Smack!
Smack-smack!
Lilith curled her tail up and rapped it three times against the stone table, sweeping her gaze across the six of them. Her voice came from everywhere at once.
"All right—time's up.
"Your introductions ought to be finished by now, so the rest is simple. You'll each be assigned a role at random, sorted by the path you mean to advance along. I won't rule out the possibility of putting some of you together. Take note: once you enter the Nightmare, your tasks will flow out of the Source you petitioned, and arrive before your eyes.
"It's been ages since I've had this many interesting participants. I'm in a good mood today, so I'll give you a free word of advice—if you can manage it, try not to make enemies of one another. Inside the Nightmare, every waking soul is a natural ally."
She paused, savoring the silence.
"So then—the ritual begins."
Lilith snatched up the candelabrum, blew across it once, and all three holy candles guttered out together.
The whole chamber plunged into dark. Every scrap of light and sound was swallowed at once.
Thea felt, dimly, that she had touched down—the solidity of marble flagstones underfoot, reassuring in the void—but the world around her stayed pitch black. She could no longer hear Vera, nor Miss Scarlett.
For some reason it felt exactly like booting up a video game, that breath of stillness right before the opening cinematic plays.
Then the voice reached her ear.
Story So Far
On the 25th of May, year 518 of the Holy Calendar, plague swept through Nuremport, the industrial harbor on the eastern coast of the Kingdom of Avengarde. The North Harbor and Great Harbor districts were sealed off entirely. At that time, a cargo ship from the Empire crossed the ocean and made berth here. Just three days later, an explosion aboard that ship would touch off a chain of fires that devoured tens of thousands of lives—the disaster the world would mourn as the Nuremport Fire.
Advancement Task (Required & Universal)
Play Sophia Salvia, alchemist of the Hand of Transmutation. Survive in Nuremport for three days, until the fire arrives. (300 points)
Nightmare Tasks (Optional & Specialized)
No Blade Shall Pass This Place: Kill the enemy hunting you. (400 points, from the Ouroboros)
I Shall Make Thee Steadfast: Protect your niece, Elvira Salvia, and keep her alive for three days. (300 points, from Oak in the Earth)
Thou Shalt Not Shed Blood: Complete the ritual alongside the other participants. 100 points for each survivor. (Cap 500 points, from Oak in the Earth)
Blood Shall Run Like Rivers: Kill the other ritual participants. 100 points per kill. (Cap 500 points, from the Ouroboros)
Fire! Ignite the Nuremport Fire. (1000 points, from Alchemy)
The narration finished. The voice ebbed, thinning to nothing.
A point of light bloomed before Thea's eyes—like opening her phone in the dead of night, that needle-bright glare straight into the pupils.
And just before the swelling light devoured her completely, the voice carried one last faint, blurred murmur:
My child, Elvira Salvia. May you always have your health. May happiness keep you company.
When Thea woke again, she was on the second floor of a run-down inn.
It was a thoroughly shabby little room: one bed, one dressing table, a hearth set into the not-very-thick wall so that it warmed three rooms at once.
The door lock was broken, replaced by a crude little iron bar for a latch. The wall facing the door held a single window, and through it she could see the streetscape of North Harbor—Birchwood Street, which she'd often passed on her way to school. The district bordered the port, which usually made it bustling.
But now the street was deserted and cold. Armed clerics in fully enclosed helmets were scattering holy salt to purge the foul miasma, and in the corners she could pick out vagrants curled in the shadows, receiving first aid and relief from the priests.
In the dead center of the street stood a gallows. A woman in a white robe embroidered with a sun had already been hanged from it. Her face looked oddly familiar.
Thea was still puzzling over why a woman she'd plainly never met should stir such an inexplicable sense of recognition when a cold, slick, oily hiss slithered through her mind.
"You are Sophia Salvia, alchemist of the Hand of Transmutation. You were ordered to escort, alongside your sister Daphne Salvia, an infant girl that the Hand demanded be delivered to Nuremport. But upon reaching the port, Daphne chose instead to shelter this innocent life, inviting you to defect with her—and she named the child: Elvira Salvia."
"The city now teems with plague. Five hundred armored knights and armed clerics from the Grand Cathedral in the Avengarde capital are barely holding order. Your handoff contact, 'White Dove,' has already been seized by the Church and hanged. As outsiders, your presence here is dangerously conspicuous."
