At the Mercy of Midnight

ONE

Amelia Winslow had spent a lifetime studying the mysteries of the arcane, but as she stood in the crumbling Ruins of Veilthorne, she felt only the sharp bite of frustration. Silas Finley, the insufferable prick, was currently blocking her view of their first real discovery.

A breathtaking find, ruined only by the fact she had to share it with him .

“Funny,” Silas said without looking her way, sketching in his open journal, “I was going to say the same. And since I was here first…”

“You were not here first,” Amelia argued haughtily.

They had arrived within minutes of each other, Amelia and her team from the Northern border, and Silas from the Southern, but he was apparently ready to die on the hill that he had ‘ beaten her to it ’.

“Time is relative, Winslow,” Silas said with infuriating calm, glancing up from his journal to squint at the glyphs, “and in my perception, I arrived first, thus making me lead scholar on this site.”

Amelia scoffed at the reference to the last time they had butted heads in such a juvenile manner, insisting that the first to arrive at a conference to discuss magical decay would be the lead speaker.

Silas had actually arrived first in that instance, though she had refused to let him take the lead on such an important topic, to which she was presenting her paper on midnight interference on their magical devices.

“Your perception is as flawed as your paper on Waystones,” Amelia quipped.

That did it, his pencil slowing against his paper.

Silas turned his head, finally glancing at her. “Ah, that biting Winslow charm. I was beginning to miss it, truly.”

“Truth hurts,” she said with a sweet smile that held no sweetness whatsoever.

He closed his journal with a snap and turned to face her. “I made one minor translation error… six years ago.”

Amelia mirrored his stance. “One error that would’ve flung travellers into the ocean instead of their intended location.”

Silas exhaled through a grin and turned back to the glyphs. “Go on, then. I’ll let you have that one if it helps you sleep.”

“Shall I list the other examples I have in descending order of sheer embarrassment, or would you prefer them chronologically?”

He raised a hand at her in mock-defensiveness. “Sheath your weapons, Winslow. Or shall I recount your infamous midnight theory? You know, the one about stabilising magic with unstable time anomalies?”

“Still not retracted,” Amelia said lightly, the familiar pulsing in her veins at the back and forth they would share whenever they found themselves thrown together.

“The midnight surges hold a magic we know little of. It could be the key to correcting some of the irregularities we’re experiencing if harnessed. ”

Silas scoffed as he reopened his notebook. “Entirely missing the fact that the midnight anomaly disrupts all our instruments.”

“As does proximity to the Monoliths, yet that’s where the magic originates. Not the quickest bunny in the forest, are you, Finley?”

Silas tilted his head, leaning closer and speaking in a lower tone. “Careful, Winslow. I bite.”

For an odd moment, her heart leapt in her chest and words died in her throat, which was a rarity for her.

“Might I suggest,” came a deep voice from behind, dry as aged parchment.

They both turned to see Halpert, Amelia’s mentor, standing behind them with a compass in hand.

“…That you both find a way to work together,” he continued, tapping at the compass with a modicum of a frown.

“I don’t fancy the paperwork that would come with explaining why one of our lead scholars did not make it out. ”

He finally raised his head, green eyes twinkling at them. “We don’t have long in the Rift, so let’s not waste time on academic pissing contests, hm?”

The older man levelled them both with his knowing gaze.

Amelia had worked with Halpert for many years in the Lux Spire, a prestigious university studying arcane physics.

When Amelia was asked to put together a small team for the excavation, he had been first on her list. He had only agreed to come along as a guide and mentor, joking that he was ‘far past his academic prime’ .

Amelia turned her head and met Silas’ eyes.

Shrugging, she shifted back to the wall and opened her own notebook to start describing the glyph discovery.

Silas also silently returned to his work and thus they spent the next hour in an uneasy truce.

Because Halpert was right. Time was of the essence when one didn’t want to linger in a place like the Rift.

It was a place where magic was at its most unstable, and glitches occurred all the time, often in the midnight hours.

