Chapter 3 #2
Beyond the atrium, boasting its giant pendulum meant to keep everyone on perfect time, the main floor sprawled before me, a maze of desks where the scorched bent over their work.
Their fingers moved in careful, deliberate patterns, tracing rune marks onto stone with painful slowness.
One rune per day if they pushed themselves.
Two, if they wanted to last the week. The drops of magic in their blood were barely enough to make the symbols glow.
Above them, real magic hummed through the air, contained, regulated, documented. Every spell cast in this building required three forms, two witnesses, and a senior clerk’s approval. Unless you were a Rune Weaver. We were the exception.
We were the necessary exception.
“Late again, Syneca.” Matthias didn’t look up from his ledger as I passed his station. The Magistrate’s absence meant he ruled this floor, and he wore that authority like an ill-fitting coat. “Third time this month.”
Yes, asshole. I’m aware. I couldn’t say it, but I wanted to.
“The arch was backed up.” I kept walking toward my corner in the Department of Binding Documentation. “Half the district is trying to get through at once.”
“Mmm.” His pale fingers drummed against his desk. “I’ve left several urgent items requiring your particular attention. Tax documents. Time sensitive.”
Tax documents. Damn it. They required specialized runes to be embedded into the small seals that would make them harder to trace, harder to question. The runes were security focused more than anything and the worst to make.
My workspace sat tucked between two massive filing cabinets, barely large enough for my desk and chair. But it was mine. For three years I’d carved runes here, bleeding magic into stone and paper while pretending I was nothing more than another witch paying her dues.
The stack waiting for me stood two hands high.
I sat, pulled the first document forward, and began the tedious work of Rune Weaving. My fingers found the water basin beside my desk. Every witch had their element, their anchor. For anyone who ever observed me, it was clear my gift was with water.
“Aquaflux,” I whispered, low enough that only the paper could hear.
The water rose from the basin in thin streams, carrying magic with it.
Where the water touched the parchment’s seal, runes formed, intricate, perfect, permanent.
Each symbol pulled from my core with slight resistance, as was always the case when I used magic, draining me drop by drop.
This was why they needed us. A scorched could make a single rune in a day.
I could make eighty in the same time. But Rune Weavers were also rare.
It was a learned skill, but there was a finesse and depth of power behind the ability that was rare to find.
The first document was a shipping manifest for grain. Boring. Normal. Except for the payment authorization tucked behind it. Fifty thousand gold crowns to “N.K.C. Holdings.” For grain that would feed maybe a thousand people. That was... odd.
The second held lumber receipts. Another forty thousand to “Dec Industries.” The third, silk imports. Sixty thousand to “P.R. Enterprises.”
The magic trembled as I worked, recognizing the pattern even as I forced myself to keep weaving runes. Someone was moving money. Massive amounts. And they were using magic to hide it.
“S.B. Collective” appeared on the fourth document.
Ninety thousand crowns for “specialized services.” People starved in the Crook, still paid their taxes, and yet the government was concealing more money than would feed the whole country for a year.
I took a deep breath, chancing a glance around to see if anyone knew what I was doing.
What I was helping the Magistrate hide. No one stirred from the mundane monotony of their jobs.
No one noticed me. But I wanted to crawl out of my skin. This was wrong.
Before I could really react, Matthias slid his glasses down his nose, staring at me over the rim. I quickly looked away, grabbing the next document. I needed this job to keep myself safe. I couldn’t make waves. This was survival. This was necessary. So I put my head down and got back to work.
The door to the Chancellery slammed open.
Hunters poured in like a plague of leather and steel, tracking mud across floors I’d watched scorched workers scrub for hours.
Dicks. They smelled of beasts and sweat and the wild places beyond the city walls, where monsters dwelled and death was a sport.
Everyone froze over their work. Sprites hung mid-flight. I tried to remember to blink.
The lead hunter stepped forward, and my blood turned to ice.
The Ripper.
His long brown hair was neatly tied back, revealing the sharp angles of his face. The marks along his arms, famed tallies of his kills, glistened beneath the chandeliers’ warm light. The same voice that had breathed threats against my ear in the Bloodwood now filled the Chancellery’s vast hall.
“—confirmed the body myself,” his words carried across the silent room, speaking to another hunter behind him, though everyone heard. “Draven Varrow. Assassinated after the fourteenth bell.”
The quill slipped from the scorched woman’s hand beside me. Someone gasped.