"You came down off the ship and had scarcely set foot in the city when some hidden presence marked you. Daphne tried to learn its location and identity and found nothing. You suspect it may be a watcher the Hand of Transmutation set on you."
"You had no choice but to follow Daphne to this inn, to plan your next move together. She is in the room next door—out the door, to your left."
The voice in her head finished its briefing.
Going by the earlier narration, it was now the year 518 of the Holy Calendar. If she remembered right, this was the year of the great plague and the Nuremport Fire—the twin catastrophes that had shaken all of Avengarde.
The plague was a disease with no cure: shortness of breath, hallucinations of sound and sight, clouded consciousness, sustained high fever, the slow rot of the organs. The Church called it the Foul Blood, and it spread through water, bodily fluids, and animal corpses.
It had hung over Nuremport for half a year—so badly that even the royal house had been forced to heed Parliament's advice and quit the capital. Nuremport sat far too close to Silverkeep, after all.
The latter disaster came when a cargo ship exploded during the plague and the blaze spread, igniting whole rows of factories. North Harbor and Great Harbor counted close to thirty thousand dead and wounded—but with the contagion still raging, there was nowhere to house the injured. The losses that followed were beyond reckoning.
Back then Thea had been in a town well clear of the port, and the whole thing was sixteen years gone. She had almost no memory of the fire or the plague.
But Vera...
She'd run into her at the Diving Ritual. Run into her at the Advancement Ritual. And now, somehow, here she was in the Nightmare too...
And the girl was tangled up with the Hand of Transmutation, no less.
Thea looked out the window again. That figure on the gallows—that would be White Dove. So Daphne... was in the room next door?
There was only one room out the door to the left. She tidied her clothes a little, then went and knocked.
"It's me, sister."
"Huh? I— ah, no— come in!"
For some reason the Daphne inside sounded flustered, fumbling—like she'd just woken from a nap and stumbled straight into some calamity besides.
On the bed lay a square of velvet, swaddling a wailing infant girl.
Daphne was trying to change baby Vera's diaper, and had absolutely no idea how to do it.
"Let me, sister."
Thea couldn't stand to watch any longer. She took over and got the diaper on the little one—a bit clumsily herself, but worlds better than the wholly inexperienced Daphne.
She'd grown up in the orphanage. She'd changed her share of babies.
Daphne let out a relieved breath. She and Sophia shared a likeness—both with red-brown hair, quite distinct from Vera's chestnut-brown.
With the fresh diaper on, the baby's crying faded. Thea couldn't resist a pinch at her cheek.
How strange, she thought. I've now pinched the same girl's cheek twice, across sixteen years of time.
But something was off. "She's running a fever?"
Daphne started. "A fever?"
"Her face is hot. Can't rule out that she's caught the plague."
"Should we— should we go buy some medicine? Or just take her straight to a hospital?"
Thea gave Daphne a curious sidelong glance. By the briefing's account, choosing to defect from the Hand, spotting the hidden watcher, coming to the inn to plan the next move—all of it had been Daphne's doing, start to finish.
The swift shifts of stance and perspective, the composure to choose a strategy under pressure... by all those measures, Daphne was unmistakably a lioness of iron resolve—a mother who decided and never doubted.
But this "Daphne" in front of her, faced with a problem, didn't propose a strategy or talk it through. Her first move was to ask her little sister what to think.
And she seemed to have no clear read on what was happening outside, either.
This... was more like a startled stray cat.
Thea filed the suspicion away and explained first. "It's plague out there. The Church has the streets locked down. If we want her treated, our only option is to find one of their priests or sisters.
"But the moment we do that, our identities are exposed for certain."
She could mix a fever-breaking draught herself, given the right herbs. But the Church had the port sealed tight.
That left only Transcendent craft.
Before the Advancement Ritual, the Suppression Bureau had granted her the rituals for Blood of the Grail and Silver Bullet. The Blood of the Grail had healing properties.
But it needed ritual materials too. At minimum: a silver knife, a crystal cup, a square of white linen.
Still, little Vera surely wouldn't die—in the real world she was alive and kicking, well-developed in the figure department, too...
Thea said, "Sister, you stay here and look after Vera. I'll go check the kitchen, see if I can scrape together some materials. If I can, I'll work out a healing ritual."