Some warnings of venturing into the slice of land in the centre of Aethrial were all undoubtedly myths, born of wild stories from travellers hoping to sell books.

Over the years, the number of stories mounted of people going missing, always at midnight. Emphasis on stories .

Amelia knew that the Rift was simply a dangerous and barren wasteland, and you risked your life by venturing beyond the borders.

Compasses went haywire, disrupted by the energy created by the Monoliths.

Waystone chips ceased working, eliminating the possibility of a hasty exit.

Arcane lamps shorted out, which could leave one shrouded in sudden darkness at night.

That led to its own significant problems: Rift Crawlers.

Disturbing creatures with a hard exoskeleton that only attacked in absolute darkness.

Very few had ever seen one outright in order to describe it, but Amelia had seen rough sketches of them, and hoped never to see one with her own eyes.

Hence why Amelia firmly believed that the stories of midnight disappearances, with claims their fellow venturers were ‘teleported to another realm’ , were absolute hokum.

People died in the Rift, simple as that.

The sun beat down on the back of her neck, though the uncomfortable heat was a small comfort to her, knowing that the danger came out in the dark.

Amelia glanced past the crumbling wall she and Silas were inspecting to take in the rest of the ruins.

They had yet to explore past the outer grounds of the newly accessible location.

All around the central ruins lay colossal pillars, some half standing, others laying on their sides, cracked and crumbling into the sand.

There was a large depression in the earth, a crater the size of a building sitting like a scar to the ruins’ landscape to their left.

Broken statues lay all around, half buried in sand and weathered beyond recognition.

The Ruins of Veilthorne, only recently traversable, were a yet-to-be explored city of a lost civilisation that Amelia predicted predated the magic they knew in their modern day.

Because of its central location between the North and South Monoliths, the head scholars of the Lux Spire had hypothesised that there could be some answers laying among the crumbled city of how to stabilise the lands’ magic, which was slowly deteriorating around them.

No one in their known history had been able to approach the ruins, an invisible barrier keeping everyone out.

The main reason they were there, was to source the power of the ward that had kept the city inaccessible for so long.

It had been a long-standing cause of intrigue, and she knew she was blessed to have been chosen for such a historical excavation.

Amelia could see in the distance the remnants of a half-collapsed temple and felt the buzzing of discovery running through her veins.

There was something else, whispering within her. Amelia had convinced herself that she was here for research, for discovery, for the betterment of their land. But the truth was both simpler and harder.

She didn’t want to be alone in her own head anymore.

Joining an excavation team meant a break from the solitary studying in her laboratory back at the Lux Spire, no longer confined within the lonely walls of her single apartment where she had no friends to speak of.

A shadow fell across the crumbling wall, and Amelia turned to find Somara there, one of the junior scholars. “We’re going to move ahead with the tracker, see if there’s anything unseemly we need to be wary of.”

Amelia agreed, watching Somara look down at their tracker device, fingers fiddling with the dials.

Silas turned his head. “More unseemly than Dr. Winslow?” he said with a mocking tilt of his head and sending Amelia a pointedly raised brow. “Highly doubtful.”

He gave Somara a crooked smile, to which she appeared baffled by the slight against Amelia.

Amelia just looked away with a long-suffering sigh and moved to sit on a slab of rock, flipping open her notebook.

The ancient language was not something she had seen before but knew that Silas had a runic translation text that might help them.

She would be chagrined to ask for his help, but the discovery was more important than their rivalry. Only by a thin margin.

She had known Silas for many years, and he had proven to be little more than a thorn in her side. Their competing ideologies had always turned heads in their published papers or their warring speeches at seminars.

He had spent his life studying ancient artefacts and viewed the arcane arts in a way that contrasted deeply with Amelia.

Silas felt that magic should be instinctual, intuitive and that science had little to do with explaining its existence.

He believed there were forces at play that the humans of Aethrial could hardly begin to comprehend. And he called himself a scientist!