I woke to the warmth of sunlight pressing against my eyelids, far too gentle for the chaos in my skull. The ache behind my eyes had dulled to something bearable, but my limbs felt leaden, as if I’d been dragged over cobblestones all night.

  Above me, the uneven beams of Jax’s loft ceiling stretched across a canvas of zy dust motes. Someone had left undry strung up, stiff and forgotten, swaying slightly in the morning light.

  Jax was gone.Of course he was.

  The chair where he’d kept watch sat empty, his coat missing from its usual perch.

  But on the desk beside it,A crust of bread.A folded scrap of paper.

  I reached for the note with stiff fingers and unfolded it.

  Went out early. Don’t steal anything on your way out.–J.

  I snorted under my breath. Typical.

  Still, I held the note a beat longer than I meant to. There was something off about how casually he’d written it, like nothing had happened.

  No. I shoved the memory down before it could fully surface.

  Clothes first. Then food. Then the long walk home. Back to work. Back to pretending everything was fine.

  I washed up in the cramped corner basin then pulled my coat tight and stepped out into the street. The air was brisk, heavy with the scent of salt, fish guts, and the rot of too many lives crammed into too little space.

  Araes was waking up.

  Vendors shouted about stale bread and fish half-frozen from the night. I kept my head down, weaving through alleys I knew like the back of my hand. A fsh of coin, the glint of loose jewelry, it all caught my eye, muscle memory twitching to life.

  I clenched my fists. Kept my hands in my pockets.

  The Weeping Mermaid was already roaring when I arrived. Someone shouted from the back room. Rogan stood behind the bar, two mugs in one hand, a knife in the other, barking at some poor soul to stop bleeding on his floor.

  I took a breath and stepped inside.

  “Oi!” Rogan’s voice cracked across the tavern. “You’re te.”

  “Didn’t know I was still alive until ten minutes ago,” I muttered.

  He grunted, unimpressed. “Good. That means you’re fit for the morning shift.”

  I slipped behind the counter, tying on my apron, letting my body go through the motions while my mind drifted elsewhere.

  Before I could spiral too far, Rogan leaned over the bar, squinting at me. “You look better. Feeling better?”

  I blinked. Wiped my hands on my apron and forced a shrug. “Fine.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “Jax said you caught something nasty. Seemed real bothered by it.”

  I nodded quickly, hoping that would be enough. Trust Jax to spin a story. A sickness, sure. Better than the truth.

  “Gd to see you’re back,” Rogan muttered, already turning away to bellow at someone trying to steal a bottle of gin with one arm.

  I scrubbed at the bar with a little more force than necessary. The rhythm of it helped. Kept my hands moving while the rest of me unraveled.

  It had been two weeks.Two.

  I’d counted the days on my fingers, scratched them into the soot along the wall when no one was watching.

  Esther said she’d send word. A letter. A sign. Something.

  But there was nothing. Not a single knock at the door. Not a single piece of parchment. No courier from the farm she worked on. No message tucked into a stranger’s sleeve.

  At first, I made excuses. The farm was far, maybe too far. Maybe she didn’t have the means. But now…

  Now it felt wrong.

  Esther never forgot me. Never vanished without a trace. She wasn’t careless. She would never leave me.

  A weight settled low in my gut, cold and immovable. I handed off a mug without looking at the customer, their thanks lost in the noise of dockhands arguing at table five.

  Something’s wrong.The thought twisted deep.

  I tried to lose myself in the rhythm of work. Wiping spills, dodging flirtation, exchanging coin. But the silence in my pocket, where a letter should have been, dragged at me heavier than any drunken sailor.

  Where is she?

  By the time I left, I was walking faster than I meant to. The streets of Araes blurred at the edges. Every familiar alley became a corridor of dread. Every face I passed, every crooked doorway, felt like it could swallow her whole.

  I reached the building and hesitated.

  The creak of the front door, the scent of stale bread and old wood.

  None of it felt right.

  My pulse quickened as I climbed the stairs.

  The apartment was quiet.Too quiet.

  I stepped inside and I froze.

  The room was a wreck.

  Cushions tossed from the couch. The table overturned. Papers scattered like fallen leaves. Only the food corner was untouched, still stocked.

  But nothing was missing. Not a single thing of value.

  Dread cwed its way up my spine.

  I moved slowly, fingers brushing the overturned table as I tried to understand. No sign of forced entry. No valuables gone.

  Just chaos.

  Just absence.

  Esther.

  Had someone taken her?

  I searched every corner of the apartment. Checked the wardrobe. The bed. The narrow kitchen. I even opened the tiny pantry door twice, as if she might be curled up inside with a candle and a notebook.

  But there was nothing.

  No sign. No trail.

