical quests. The swordsman wasn't really sure what he had expected upon arriving in Atelier, but... well... to be honest, it definitely hadn't been a reevaluation of how appetizing his leather gloves could be.

Wasn't this the sort of place where things happened to people? That was why he'd left home in the first place. At home terribly exciting things only happened to the cows, who didn't know enough to realize that milking really wasn't such an adventure.

Well then. Forrest would just have to go and find something that was happening!

So this was what he had to do: he had to find a wayfaring bar for wayfarers and begin to... errrr... wayfare. What did that mean, anyways? Maybe they'd know. It seemed to be a decent occupation, after all. When a guy thought of wanderers he thought of grim, too-thin men worn by time and the road and the path to nowhere into crags of living rock. When a guy thought of drifters he thought of somebody paying penance, or just some creepy homeless wino - someone dirty and vile and disturbingly, animalistically desperate. Brigands and highwaymen were violent nomadic thieves, and mavericks simply added hustling to the basic resume of the nomadic criminal. 'Adventurer' gave him visions of guys spelunking into big giant caves to look for cursed treasures. 'Ranger' made him think of those crazy people that shot at you in forests if you forgot to put out your campfire or killed the King's deer (that had NOT been his fault), and wrestled bears for suicidal kicks.

But wayfarers? Wayfarers had class. Wayfarers weren't evil or crazy or alcoholic or thugs or minions or bandit kings or looney uncles driven off the family estate for being not quite right in the head. Wayfarers were just ordinary (well, not including the impressive special skills and abilities which grew matching legendary reputations and/or a humble aura of impenetrable mystery) who didn't have to steal from people or go off wandering into gross monster-infested caves for moldy artifacts.

Hopefully the "fare" was also a big part of wayfaring. Forrest was reeeeeally hungry. So yeah. The bar thing was probably good all around.

... not that he had any idea what a bar was supposed to look like here. The buildings right around him looked normal enough, but above... if he looked up he was going to start gaping again. Did people really live in those things? Whoa.

"Um, excuse me," Forrest queried a pedestrian with embarrassment. Yeesh. He felt like a little kid asking his way to the candy store. "You wouldn't happen to know where I could find a...."

The crowd was large, and so was the woman he was trying to flag down.

"Excuse you?" her eyebrows rose and then her feet as she floated a few meters away with a small harumph. The blonde then noticed that she had unnaturally violet hair. And was wearing a large conical hat. And was carrying a wand.

Oh.

Oh.

Whoa. Again.

Ms. Peanuts blinked up at him sympathetically from the perch she had taken on his shoulder. The wayfarer wasn't sure quite how she was blinking, since she didn't have eyelids, but... eh. If he thought about it too much he'd probably just get confused. That was the nice thing about magic - you never had to think about it. Since it was magic it kind of explained itself by being... well... magical. And not in a sarcastic way, just in the way that involved it being magic. It probably made sense to these magic people. The same odd kind of sense that dictated they never look him in the eye, wave, or say hello when he did.

For a second, the swordsman allowed himself to feel very lost and very small.

"I'm sorry - are you lost?" Oh! Another woman with purple hair. That was probably magical too. His sanity thanked him for that brilliant piece of deduction as he eagerly nodded her a yes.

"Yeah, I guess so. I'm new here," he felt kind of sheepish. But he hadn't seen a place to buy a map, right? Maybe there were magical maps he couldn't see here made out of mystical spiderweb dew gathered in the light of the full moon or something. He wouldn't put it past these people, what the the flying and all.

"Wow. Being a magic person must be really neat. So do you fly lots?" Forrest attempted to strike up a conversation with his erstwhile companion as they made their way to..... uhhhh..... somewhere?

The lady laughed. "Oh, honey. You're adorable, do you know that? You just let Verbena take care of you and we'll get you fixed up right quick," she beamed at him indulgently. Aw. Now he was thinking about Mom again. Poor Mom. She hadn't wanted him to go...

"Aw, thanks! You remind me of my mom."

But this woman was so much like her. She was the sort of person that you couldn't help but trust.

Ma Verbena just smiled and pulled him along. That was okay. It was kind of like a maze in here and also kind of frightening the way that the sky was cut up into little strips even by the shorter buildings.

He'd been so right - if anything neat was going to happen to him, it was bound to happen no place else but here. Especially after he got a reluctant yet faithful wizard companion for his journey around the world. He was fairly certain that most great heroes had faithful wizard companions like the three wizards that moved here and started this place. So sad that nobody like them was around anymore to slay great monsters, such as the massive butterflies that had invaded his stomach and were asking him quite insistently just what he thought he was doing in a place like this.

Quiet, you. Places to go and things to see. Hurrah!

"Oh, that's no trouble, You just come with me, honey."

Hey - maybe people here weren't so bad after all!

The Reverend Lucian Jones was a composite of a man - the great cosmopolitan jigsaw puzzle of the Civilized Age jammed together by force in a crude patchwork of images which deigned to match in shape but never in appearance. His eyes were surely stolen from a black magic baron of the Lethe - one of those who dealt in death and the muddying of waters that colored his eyes a fool's gold. His shoulders were borrowed from a working man, slumped with wear of a load he'd never carried. His smile had been swiped quite audaciously from a department-store sales clerk pestered by that one last customer just before closing time, and his nose was the free-spirited black sheep of an aristocratic line. His legs were long for climbing masts on ships he'd never see. His hair was in a state of inky disarray, in respect for the harsh mountain wind that it would never feel, but one of the braver rangers might. Musician's hands, scholar's cheekbones, a farmer's bronzed skin and a build worthy of a fencer... this figure they called Jones was both many things and none of them. He was an implacable, unplaceable creature who caught eyes in crowds and left a vaguely unsettled feeling in his wake. Hewas also a man to whom people paid attention without every quite knowing why except that maybe, just maybe, there was something in that menagerie him that struck them as being very much like a part of themselves.

