Oliver wasn’t home the afternoon of Kess’s fight. She stood in the waning afternoon light and pounded against her brother’s thick door again, bag in hand. In spite of their family’s money, Oliver’s home was a quaint thing— he spent more time studying than lounging at home, as he put it. Kess was oddly grateful for his propriety; she didn’t want anyone to wonder where Oliver got his money from.
A few passerby in the whitewashed streets of the Uphill hurried by, staring at her and whispering. Kess did little to hide her irritation. After the disaster with her own home, she’d stayed at Draven’s, and the tavern noise through thin walls had kept her up most of the night. She wanted to be done with this business with Oliver and out of the city by nightfall— provided the fight went her way.
Where is he? She thought with frustration. Oliver was a man known for his habits, and while Kess rarely visited him, his schedule was simple enough to memorize. He spent the mornings at the university, but he often came home for a late afternoon nap of all things. Still, he usually answered the door, albeit reluctantly.
Kess was about to give up her search and blame the relatively nice weather of Drystorm season when she noticed something odd in the garden. The soft, loamy ground was turned up in a few spots, as if large boots had raked across the grass in a violent way. Kess frowned and crouched in the garden.
With Floodstorm season still a ways off, the ground was subtly broken, but broken all the same. But Oliver never comes outside, she thought, following the trail with her eyes towards the back of his home. Oliver preferred to stay out of the constant muck of any non-paved Hillcrest surfaces, and if given a choice between the paving stones of a path or the mushy ground, the man would hop stones like a child rather than soil his fine boots.
The trail ended at Oliver’s back door, which was slightly ajar. Kess knocked again and called out, but only the rustle of the Drystorm breeze met her ears. Heart pounding, she unearthed a few tiny throwing daggers from her bag, grateful for Oliver’s tall walls in the garden. Few would recognize her Uphill, but word would spread of someone using a blade, especially in a neighborhood as respectable as Oliver’s.
Kess crept forward, but paused at the doorway. Tiny marks the size and shape of fingernails pocked the surface, and Kess’s stomach dropped slightly.
Inside, the signs of a struggle were easily visible; overturned chairs and piles of books littered the ground in a haphazard manner. A few flecks of blood stained the wooden floors, though in such a small quantity that it was likely just a bloody nose. Kess had seen much worse during her time in Downhill rings, though something inside of her twisted at the idea of her academic brother, bloodied and bruised. Oliver was no fighter— so who had come to take advantage of that fact?
Kess checked the tiny kitchen and bedroom, but most of the damage had taken place in the sitting room and study. She paused there, tucking her daggers away, and grasped for some sort of explanation, her mind reeling with shock.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Did he have enemies? She wondered. Did he make some kind of bad deal with someone? She shook her head. Oliver was no businessman— he was a simple scholar— and though Kess’s understanding of his research was rudimentary at best, it didn’t seem to be controversial. In fact, Oliver’s studies were mundane enough to put Kess to sleep.
She sunk down to the floor with a thud, stunned, and absently moved a few books aside. None gave her the answers she was looking for. All had seemed normal last night when Kess had spoken to him, so why…
Kess paused as she moved another tome aside. This one was thick, unwieldy, and mind-numbingly boring, but she let out a hiss of air when she saw the charred mark on the floorboard beneath— the telltale, jagged, twisting branches of Fulminancy, seared into the wood. She sat back, stunned, then saw a few more marks against the wall, carefully tucked behind a supposedly flipped chair. The upended table hid a few more, and the piles of books, papers, and other miscellaneous items hid more.
Kess’s hands shook as she pushed herself to her feet. No, she thought, shaking her head. I was so careful. She’d stayed away from Oliver for years. Their meetings were sparse at best— she barely knew the man— and Kess had been sure to never reveal any sort of relationship with him.
To make matters more baffling, Kess wasn’t even certain anyone knew who she was anymore. She’d died that night— she was certain of it. And yet…
She’d thought the Fulminant Shadow who followed her around the city was unrelated to the Council, but what if she was wrong? What if they’d already found her, and she’d been living with a knife pressed to her neck all this time?
Kess trailed over to the study, where several piles of paper had been thrown against the wall to hide the Fulminant marks on the wall. The desk was no better. She pushed aside a few tomes, still looking for answers, though she felt she would find none here.
A few envelopes surfaced— one bearing the name and address of a man Kess thought she recognized from Oliver’s animated chatter about his studies. Rowan of Northmont. The name tickled something at the back of her mind, though she’d been gone from Uphill for so long that it was likely just the name of one of the foppish young men that often attended court. The address was somewhere in Redring district, not particularly far from her former home, though on a much nicer street. That much was odd; there were few people born Uphill who would suffer the Downhill at all. Maybe Oliver got involved with a bad crowd, she thought.
She pocketed the envelope on a whim and gave the place one last glance. Suddenly her escape from the city seemed further than ever. She couldn’t leave Hillcrest behind if the Council had taken Oliver. She’d been wrong to assume her brother’s safety.
Somehow, they’d figured out the connection.
Her family was at the Council’s whims once again.
NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s [and publisher’s] exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