  Just me and the silence.

  I sank to my knees by the bed, heart pounding in my ears. The pillow was askew. The bnket half-off. Someone had been sitting here, maybe waiting.

  I didn’t want to do it. Didn’t want to call on the thing inside me. The cursed power I’d spent years pretending didn’t exist.

  But I needed to know.

  I needed to see.

  I pressed a trembling hand to the floorboards. Closed my eyes. Tried to steady my breath.

  “Please,” I whispered. “Let me find her.”

  And a spark answered.

  A flicker. A pulse beneath my skin. The air thickened around me, pressing close, heavy and sharp.

  Then—A vision. Disjointed. Brutal.

  The apartment, dim and cold. The door opening. Movement. Figures blurred by time and fear. A weight in the air. A presence I didn’t recognize.

  I tried to focus. Tried to hold it in pce.

  But it shattered.

  The vision splintered like gss, slipping through my fingers, leaving behind only the echo of something terrible.

  I colpsed backward, gasping. My vision swam. My limbs shook. But I didn’t cry. Not yet.

  My throat burned with unshed screams. My chest ached with the weight of all I couldn’t see.

  Where is she?

  I pressed a hand to the wall, steadying myself, forcing the tears away.

  I couldn’t lose her.

  Not Esther.

  Not her.

  I didn’t move for a while. My legs refused to carry me, the weight of what I didn’t know anchoring me harder than anything I did. The silence of the apartment pressed in, more deafening than a tavern full of shouting drunks. The kind of silence that meant something was missing. Gone.

  I forced myself to stand.

  If the vision wouldn’t show me everything, then I’d search with my own hands. I had to find something.

  A clue, a note—anything.

  She wouldn’t just leave without a trace. She couldn’t.

  I started with her side of the room, where her books were usually stacked in lopsided towers beside the bed. Most were scattered now, spines bent or pages torn. I knelt beside them, flipping through one after another, hoping for a letter tucked between chapters or a pressed flower marking something. Some hidden message only I would think to find.

  But there was nothing. Just her scrawled notes in the margins, her careful underlines, the faded stains from morning tea. I sifted through them all, one by one, my fingers growing more frantic as they turned page after empty page.

  Then I opened the drawer in the small table beside her bed. It had been rifled through already, judging by the mess, but I dug anyway, pulling out scraps of parchment, dried ink bottles, the half-broken quill she always refused to throw away.

  And then beneath a folded sheet of cloth, nearly stuck to the wood, I saw it.

  A parchment, torn along the edge, browned from age or damp. I pulled it free carefully, my breath caught somewhere between my chest and throat.

  There was a mark on it. A symbol.

  It wasn’t clear, not fully. Parts of it had been smudged or water-stained, but what remained was strange ornate lines forming an incomplete circle, curling inward like thorns, with something like a sunburst behind it.

  I tilted it toward the light.

  It pulsed with a strange familiarity, but I couldn’t pce it. I didn’t recognize the mark. Not from the tavern, not from the city. Not from anything I knew.

  But Esther had kept it.

  She’d hidden it.

  I turned it over. The back was bnk, though I could feel something rough along the underside, like a texture left by ink long dried. A sigil, maybe? A crest?

  My stomach twisted. It meant something. And if Esther had kept it, if she’d hidden it under cloth and drawer-bottoms, then it mattered.

  I sat back on my heels, the parchment held delicately in my hands like it might burn or vanish if I breathed too hard.

  She wouldn’t have kept something like this without reason. And she never involved herself in things beyond our quiet world.

  Not unless it was to protect me.

  A cold realization trickled in.

  She’d been hiding something.

  Something she never told me. And now she was gone, and all I had was a tattered scrap of paper and a storm of questions that refused to quiet.

  I stood slowly, folding the parchment with shaking fingers and slipping it into my coat pocket. It felt heavier than it should’ve. Like it carried the weight of everything I didn’t want to know.

  “I’ll find out what this is,” I whispered to the empty room, the echo of my own voice strange in the silence.

  I stepped toward the door, pausing just before I left. My eyes skimmed the apartment one st time, searching for anything I might’ve missed. But the wreckage was still, the mess unchanged.

  The streets blurred around me, soundless and colorless, as I walked with the parchment pressed tight in my coat. I kept a hand over the pocket, as if someone might reach in and steal it from me. As if it were a thread tying me to Esther, and if I lost it she’d be gone forever.

  The guild wasn't far, but every step made me hesitate.

  I wasn’t supposed to go back there. Not without reason. Not without someone like Jax dragging me in with a grin and a stupid excuse. I didn’t belong. I wasn’t a member, wasn’t registered, and especially not today looking like this. My clothes were rumpled, my eyes still swollen from whatever curse-dream or vision had cwed at me, and my boots had tracked in the city’s cold mud.