In short, the mage was a mutt. Something new and improved - a revolutionary new flavor untested for mass consumption.

No one was noticing this at the moment. This was, after all, a pub, and he knew better than most how alcohol tended to blend him together and into the ordinary. It could also be because no one actually cared about the Reverend Lucian Jones or his message of intellectual revolution. That was also to be expected. They could not Revere nothing, after all, and in this particular neighborhood the opposite of nothing was cold hard commerce.

Commerce, that is, or the lack of a rent, and then Outside the Wall. He was working on the commerce angle, though. First commerce, then respect, and then finally what he wanted.

What did attract a certain amount of attention - before it was immediately repelled, that is - was the Reverend's disturbing ability to stay completely still for long periods of time. It was not the stillness of a corpse with it's cold lifeless limpness. Nor was it the frozen grace of stone, which could be leant on and weathered away. It was a stillness out of time - a state of illusory meditation that could forgive all trespasses or pronounce penance without a word. A stillness so empty and without personality that those who saw the Reverened created their own mood for him, and only seldom happened to like it.

That was why he tended to sit in the more shadowed corners of the pub. That or, as Francis would put it, 'adequate cover for the transaction of business'. Francis was, as a rule, immune to charisma, and Mel far too high (or low) to notice it. That was why they could be trusted.

Unfortunately, that stillness gave the impression of a patience that the Reverend would readily acknowledge he'd never possessed. That was the problem with being him, really. What attracted people to his cause (his beloved, all-important, under-appreciated cause) was not the mage's sheer presence but his lack of it.

Oh well.

Another sip of his cider. The Reverend liked to think that he could keep the amber-ish liquid down fairly well, all things considered. If he could be this pensive with some Liquid Happiness in his system then he really must be building up that immunity he'd been working on. Emotions - Bottled or no - were never all that conducive to wisdom.

Neither was this, really. Watching. He'd have given quite a bit for a book right now. But that was not to be - the whole reason that they were here was to be watching.

And so watch he did.

He'd waited tables in pubs before and knew the way of looking both at a crowd and through it. This place wasn't any different... from any place, really. A roaring fire and ale on tap, with the stink of Outwallers who could not nullify their scents punctuated occasionally by the telltale smell of grass or fresh air othat mages affected in deference to the noses of their peers. All of them were grizzled, most of them men, and many happened to be armed with pretty foreign sticks and stones. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.

And then he saw.

"There. Look,"

It was Verbena Murphy herself, taking some poor boy with frizzy blonde hair into an obscure little Outwaller bar where a fledgeling crime ring hardly worthy of her time happened to operate. The Verbena Murphy. The Murphy coven's Potionsmaster.

By all the Kings and Martyrs. A sign. A sign!

"There."

"There, what?" Francis yawned, apparently having fallen half-asleep ensconced in his opinion of the futility of listening to Mel.

"Verbena Murphy," said the Reverend bemusedly, half disbelieving he'd seen the flash of violet-colored hair and shabby robes cutting through this mass of people like a hyena taking a kill back to her cubs.

"You're kidding. Right out in the open? Here? She has to be under blocking twenty-three hours a day after she chewed that poor bastard's legs off... "

"Why would I kid about this? It's obvious Mel was given a sign for us. i was right!"

If Francis believed that the consumption of humble pie was worth his time at this point, he wasn't going to show it, "Right."

Mumbling a small sonics spell, his colleague conjured a messenger breeze.

"Aer transmitte mea verba," Francis' movements were quick and economical. There was no time to lose. They had been sent their chance!

Money, fame, power. HaHA! A formula as old as time.

"Morag! I want you to leak word to Jimmy - yes, that Jimmy, the fucking rat Jimmy. I need you to start a rumor to the tune that Verbena Murphy's out of hiding and doing Extractions at bars on the Gateway grid. Make it sound like a business thing. Reverend's order's."

Mel, the Reverend reflected, was going to have to get a very big cut of this indeed. Er, once he was awake and out of the pool of his own drink again, that is.

When you're a child, they force you to look down.

Everyone in the City goes through it - the brightest lights of Pyri made equal, at this one very special event, with those scraping a living from the gutter with the family elemental. It's a pilgrimage of sorts. Mother and father (or mother and mother, or father and father, or mother and boyfriend, or whomsoever can be cunningly drafted into the task) take you up to the great glass takeoff platform which moves up and down the length of the complex most commonly (if incorrectly) known as the Aerie, home of the Fury Corps. There you are placed with legs dangling off of the near-imperceptible seam between ledge and abyss. And you are left for three entire days under the watchful eyes of the passing officers.

For the duration you are looking down, whether you like it or not.

That was why years later most citizens of Atelier thought nothing at all of darting about at breathtaking speeds in the lattice-like layers of gridlines set aside by floating buoys for aerial traffic. That was also why militia members (and those they pursued) were fairly unconcerned about flying one-handed and over the speed limit regardless of the possibility of plummeting several hundred feet down to the ground and bone-crushing doom.

Officer Sibyl Mortimer of the Fury Corps, for one, was glad of it. True, the absence of fear had made daredevil air-jockeys out of a thousand and one damnable teenagers and insecure middle-aged men, but... her unit had someplace to be.

"What's going on?" she asked, launching off of the transparent platform as the five of them fell into a black-cloaked V.

Sibyl was the last. She hated being the last. Hated it with the passion of a thousand cornered rats. There wasn't any time, dammit! These people had no idea what they were dealing with.

Only her. As usual.

The makeup - illegal and foreign and exotic and perfectly blended to the color of her skin - itched where it was slathered overtop of the tattoo that claimed her upper arm (and the rest of her person as well, actually) for the Biryukov Coven. The sun on her back through the layers of protection-charmed clothing they all wore seemed to disagree with it. Most everything did, save necessity.