I ducked behind my hair like it was armor, which was foolish; copper waves weren’t exactly camouflage.
My heart beat so hard I was certain he’d hear it across the room.
He hadn’t seen my face the other night. The fog had been too thick, my hood too deep, but bodies remembered trauma.
What if he recognized the way I held my shoulders? The way I breathed?
The Ripper’s icy gray eyes traveled around the room looking for a hint of guilt. For anyone who knew a single thing. As if he could smell it. Or see it in a passive expression. And that was exactly why Calder and Vitoria hadn’t told me. They’d known this moment would happen.
“The Championships will—”
“No!” A shifter three desks over shot to his feet, his blue and silver lapel pin—Silverbolt colors—glinting. “You’re lying. Not Draven.”
He shoved past two scorched and stormed out, his yell of anger echoing in the stairwell. A bet poorly placed, no doubt.
Chaos erupted.
“I had fifty crowns on him for top scorer,” someone moaned.
“The whole tournament’s fucked now.”
“Who’s going to lead the Bolts?”
“My daughter will be devastated. She has his portrait on her wall—”
The Ripper stood like a stone in the center of the storm, unmoved by the grief and anger swirling around him. His presence seemed to expand, filling the space, making it hard to breathe. Every hunter carried violence in their bones, but he wore his like a second skin.
Then, the temperature in the room dropped.
Not literally. But everyone felt it the moment Tiberius Veyne entered.
Where the Ripper demanded attention through promising danger, the Magistrate simply took it. Owned it. The chaos died instantly. Even the sprites cowered. Some hid.
Tiberius Veyne was not a large man, but he didn’t need to be.
His silver hair was pulled back in the traditional hunter’s knot, his leather coat pristine despite the morning’s work.
The twin blades at his hips had names, Mercy and Justice, even though no one living had seen him draw either.
He drew his sleeves up, just enough to show the mark that branded him powerful, beyond his role as Magistrate.
The twin blades crossed beneath a crescent moon shimmering on his forearm marked him as the leader of every hunter in the world.
The Ripper straightened. Then, impossibly, seemed to shrink two inches. “Father,” he said, and his voice carried none of the earlier menace, only the sharp acknowledgment of a son falling in line.
Tiberius’s gray eyes swept the room once.
When they passed over me, I forgot how to breathe.
This was the man who’d written every new law that kept witches leashed.
Who’d personally executed three fire witches in Blackbriar’s Square.
Who served as both Magistrate and hunter Commander because no one dared suggest he shouldn’t.
“The Championship Bracket begins tonight as scheduled,” Tiberius announced, his voice soft but somehow filling every corner of the room.
“The opening ceremony will include a tribute to Draven Varrow, whose dedication to the sport brought honor to his home country, Noreya. As representatives of my office, you are all expected to attend. There will be no exceptions.” He turned to the woman with a round belly and swollen ankles, who already looked dead on her feet. “That includes our expectant mothers.”
No one moved. No one spoke.
“Rest easy knowing my hunters are doing what they do best.” His smile was exactly what one would imagine from a crooked politician, icy and fake. “Hunting killers. We will find those responsible. And when we do, their deaths will be... instructional.”
Matthias cleared his throat. “Magistrate, sir, the documentation for—”
“Can wait.” Tiberius’s gaze found his senior clerk. “I have things to organize. Everyone is dismissed at the noon bell. Expect twice the work tomorrow.”
He turned without waiting for acknowledgment, his son falling into step behind him like a trained hound. As they passed my desk, the Ripper’s eyes swept over me without recognition. But I was still a witch, and he was a hunter. He’d never forget me now.
Only when their footsteps faded did the room remember how to breathe.
I stared down at the documents on my desk. S.B. Collective, P.R. Enterprises, N.K.C. Holdings. Someone was moving massive amounts of money through the Chancellery, using my runes to hide their trail.
And unfortunately, that couldn’t be my problem. Today, my family had killed a hero, and the two most dangerous men in the country, if not the world, were hunting them.
I dipped my fingers back in the water basin, letting the familiar cold steady my shaking hands. Around me, workers began gathering their things, whispering about the memorial, about the Championships, about everything except what mattered.
Somewhere in this city, Calder and Vitoria were waiting for me.
Tonight we’d sit in those stands like good little citizens, cheering for games and pretending we had no idea why the Silverbolts were suddenly short one star player. Just three innocent people enjoying an evening out, definitely not the ones who’d turned someone’s hero into a very expensive corpse.