  But I didn’t turn back.

  When I reached the old stone building tucked behind the docks, I lingered at the door. Voices inside, muffled ughter, the ctter of someone dropping something metal. It sounded normal. Lively.

  It felt wrong.

  I pushed the door open.

  Heads turned. A few familiar faces blinked at me in confusion, surprise, curiosity. Bell raised a brow from the board by the entrance, mouth open like she was about to shout something flippant, until she really looked at me. Her smile faded, and she quietly turned back to whatever she was doing.

  I didn’t stop to expin.

  I knew where he’d be.

  The narrow stair behind the front desk led up to a half-loft room that most didn’t bother with, except Irah.

  I'd seen it once. A small study-like space with shelves and crates of books scavenged from gods-knew-where. He kept it like a retreat. Quiet, clean. Unlike the mess of the floor below.

  I climbed without asking.

  Talia, the receptionist, called out behind me, half-warning, half-annoyed. “Dawn, you can’t—that’s not—Jax isn’t even—!”

  “I’m not here for Jax,” I called back, my voice hoarse.

  I reached the top and paused at the threshold. The door wasn’t closed. Just barely ajar.

  I knocked softly. Like my own presence might break something if I wasn’t careful.

  A voice answered, calm and low, “If it’s Jax, tell him I’m not covering for him again.”

  I stepped inside.

  The room was dim, the scent of old parchment and dust in the air. Light poured through a snted window, casting a glow across a makeshift desk piled with books. Irah sat hunched over one, flipping through pages with methodical precision, a quill tucked behind one ear.

  He looked up.

  Paused.

  “Dawn?” he said slowly. His eyes narrowed slightly, analytical. “You look—” He stopped himself. “Is something wrong?”

  I didn’t know what to say. My throat was tight. My legs wanted to give out, but I clenched my fists until my nails bit into my palms.

  “I need help.”

  He stood slowly, closing the book in his hands. “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “I just need to know something. You read a lot, right? You… know things.”

  His brow twitched. “Depends.”

  I stepped forward and reached into my coat, carefully unfolding the parchment. My fingers felt clumsy. I smoothed it out and pced it on the table between us.

  “I just want to know what this is. The symbol.”

  Irah looked down.

  His expression didn’t change, not at first. But his eyes narrowed slightly as he studied the faded lines, his hand moving to trace the curve of the symbol without touching it.

  I watched him, barely breathing.

  Please know it. Please don’t ask.

  A long silence passed.

  “Where did you get it?”

  I stiffened.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” he said. Calm. Not pressing, not demanding. “This isn’t something you find lying around.”

  “I’m not asking for stories,” I snapped, then winced. I looked down. “Sorry. I just… I can’t expin. I just need to know what it is. That’s all.”

  Irah was quiet again. I could tell he didn’t like that, being left in the dark. But he didn’t push. He looked back at the symbol, tapping a finger thoughtfully against the table.

  “It’s familiar,” he murmured. “Part of a seal. Stylized. Old, maybe older than this city.”

  My stomach sank.

  “It’s a religious mark,” he continued, finally meeting my eyes. “Not local. Something from the Holy Land. The Church uses a version of it. I’ve seen it in some of the older registries, texts that reference pre-Divine era alignments.”

  My mouth had gone dry.

  The Church.

  My head shook slightly. “No. No, she hated the Church.”

  Irah gave me a long look, but again, he didn’t ask.

  He leaned forward and turned the parchment with practiced care, examining it from the side, lifting it toward the light.

  “It’s incomplete,” he said. “Looks like it was part of something rger. A document, maybe. Or a decree.” A pause. “Whoever had this… it wasn’t by accident.”

  I said nothing.

  My hand closed slowly around the edge of the parchment. My only clue.

  Irah didn’t ask again.

  He just said, “If you want me to dig deeper, I can.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Thank you,” I murmured, turning to leave before the questions could start again. Before the walls closed in and I fell apart.

  “If you’re looking into this… be careful. The Church doesn’t like their past being dredged up.”

  I didn’t answer.

  Because what was I supposed to say? That I had nothing else? That this scrap of forgotten history might be the only clue I had to my sister’s disappearance?

  I reached the door, my steps steady, hand clenched tight around the knob.

  “Dawn,” Irah called gently behind me, his voice low, almost hesitant. “If you need anything—”

  But I didn’t stop. I didn’t look back.

  Whatever he was offering, whatever words he thought might comfort. I left them behind with the rest of the room.

  This was my burden to carry.

  My sister.

  And I would find her, no matter the cost. Even if I had to tear the Church down, stone by stone with my bare hands.