"The Aerie's got word on the Sorceress Verbena Murphy - a Potionsmaster that controls deals on Veritas grid in Lethe for the Murphy Coven. She escaped last month's raid by burning off one of our boys' legs with an unidentified flesh-eating solution," their sergeant barked from the head of the formation, steering them towards the restricted upper gridways where they could catch a good view of the lines below. "Seems she's come out of hiding and trolling for dirtbags to Extract from on the Gateway grid. The Chief wants this one... bad."

A translation: their illustrious leader, the Commandant in Chief Erich Glasford, wanted either Verbena Murphy in the Hole or someone in this squadron gainfully unemployed. Nobody hurt one of their own and got away with it. Nobody.

That was acceptable.

"Amazing that she was found so quickly. Everyone said that she'd be laying low under shielding for months and there was no point tracking her," one of her squadmates, a longhaired man named Todd, commented into the wind. Todd was too frivolous. He should have been kept in Traffic where he belonged.

"Luck is an amazing thing," Sibyl snapped, annoyed. Didn't they know that there was no time? She might not be a prophet but this Sibyl could see the future - and in it was some poor bastard's skeleton with all the flesh boiled off, his bleached-white bones up for sale on the black market for teenagers in the Stacks to buy and show off their 'daring' brush with black magic to their friends. Eventually they'd be forgotten and thrown away in the trash while the victim's was devoured, bit by bit, by the junkies and the depressed and the hobos and poor little rich boys at their Pyri boarding school.

Ugh. If there was anything truly vile in this sick, sad city it was Extraction. They'd find some poor sucker at the Gateway, get him feeling a whole hell of a lot like whatever emotion's the most in demand this week. Then they'd extract his soul and a few major organs to make a toxic soup out of it and then serve it up by bottle or dose. Sick, sick, sick.

Luck? The hell finding Verbena Murphy was luck! It was Karma, plain and simple, and with these layabouts about her instead of decent officers it appeared that this day would be casting Sibyl Mortimer in the role of Hand of Fate.

So be it.

"Take these," the sergeant directed, tossing each of them a small drawstring pouch as they wove through and around the gridlines of airspace to which the queues of their civilian charges were confined. "You'll need them for tracking. They're the tissue samples they took when she almost got dragged to the Hole. She killed one of our own, so it's dead or alive. You come through on this and odds are you're off H&T detail and on to better things, so don't fuck this up. Questions?"

The four other members of the hunter-tracker team didn't dare.

"Right. Remember to be on your guard - the guy who lost his legs is gonna be in regen for months. We'll travel alone, without alarm lights. Our target has already escaped three tracker teams this month.... if she knows you're coming, she's as good as gone. And so, probably, are you," he finished briefing with a curt nod, the back of which Sibyl could see from her place in formation.

"Break!"

Sibyl waited a moment to see where the best tracker of their number was going, and then took a sharp climb upwards a couple of grid levels so that she could follow him out of his line of sight. Her portion of the adversary's tresses was destined for other things.

As was Todd, actually. This was the perfect opportunity to get him promoted out of here. Kings and Martyrs knew she couldn't risk it.

Bored.

So very, very bored.

O'Reilly looked upon all the myriad species of boredom with the jaded eye of a collector. The magician could catalogue them, classify them, stick them with a pin and hang them up for magical research or trendily morbid interior decoration. It was, after all, his life's work. The occupation which had vexed his days and consumed his nights since before the day he was born. Boredom was his calling - his vocation, if you will. That had been foreordained by everything that made him the Younger O'Reilly. But damned if he were going to accept it like a dozen other aristocratic younger-sons and hanger's on. Damned if he was going to be transformed into one of the professionally bored, praised-for-their-beauty-in-the-houthouse dilettantes who wiles away their days in contemplation of their own graceful decay. Oh no. That would never be him.

Inaan Tiresias O'Reilly had dared to find his own amusements.

Of course, that was why he was here. And bored. Again. But that was nothing new, was it? What was the point of being the culmination of centuries worth of good breeding to languish here instead of in some socialite's parlor? At least the socialite could appreciate the pleasure of his company, even if it still bored him to sulking (the magician held a quiet distaste for any and all things involving tears).

O'Reilly kicked his bed for no good reason. He felt it his privilege - nay, his right - to take things such as boredom and responsibility as badly as possible. Especially boredom. And of all the boredoms of the world, even more especially a boredom like this.

He hated waiting. That was a most poisonous variety of bored indeed.

O'Reilly paced. His sandals were both leather and beige. He wondered, briefly, if one could actually describe a temperature as beige. As it was, he'd already placed it somewhere around bloody lukewarm. The bridge of his nose itched with the glasses he wasn't used to wearing. Wasn't taking the reshaping charm off of his corneas an absurd punishment? Maybe he'd wear glasses for the rest of his life, itch or no accursed itch. Hah! That'd show them when they had to take him out looking like some déclassé Stacks-bred scholar.

The prisoner thought about looking in the mirror, but that would just depress him glasses or no. Inaan had never had a particularly pretty face. Not bad - and certainly not plain enough to turn off a good horde or two of fortune seekers - but handsome? Never. His nose was the tiniest bit too sharp, his eyes were narrow and sunken enough that they came out looking less like emerald than swamp-green, and his lips were a millimeter thinner than his face deserved. The mage's frame was far to wiry to fit the classically muscular romantic style, and oval glasses affected an aloof air rather than a sense of library-bound wisdom. Indeed, his face was the sort of face that might have been rather attractive were it adjusted ever so slightly out of focus - a collection of angular features that begged for a blurring they would never receive.

His brother Godrick, on the other hand, was six feet tall to Inaan's five-two. A varsity athlete, three times head of his class, president of the University of Atelier Student's Association for three years running, a talented healer, and heir to the O'Reilly family holdings as well as defacto rulership of the city. He also - to add insult to injury - had really, really good hair. Apparently Inaan's parents had broken the mold the first time through.