When she said Vera, she fixed her eyes deliberately on Daphne.
Daphne's gaze drifted off her without thinking.
A micro-tell of self-protection—even though "Daphne," or rather whoever was playing Daphne, hadn't the faintest awareness of it.
Thea caught the small motion. Add to it the way "Daphne" deviated wholesale from the role's written background, and she was instantly certain: behind Daphne, in all likelihood, was another conscious participant.
Rule out a man playing a woman, and that left only two people.
Of those two, Officer Scarlett was not someone who could keep a secret. She was foolish enough to wear every thought on her face and blurt it straight out, no hesitation whatsoever.
So who, then, was this player—who looked so composed, so capable, yet was in fact so rattled she was nothing but seams and cracks?
Hard to guess, Thea mused. She's actually playing her own... "mother"?
She left the room. Out in the corridor, the corner of her mouth tilted up, and she went to ransack the kitchen.
No linen, but there was a silver knife, and a slightly cloudy glass cup.
In the end she sought out the cook, fished a ten-pence note from her pocket, and asked the woman to cut her a clean square from a white linen apron.
Cobbled together, it would just barely do.
Back in the room, "Daphne" was still carefully spooning water into baby Vera.
Thea crossed the floor without a sound, came up behind "Daphne," and looked down at this detestable creature who'd taken her name as a codename for the Advancement Ritual.
She laid one hand on the girl's shoulder.
"'Thea,' don't turn around. I'm your little sister."
The instant she was recognized, Vera's face froze stiff, her pupils flooding with panic. She leaned just slightly toward the wall, forcing a mask of calm.
Thea pricked the mystery open directly. "No need to worry, Miss 'Thea.'"
She bit down hard on the two syllables of Thea, terrified the girl wouldn't catch it.
"I'm Annelise. The one sitting next to you at the Advancement Ritual. The roles we're playing now make us blood sisters, and whether it's for the sake of the task, or simply to save our own skins, or out of pure righteousness and morality—I see no reason for us to be enemies. You've been told the required task, haven't you? I have to survive until three days from now."
Thea took two small steps back, opening the distance to let the girl relax her guard.
Vera's heart was still hammering, but she nodded. "I have that task too."
Just as Thea had expected. The required task had to be the universal one shared by every ritual participant—in gaming terms, the main quest. If you couldn't even clear the main story, you didn't qualify to advance at all.
Thea said, "From the task prompt you'll know it too—the pair of us are being hunted now, and our being smugglers makes every step harder. From any angle you care to name, you and I have a need to cooperate."
"And there's more—my tasks include protecting Elvira Salvia."
Vera lifted her head, a little startled. "You have that one too?"
"It must be tied to the Source we petitioned before the Advancement Ritual. You're advancing along the Alchemy path, aren't you?"
"...That's right."
"Because we're both advancing along Alchemy, and the Nightmare happens to hold two alchemist roles from the Hand of Transmutation, we got sorted together. And I petitioned Oak in the Earth—Oak in the Earth stands for life, propagation, the way of the mother. So I'm bound to shelter little Vera, here in her swaddling."
Thea passed the glass cup over. "And if I haven't guessed wrong, Miss 'Thea,' you petitioned a related Source yourself."
Read clean through, every bit of it...
This girl...
Vera remembered Lilith, the host, mentioning that this Advancement Ritual had two Transcendents present who walked two paths at once.
One was the uncle peddling medicines. And the other was this "Annelise" standing right in front of her?
Most Transcendents specialized in a single path. But because a natural relationship of transformation existed among the nine paths, anyone whose path ideals were compatible could set foot on two—or even more. So it wasn't unheard of for Transcendents who'd already reached Sequence Eight, Seven, even Four, Five, or Six to open a Sequence Nine Advancement Ritual just to begin another path.
Of course, there were also those who hadn't thought it through at all and walked a second path purely to advertise their shop.
Vera admitted it, none too willingly. "I petitioned the Holy Grail."
No surprise there.
The Grail held many authorities—faith, knowledge, guardianship.
"We can talk over the task business later. But for now the main thing is securing little Vera's safety." Thea wiped down the silver knife with the clean linen, glanced at the cup she'd just handed over, and said:
"Go. Fetch me a cup of clean water. Boiled, mind—no raw water."