Stupid Godrick. Such a bastard. He couldn't even be enough of a jackass for O'Reilly to work up a decent hate instead of just sort of missing having him around. They might as well have just named him God.

... see? He knew that he'd get depressed, and people that brooded were a universally despicable lot.

O'Reilly paced. The mail should be here soon. Shouldn't it? He tended to lose track of time these days. The redhead's boredom was growing to the point where his higher faculties might as well commit suicide anyways for lack of stimulation.

O'Reilly paced more, conveniently forgetting to be grateful that there was no roommate to kick his ass for it (his separation from the riff-raff was more than a given). The top bunk had become his sleeping bunk, with the lower bunk was his space for flopping down and wanting to sleep while restlessly tearing at the covers. The second, it could be presumed, was the one that preserved his sanity in this Hole.

To say that boredom had been driving Inaan O'Reilly slowly insane for the greater part of his twenty-one years was like saying that the sun rose in the east. It wasn't just a fact - it was a condition so integral to his existence that he rarely gave it any thought whatsoever. Except for times like these. Times when a perfect boredom romanced his imagination back into contemplation of the slow-action water-torture that was his life. The boredom made him do things in spates of madness, which landed him here, which made him even more bored - a cruel cycle indeed.

He paced. And paces. And paced some more. And then a scrawny man with many tattoos slipped a letter under the glass door of his cell.

...

.... well, that was anticlimactic, although he rather expected that the letter from Mother would be moreso. Letters from Mother were so quaintly predictable. Or perhaps she'd send the extra two-thousand marks in bills instead of barterable goods this time? He ripped it open anyways, because reading it was better than not.

"Dear Inaan,

I am afraid that your father and I are fresh out of thousand-mark notes. Smoothing over this little 'incident' of which you've written would be a good experience for..."

.....

What the fuck!?

Think, dammit, think! This had to be a mistake... or... or a trick.. or.... that selfish bitch!

It would be cliché to wish that he were bored again, so instead the wizard set about pacing. His contemplations were not, however, on the subject of boredom this time, but ways in which he could land from this on his feet. Or, fuck, still have feet once this was over. Or operable legs. Or an unbroken spine. Or not be sucking on Kings-knew-what.

Right. Time for new plan.

Traffic had started thinning as soon as they passed out of the commercial areas near the center of the city and downslope to the residential Stacks. Flyers dispersed from the heavily-packed gridlines and into deceptively pleasant byways, where they'd meet the death of their travels among the spiderweb of floating waterlines that supplied the city with water - the so-called aquagrid. Although it was not immediately obvious to punks on joyrides, most sensible mages actually found it harder to fly in Stacks. One slip-up and you were in the middle of a highly-pressurized stream of heated water, scalded or falling or, worse, charged with polluting the water table and forced to compensate the city in time, money, and humiliation.

Time especially was too precious to be so carelessly wasted.

As a result of this, most mages also tended to keep their eyes very firmly on the flightpath the closer they were to home-sweet-home. That was why the concentric layer of housing was constructed ideally for camoflage. No time to waste. Dammit, if she lost Todd....

No. Best not to think about it. She wasn't going to lose Todd. She was going to keep one eye on Todd, and one eye on the horizon, and hope to all things profane and sacred she didn't lose him. That should cover a pretty broad spectrum as far as fruitless praying went.

Feh. Luck. Her particular brand of luck was a friend that could only be summoned in fair weather, with a knife to it's throat. It was a reclusive, broken beast. Sibyl much preferred the simple elegance of karma. Distilled Luck was a charm like any other bottled and sold on the groundlines of Acheron and the and backrooms of Lethe - a chemical reaction between clover and honey and the souls of pure-white rabbits. Luck was something people blamed their achievements on so as to look humble. Luck was something people praised for other's help so as to make themselves look stronger. Luck was the religion of people who wanted to make no effort and feel no pain. It was the gleam on the ribbon at the end of the race - nothing more. Karma, on the other hand, meant justice.

And if people could make their own luck, Sibyl figured that she ought to be able to make her own karma as well.

So she'd just have to try better, harder, and above-all faster. Otherwise, someone was going to die.

"Come on... bloody winged rats are never around when you need them."

Glide, twist, and barrel-roll. Nothing. Nothing. Sibyl gripped her broomstick tighter... she was not going to panic. Surely something had to be out there.

The sorceress' knuckles clenched white with frustration under her gloves. These things always happened to her. They would get the call for Verbena Murphy, of all the H&T wings to be on duty. And she would know the way to stop her. And next thing you knew it'd be the one-way road to perdition - unless she pulled this off just right it's be her wearing a detective's braces and caught up against a rock and the long arm of the law ready to dislocate her jaw. She couldn't even fathom what they'd do to a sorceress working her way through their own ranks. If she could just be left alone to accomplish her objectives, or skip out just this once and grab a latte, say she lot the hair, maybe get de-moted to traffic...

No. Someone was going to die. And if they did capture her, at least that would prove her point. Karma. If they found her out it was only because she deserved it. If she saved whoever this Extraction would be.. that was something, right? That would help even the score? Keep the dogs of internal affairs off her scent a little while longer?

Outrunning karma was, for Sibyl Murphy, a full time job.

Duck, weave, climb, dive, turn. Nothing. Nothing... nothing... nothing but no time and the dryness at the back of her throat until ... there.

Karma. She'd known it!

Spin - the rush of blood as her mop of moss-colored hair turned three hundred a sixty degrees - and she was off. Over and under and through and around until momma longlegs found her fly, a lazily gliding pigeon whose path she paralleled, her cloak billowing with speed in a parody of wings. The great dark crow dwarfed her feathered counterpart by several dozen pounds, so it wasn't terribly hard for her to pluck it out of the sky with an anticlimactic non-chase.

It failed to struggle as much as it should have. The sorceress had probably broken it's wings. Birds' wings were so frail - that was why people used good solid wood for flying instead of indulging their vanity and subjecting themselves to physical exertion and the cruel mercies of inter-tower updrafts for the sake of pretty plumage. There were enough steering problems with wind-tunnels already. Which was why she dare not spare her other hand to reach for a knife as the bird pecked crossly unto her glove. The officer instead pinned it's head back with her thumb before unceremoniously bringing the thing's throat to her teeth and ripping it out.

There was nothing terribly novel or disgusting about the salty-smooth taste of blood, but she spat out the small excess of flesh to concentrate on steering. Her right hand grew damp with more dark red liquid than any bird ought ever to produce, and pulsed with the fluttering beat of an untapped soul. The sorceress kept her eye (as promised) on Todd while her fingers mixed the blood with Verbena Murphy's hair and traced sigils in the air by rote.

The half-forgotten letters could only spell one thing - a curse.

She'd have to keep out of sight now.

The pigeon's mutilated body began the long, quick plummet to the ground as its life's blood formed a ring around the officer's palm. Obliquely arcane patterns arranged themselves around it on the surface of the sky.

Waiting.

"Oh stillborn power I command:

Forsake the cycle into another life.".

Be instead reborn in my hands,"

The sigils struggled and then converged, her blood halo disintegrating into a bird-shaped bolt of sanguine power.

"And wreak the vengeance of my words."

Momentarily matching Sibyl's pace, it was quick to shoot off ahead into the failing daylight.

"Devoveo!"

And indeed there would be time for waiting, although the power would not. Verbena Murphy was not going going to run or hide or fight.

"Allige eam!"

Not if Sibyl Mortimer held her down.

Meanwhile, on a bar at the edge of everywhere that mattered, one singular young man was getting very, very drunk. His cornstarch hair was flyaway and so exotic (here, where the usual old exotic was ever-so passe) that he could be nothing but some magicless Outwaller. Yet another meaningless addition to the horde of parasites on the underbelly of the city that the more honest of the wizarding classes referred to as Pigs. He smelled like fresh air as a matter of course instead of enchantment, and his eyes spoke of bluebells. He carried a sword in this place as if it could matter. More importantly, Verbena Murphy could read him like a book, and the book said that he made for an excellent mark. Her charge was young and naive and stupid and probably hadn't even realized that the cider was alcoholic at all. All the better to Extract him under-budget with.

"Oh, honestly - you're all skin and bones! Let me order you another to help warm you up, hmmm?"

"Yeah! Thankya ma'am!"

She had to work. Her family wasn't happy that she'd failed to anticipate the raid on their most profitable mass-Extraction operation at an out-of-the-way Lethe brother. They'd failed to make their protection payments to the Biryukov because of it, and when the Biryukov weren't happy nobody was happy (bloody curses). That made her a liability the size of a small country. She had to work and she had to make a score and pay them back - show them that she could survive and be trusted. It was ridiculous, really. How many years had she been in this business? They were so paranoid about security these days. Who'd find her in some pissant hole like this?

She'd show them. She'd show them all.

"Now, then... d'you feel any better, hon?"

"Yeah, I just..." the boy stared bemusedly into his drink. "Is this magic too?"

She laughed, "No, dear. This is good old-fashioned Outwalla drink. I thought it might remind you of home... make you feel a bit more welcome."

"Yeah, I...yeah," he smiled at her broadly, before taking a violent turn towards the concerned. "As long as it's just magic and not alcohol. My mom'd kill me if..."

"You're more than welcome. Seeing a smile on you face brings a smile to mine," Verbena said. This one was just about ripe for the picking, it seemed. "Now, would you like me to show to the nearest inn? You must be so tired, you poor thing... just look at you, you're all skin and bones and frostbite!"

Worthless little rat. This kid was like a cocker spaniel. She dearly hoped that he wouldn't drool on her shoes.

"Sure thing, ma'am! Wouldn't want to impose on ya any longer than necessary," the liquor - spiked with a touch of Iced Comfortable to keep the boy compliant - allowed her to lead him merrily on their way outside the door. It was just as well. Some fool in the corner seemed to be checking them out, and she couldn't take down two of these lugs without invoking traceable magics. Bloody Furies...

Had the Biryukov cast an ill'fortune glamour on her? Was that it? Typical. Those vindictive bullying cows...

Her hand firmly on his arm, the sorceress led him out into the alleyway. Christopher at the bar would keep anyone from interrupting them - or at least he would if he wanted to keep his Bottled Emotion supply lines open.

Verbena sat the child down among the refuse.

"You just wait right there for a second, hmmm?" the sorceress dug around for the live rat she kept in her purse - she'd need it to jump-start the energy reaction. Shit. She hoped her good beakers were in here. This was gonna be premium-quality stuff. "I just have to make sure I haven't lost my keys..."

Ah! There is was. But... shit. Had he fallen asleep? She didn't need some cheap-ass sleeping draught to...

WARM.

"Mwah?"

"Whoa... is that your bird? Heehee! Cooool...."

She would have answered, except the liquid energy that had just melted into her skin - wings and all - was now working towards her heart at a slow burn. Her veins would not obey her pleas to stand down, and once that feeling hit the back of her head her limbs proved insubordinate was well.

She.... she couldn't move. She couldn't move.

It had to be them. It had to be! Her own family had taken out a hit on her with the Biryukov rather than let her make things up!? How could they... hadn't she been there for... this had to be some kind of horrible mistake...

Because she couldnt' move, she couldn't scream when the back of her head met the cobblestones. She couldn't reach out and snatch her salvation when it worridly knelt beside her. And she couldn't cry when she knew that she was going to die.

If the officer wasn't careful, she'd end up making some sort of horrible mistake. This was going well so far, but that just meant that the odds dictated her fucking something up later.

But then, she always was careful. So maybe she'd beat the odds.