Blood of the Grail was a fairly basic ritual, its prototype the Church's Crimson Cup Seal. Like the Unceasing Holy Seal that Thea had gotten hold of, that original was a very high ritual indeed—elaborate and difficult to set up, its materials rare and seldom seen, its price near unbearable.
According to the Suppression Bureau's archives, in the Bureau's earliest days the Church's First Bishop, Peter, had reworked and simplified the Crimson Cup Seal and handed it down to them—meant to let frontline Bureau members with no medical training render first aid and healing to themselves, their comrades, and the innocent when facing a Transcendent.
This small, simple ritual had its price too.
Its positive effect: it made the water in a crystal cup equivalent to a Slow Mend ritual, restoring five to thirty percent of one's vitality over three hours, with the incidental benefits of dulling pain, purging foul miasma, and cleaning wounds.
Its negative effect: the ritual's officiant had to use the silver knife to cut a wound on the hand at least 33mm long—a wound that would not close for three hours and would bleed without cease.
Thea took the silver knife in hand and drew the edge across her left palm. Beads of blood seeped through the linen, dripped into the glass cup, and bloomed out through the water.
—Blood of the Grail.
Vera had seen this ritual before. If she wasn't mistaken, it was something the Church had taught the Suppression Bureau—which would mean this "Annelise" had ties to the authorities, too?
Thea cradled little Vera and soothed her, set the cup on the nightstand with her other hand, then dipped a finger in the mingled blood-water and fed it to the child.
The effect was excellent. Baby Vera latched on like she was suckling a bottle, drawing the blood-water off Thea's fingertip and down into her belly, and when the whole cup had been taken in drop by drop the child curled into Thea's arms, eyelids sinking shut as she fell into a deep sleep. Her temperature had dropped a fair bit, too.
She was a good baby, with a faint sweet milk-smell about her. Thea sincerely hoped that her future mother would remember to teach her to swim.
To Vera, the whole tableau felt more than a little surreal.
Watching her "little sister" hold her own infant self, in third person—well, no, now she's her mother... that was stranger still.
"Bandage this for me."
Thea held out her hand. Vera took the left one and wound the clean linen twice around it.
"There. Don't wrap it too thick."
Thea flexed it a little. Sure enough, the wound bled without stopping; the gauze's only job was to keep the blood from going everywhere.
So then—on to the real business.
Thea cut to the chase. "There's no question about it, Miss 'Thea'—no, never mind. I'll just use the roles we're playing."
She couldn't quite keep a straight face herself.
"Daphne, or rather—sister. Right now we have two shared goals. At the very least we have to deal with the enemies who came to kill us and stay alive, and then we have to protect little Vera and keep her—and ourselves—alive until three days from now."
Vera was getting a feel for Thea's rhythm by now. After a moment's hesitation, she chose to lay out every one of her tasks.
In a situation like this, when the other side had already opted for full candor, incomplete trust was total distrust.
"I have five tasks left. Get little Vera through three days, reach the Cathedral of Our Lady, complete the ritual alongside the other participants or kill them, purify the plague."
Thea nodded. "Mine overlap with your first and third. Of the remaining two, one is to deal with the enemies hunting us. From that angle, I'd say we have both the basis and the necessity to cooperate—you need to reach the Cathedral of Our Lady, and I need a helper."
"You have a way to get to the Cathedral?"
The Cathedral of Our Lady stood in the Great Harbor district. It was now the Holy Church's frontline outpost against the plague—hundreds of dispatched templar-knights, along with priests and sisters levied from every quarter, all converged there.
If they could reach the Cathedral, the tasks of keeping little Vera alive and surviving the three days would be all but complete.
The trouble was—they were illegal smugglers right now.
So it would take a little sleight of hand. A little bit of cooperation within the field.
Thea said, "I don't have that kind of way. I can get you clear of the patrolling knights on the streets, through the districts, and to the outside of the Cathedral. But there's no chance I can carry little Vera through the doors and beg the clergy for aid."
She paused, then added: "Someone else, though, will help us get inside."
"Are you serious?" Vera looked doubtful.
It wasn't that she was paranoid—it was that the Nightmare's timeline was sixteen years ago. What kind of grandee would they have to be, for their connections to reach back sixteen years—and sixteen years inside a Nightmare, no less?
Thea explained. "It's Night Iris."
Night Iris—that was Scarlett.