Indeed, the sorceress could barely comprehend not being careful. It had become, over the years, an integral part of her - some ephemeral quality acquired by osmosis that could never quite be banished away. Living her life required so many thousands of rules and regulations and cares and worries and whispers and pain that they'd hardened and twisted and formed the cage about which she'd grown up, like the prized vine of some pampered noblewoman's chief gardener.

In any case, she was at least careful enough that Todd couldn't see her. He was good, but she had to make sure. Besides, if he got there early the curse would have to be revoked so that he didn't know the quarry'd been gift-wrapped. Any careful person could see that the last thing Sibyl needed was someone asking questions about this.

As she was sich an innately careful person, the risk inherent in the situation cut into Sibyl's nerves like razor wire. This was a terrible torture indeed. The eyes she imagined could be watching her made pinpricks in her back. It would be easier out here for someone to figure her out. They'd moved from the Stacks to the slumlands of Acheron - where the aquagrids were replaced by primitive wells, and the shadows crept up from low-lying buildings to take you by surprise. The smell of trash and humanity robbed you of any illusions about the population of this place. They lived and died in the dirt - Pigs wallowing in the mud of their self-made pen. It was disgusting, really. The people moreso. They stared up atyou in the darkness and they stared when you flew by. They'd sell your secrets to Departmental Inquisitions for half a mark and a bottle of ale. It was unnerving. It was....

Unworthy of her to worry, of course. These were all just Outwallers, Pigs, and other societal refuse. None of her concern. They wouldn't dare look at her crossly in full Corps regalia.

The sorceress winkled her nose and coughed. A greasy haze seemed to cling to everything around them, as if to remind visitors that those who decayed in this squalid hole were still living by clogging their nostrils with fat.

Todd cruised above the buildings ahead of her. She had to keep low to the ground to avoid detection. They could look outside of their windows and see her. It was most unnerving. If she wasn't careful, they'd see the remnants of blood on her hands. She could feel the dust rise up to clutch at her cloak with bony hands - dragging it down.

Sibyl landed in a darkened corner when Todd started to circle into a descent around some squalid little pub. There was singing coming from within and an odd variety of music. The windows cast embers of light onto the street - disturbing the peace of the wicked and hardworking alike.

Verbena Murphy was a smart woman. Hadn't Sibyl always been told that? There was a narrow crevasse of an alley beside the unremarkable brick building - the sort of place nobody goes into at night because someone dangerous could be there, and thus is almost always perfectly safe. There were no windows out onto the alley, and the music was loud. She had to be over there. And Todd, for all his flightiness, seemed to have drawn that conclusion as well.

Suddenly the door to the bar opened and dislodged a scrawny-looking man in glasses, who proceeded to hug Todd with all the limpetlike passion of a schoolboy crush.

"It's impooooooooooortant! I said so. Me. Me!"

"What!? Get off me! You can't just stroll up to an officer of the law and..."

Lovely.

"I can't let you go there... it's important! I know so. Lets have a drink! That's important too!"

"Hey! I'll have you know that there's a wanted criminal on this grid and... NO, you CANNOT touch my wand! If you don't get off me RIGHT NOW I'm going to..."

"Mel, get off of him," some other man - the drunkard's friend, no doubt - fell upon the scene with a roll of his eyes. "Kings and Martyrs, do we have to tie you down every time you get drunk? Look, I'm really sorry about this officer..."

"Whatever. Can you just get this guy off me? I have important business to take care of, but if I have to write him up..."

"Whoa! Who said anything about writing up? Have pity on the common man, sir. This is all just a big misunderstanding."

"No! No! No! Understanding is the KEY! It's important! Things are going to happen because of this! You have to stay here.... I can see fate, and fate said to me 'Mel, you're one sexy bastard'. An' I said to Fate, 'Fate ol' girl, I know you're hot for me, but there'ezis barmaid at...'" the drunk man poured a mug of ale over Todd's indignant head.

Sigh. Damn Outwallers didn't know what direction was up half the time.

She should have been more careful. The curse wouldn't hold forever... she'd just used a single bird to power it and.... fuck. Was one random Extraction victim really worth blowing her cover?

Dodging out from beneath the mesh of staircases and shadows in which she'd been hiding, Sibyl made a dash for the alley.

Mel had been babbling his usual Mel-babble when the Reverend gave Francis the word to go look around. Mel thought something was going to happen. As always. And since that something probably involved Verbena Murphy and the shiny-eyed lightweight that she'd dragged outside twenty minutes ago, Francis was dispatched to go see that things went properly while the Reverend tried to get Mel not arrested.

Francis held a brief yet passionate debate with himself on the relative merits of doing something to get Mel arrested instead. Then the practical side of him got the really fucking annoyed side of him in a headlock, and that was the end of that. He also considered just killing the Sorceress, but the loyal side of him punched the practical side of him in the jaw for that. By that time it was getting pretty bloody in there as far as mental brawls go, so the air mage finally decided to just go out and see what the fuck was going on already. His footsteps were muffled by the permanent anti-sonics spell on his boots, so it was no surprise when she didn't see him coming.

The only surprise ended up being what he was seeing.

Verbena Murphy was twitching on the gravel while the guy she'd picked looked concerned and shockingly not dead.

Oh... great. Just great.

Francis Maddox hadn't liked this from the start. He didn't like the fact that they were wasting all day in some stupid bar because of Mel's 'special feelings'. He didn't like screwing around with the corps when they didn't need to - that sort of thing was strictly anathema among the Barons for damn good reasons. And he sure as fuck didn't like all these bloody questions with no bloody answers.

This never would have happened if they'd just killed the woman like normal people would.

How could she already be knocked out? That didn't make any fucking sense... What the hell was going on here?

A blur of black and silver and hunter-green barreled down from the sky and booted the drunk-looking kid in the head. She'd only been half-mounted on her broom in the first place, and when she landed she took it up like a staff - swinging it in a quick circle before slamming it into the back of the shocked-looking teenager's head. Once he'd fallen loosely to the ground she cursed, pulled out her handcuffs, kicked Murphy twice in the stomach for good measure, and roughly pulled the sorceress' wrists together to be restrained. All Verbena murphy seemed to want to do in response to this was bat at her attacker kittenishly before being bitchslapped back to the ground. The entire process had taken approximately a minute and a half.

.... okay, that was going on here.

"This woman is a convicted Sorceress," the cop breathed, ire kept to the surface at a low simmer. Fuck, she'd seen him. Psychoanalysis was for people with too much fucking money on their hands, but... whoever she was so pissed off at it'd better not be him. "Her welfare need be none of your concern. She will be punished."

"How very self-righteous of you," he dared to mouth off. Kings and Martyrs.. yeah, great plan Francis. The cop is doing something obviously illegal. Let's make a big deal of it! Dumbass. It's not illegal until she SAYS it's illegal, and at this point she coudl make it illegal for him to breathe.

Wasn't he usually sensible about these things? It'd been a long day.

"Righteousness is severely underestimated, citizen," she hissed coldly. Her eyes were amber like the Reverend's - reptile eyes. He could easily see her being a cold-blooded beast. In fact, that led strait to the realm of putting two and two together... "It's easy to ramble on about grey morality and sin being in the eye of the beholder until everything goes to hell when you're the one treading the line next to black. Someone has to judge her who is not prone to such fashionable excuses. And I assure you, there's no better judge of such activities than I."

"Do you really think so?" Francis cursed his inability to say anything without smirking, the absence of the Reverend (who actually could lie worth a damn), and the fact that he'd given up killing. Damn. He wished he were killing something right now... then Francis wouldn't have to be vaguely disturbed by some naggingly obvious twist to the plot he obviously hadn't picked up on yet. She seemed annoyed that he was here. Like he was keeping her from leaving. Again: what the fuck?

Something wasn't right with this picture. She should be doing her little fanatic victory dance. Something wasn't connecting, and he didn't know what.

"What are you getting at? I won't play word-games with you, citizen. You know our Charter, just like everyone else."

Hell yeah, he did. Bloody fascists.

"Yeah... I know a whole fucking lot of things," if he was already in the frying pan, he might as well go for the fire. Besides - Francis always thought better out loud. He was built for impact rather than stealth. "Like that she can't move. And before you say that it's biomagics, we both know that that's a lie. Her skin is slack, not strained - her brain is disconnected from the rest of her body. She hasn't been physically bound. It's classy stuff, really. Just like...."

Oh, no fucking WAY.

"...Grade-A Biryukov cursework. I'm impressed. But why would one of the high-and-mighty Biryukov hexing coven be working for the cops, hm? You getting a protections cut? You aren't fit to impartially judge a spelling-bee."

On the other hand? Maybe it was good that certain things didn't make it past his chemically-induced facade. Like, say, the fact that he half-expected his ex-employers to come crashing down through the sky at any minute, cast a regen spell on him, and stick him in an iron maiden for the next fifty years so as he could play matching games between the types of pain and the types of oozing, half-destroyed organs he possessed. That's what he'd do in their situation. For the descendant of a long line of thugs, Francis had been praised for his creativity with alarming repetition. That's why he'd had to leave, actually. Lower pay than he could pull in an entrepreneurial venture, and... it had been hard to remind himself constantly that all he was hired to do was smash people's faces in with traditionalist flare.

Best look confident as long as he was being a moron. Maybe the cop'd think he was big.

"Do you think so? That's a very daring theory. Because I think that if you don't cease such treasonous talk then I'll have to take you with me as well."

But there was no crashing Biryukov sting. There was, in fact, nothing at all, except for some pissed woman looking very coplike indeed. Well then. Bluff?

"And wouldn't they like to hear what I have to say...?"

"They won't if your tongue goes mysteriously missing, now will they? No one is going to interrupt my work - least of all some petty thug operating out of an Outwaller dive in the Acheron. Who do you think they'd believe, hunh? The one who brought in Verbena Murphy, or some wannabe punk with a coven-sigil scratched on his arm? Just take your friend and go. He should be alright - I've given up enough for it. But I've got to get her out of here."

Francis knew, since they'd made him read poetry in school, that he ought to be able to read people just from their eyes. He should be able to peer through those tiny windows straight into their souls and catch just a whiff of feeling - anger, fear, hate, alarm, or consuming passion, maybe. Francis thought that that was bull. Eyes were tiny things. They were useful, true, but not much else unless you wanted to go about staring at them all day vain attempts to discern bullshit meaning from the black or yellow or red or blue, instead of doing something useful. All this looking into eyes all the time was for pansies.

The felon much preferred to read body language - a far more reliable indicator as far as these things went. And the way that she stalked off suggested that getting the fuck out of here was probably a very good idea indeed. Every stomp bespoke the kind of foul mood that woke you up at four in the morning with half-remembered nightmares, fading bruises, and bad mojo on the brain.

Francis slouched off into the night with the kid following obediently behind on a pillar of air (he had no idea what to do with the kid, but couldn't very well leave him here with some crazy Biryukov playing dressup). Best to keep his head down. He of all people understood that you never knew with Biryukovs. Bad mojo all around.

Inaan Tiresias O'Reilly opened the doors of his cell with a firm, sweeping motion. He did not shake and he did not pause. He looked strait ahead and walked calmly down into open pit-like that connected all of their cells like some sort of human drainage pool. He was not nervous and he did not frown. For the redhead was O'Reilly, and if anyone should be nervous around him it was the rest of the prison.

Indeed, at this very moment he was not even just an O'Reilly. He was an O'Reilly with a plan.

People stared, but he ignored him. Being stared at was something that he was used to - and even if he hadn't been, it was still something he expected of them. It was a better way to affirm his existence than that little lost feeling at the back of his head. It was do or die, fall or be felled, and O'Reilly had no intention of losing himself here.

As he made his way across the floor and past the guard-post, some of the wardens tipped their hats. Some of the inmates threw him rude gestures.

What the fuck was he thinking? This was never going to work. Why not just slit his wrists and have it over with?

But if it did work....

In another way, one which O'Reilly wasn't quite familiar with, this whole situation was also just a little bit exciting. His plan was sound. They'd have to want him. Who was he, after all? Couldn't he take a little pride in his cunning? Godrick wouldn't touch a plan like this with a ten-foot pole.

There was no place for the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, so he banished it away.

Taking a deep breath, he rapped upon a glass door at the opposite end of the cell block. It was guarded surreptitiously by several beige-wearing inmates playing cards with porno decks (typical). The corners of their eyes were deadly-sharp when their scrutiny was cast his way,and he had no doubt that one of them could probably break his neck in a heartbeat. Except they wouldn't, really. So that was alright. Godrick may have charmed their parents, half the city, society bitches of both genders, and most animals and inanimate objects to cross his path, but O'Reilly had faith in his own innate ability to dodge the shit as it left the fan with the grace of a professional dancer.

Time to take that for a test-drive, hmmm?

The door opened.

"Can I help you?" asked a small, half-bald old man with the typical old-man twinkle in his eyes of anyone who retained their full faculties after a few decades in the service of living.

He looked amused. It occurred to O'Reilly that if this was who he thought it should be then he really ought to look more... well, frightening. Much like the dark vortex of unfairness that was O'Reilly's life. Fuck. Just because he had an in with luck did that mean the rest of the universe had to kick him in the gut for it?

"Anthony Guerra?"

"Yeah?"

His demeanor was friendly. Too friendly. Kings and Martyrs knew that this had to be some sort of practiced crime-boss facade of wiley evil. Sometimes it was hard to forget that the possessor of such faded-looking prowess could order O'Reilly bleeding in several creative ways with the flick of his wrist. It kept the guards looking to testosterone charged youth for the next 'cunning' scheme to break the rules in this place. Crafty old geezer. The Guerras were in many ways very much like the O'Reillys... except with all the added lies, gruesome killing, and unspeakable dark magics, etc. And without the prestigious bloodlines. Which O'Reilly guessed actually made them not much like his family at all.

Oh well.

His luck would hold. ... right? Right? Right. Right.

It's showtime.

"As in Anthony Guerra, the crime lord?"

"That depends. Are you here to waste my time?" the figure that they called (in no particular order) Old Man Winter, Baron of the Guerra Coven, Master of the Undead and criminal bane of an entire city... still sounded fairly cordial. The younger man put it down to a combination of luck and O'Reilly blood. Either way, he had the upper hand here. Right? Obviously this guy's people couldn't spy worth a damn even if they had a vat full of invisibility potion, the great clumsy oafs. Nobody had to know that Mother had him over a barrel here, although he was fairly certain that she'd just done this to goad him into begging for cash.

Needless to say, O'Reilly would rather gouge his eyes out with rusty spoons. Or, apparently, consing himself to a life of indenture to the local crime lord. Well, nothing said that he couldn't get his ass out of this later....

O'Reilly was not well known for carefully thinking through his plans - ergo the jail time. But he was already here, so he might as well shred his misgivings and go for it, right? No compromise. Right? Right?

Talking himself into this was only garnering him more funny looks.

"No. Of course not," the younger man drawled. "My name is Inaan O'Reilly. Doubtless you've heard of me."

Old Man Winter grinned with just a touch of frost, his eyeteeth growing sharper, "Doubtless. You've put my boys in cigars for the past six months."

Oh, there was the supposed-to-be-frightening part. Really. Was he meant to be stuttering now or something? Foolish Old Man. Hah! This wasn't so hard at all.

"I'm sick of paying my way through. Rotting away here is such a tedious waste of my time and ability. Instead, I'd like to join your coven."

".. is this a JOKE? They always said you were the mouthier member of the noble bratpack. And even if it isn't... I should give a shit about this why, exactly. Because you're an O'Reilly? Because no, I wouldn't mind pissing off the most powerful woman in the city after all? Give me a break. You can't possibly believe that frigging much in the blueness of your blood?" Old Man Winter seemed to find this funny.

Hunh.

O'Reilly took a moment to calm himself before beginning.

"I don't joke, Old Man. I speak the truth and nothing but. It's not my fault if the truth often hurts enough to be funny or cutting or both. And I have low tolerance for lies," O'Reilly fixed him with an appraising look. "But there are two things worth believing in in this world, not just one. I believe in blood, yes, but I believe in luck. I believe that you can make luck, break luck, find luck and shape luck - and I believe that I've never run out. I believe that the statistical probability of being born me in a world full of plodding magicless pig-drones, soulless corporate cogs, and the sweating, bleating throng toiling away the only years they have just to suffer for a few more... is astounding. Call it my blessing for carrying the blood of Kings if you want. Or call it what got me that blood in the first place. I really don't care. Luck is on my side - my protector and my parasite. I create destinies wherever I go. And maybe, if you take me on? Then maybe things will start to go your way too."

"You're really full of yourself," Guerra arched an eyebrow, "You know that?"

O'Reilly shrugged, "Clearly someone has to be. Who else would I be full of?"

"Alright then, Sparky. You think you're so big? You're in. But you're gonna have to prove it."

***

Author's note: Do I hope that was coherent? Indeed. Character and setting nformation, artwork, and other rather pointless stuff relating to Blood Libel can be found at .ca/inexplicable/blood_libel/ . To be honest, I feel rather odd posting this at a fanfic site, but I suppose it can't hurt.... can it? Gods. I just know that writing this whole series is going to take forever plus infinity times one, and get about one twentieth of the attention that any fanfic I write might garner. Oh well. Good ole masochism... life just wouldn't be the same without it, non?