2412, Rab 30, Daleth

Sera yanked the brim of his hat lower, hoping to hide any semblance he had to the Crown Prince. Not that anyone knew him around these parts. Most of the neighbors attributed him to the nondescript building which had been closed for as long as they could remember. The Embers couldn't really do much about the facade, so they kept the long-running story of it being haunted by a spirit of fire who only came at nights when Crozal was the brightest.

But now, as Sera trudged past the usual bustle and the same people in the same street, a lingering thought entered his mind. Maybe the spirit existed all along, and it simply decided to attack its basement occupants.

He gritted his teeth so hard his jaw started throbbing. Memories of that day were a blur in his head, and he couldn't bring himself to try and remember more. How did he end up at the palace that night? In his room? Did anyone see him stumble through the streets like a fairy high on oshella? What's more, did his father talk to him at any point of the night and some days after?

He didn't know. Nothing. There's nothing in there.

But he remembered waking up one day with the sun shining through his open windows, right into his face. For a second, he thought he was there in the studio, getting fried alive. He might have screamed, and that scream shook him awake, but there's no point in knowing, right?

All he knew was that the press burning down was something he needed to investigate. Along with how much the Potentate and the Court knew about Sera's extraneous activities, or how in the world did they pinpoint that building out of many others. Add to that the disappearance of the prisoners in Gaimouth, and this new entity called Cardovia sticking their hands into the matters of the state. Not to mention the fact that the guards in the volcano prison knew enough to warn him of whatever disaster was going to visit him should he stay resolute.

Those words still blazed a trail in his faulty memory, but some part of him argued that it was too soon for it to have happened. Did the guards have ties with Cardovia or the Potentate? Had they worked out everything Sera was just from a silly round of poserne? Did discarding the High Queen of the House of Crozal that day mean something? He was vaguely aware of alternative divination methods using the same deck popular somewhere in the outskirts of Fimrio. Or was it Gulstead? No idea.

His feet skidded to a halt, stopping his form in the middle of the street. An aksaba whined, and a shadow fell over him. The cart's driver swore in colorful strings in the Cyerela dialect as he pulled at the reins to avoid hitting Sera.

"Sorry!" Sera called out, ducking under his hat. Let them think he's a random country bumpkin who was a million fortweres from home. "Will be careful next time. Sorry!"

He scampered off to the side of the otherwise empty street and kept to the patios of the establishments. All of it was sand. The tunic's collar—one he put on after digging through the servants' supplies—bit against his neck, and it killed him to have to hook a finger at it every few minutes. Sweat beaded down his face and dripped from his chin. His back wasn't spared either. He clicked his tongue, flicking his gaze at the relentless sun shining overhead. Damned disguise and damned weather. This was why he wasn't fond of anything other than a vest.

His trousers were equally scratchy, clamping around his legs like mini-restraints. Same with the leather boots he modeled after Darmer. Seriously, how did that damned mechanic manage? In this weather, nonetheless.

But he needed this. He couldn't simply raltz his way across the market as if he owned the place, not when constant paranoia that someone was tailing him everywhere he went nipped at the back of his head. Nowhere was safe, not even in the basement of the press. Nowhere. Not even in the palace he had to call home for the sake of his sanity. Even in the presence of friends and allies—he wasn't safe.

If he wanted to stay alive and not be thrown into Gaimouth, being careful was the only way he could survive to do what he needed to do. And no breaks, no matter what Darmer had to say about it. Not like the mechanic was here to talk, either.

A stone dropped into his gut at the thought. In his murky state of shock that day, he would have searched the rubble for signs of the Embers. Had they gotten out? Were they safe? Would they have destroyed any evidence of a press ever being there?

A huge chance they didn't know Sera was in Calca that day, or if he would return at all. Their beacon in the night was gone, and without it, there's no reason to keep coming back to this place. But...if they really believed in what the Ember Chronicles were trying to do, they would find their way back, even if it's not in this particular alley in the Calcan market.

Sera trusted them enough to think on their feet and survive. At all costs.

He reached the remnants of the building, its hollow rubble reminding him of its proud stance before it burned. The foundations jutted out of the melted clay walls, and glass littered the wooden floorboards in droplets of crystalized shards. A steady carpet of cinder dusted the ground, and when he got close enough, the smell of burnt wood and metal hit his senses.

This morning, before he left the palace, he made it a point to pass by the meeting hall "by accident". There, he caught wind of the topic at hand, and by some miracle, it was about the Ember Chronicles' demise. The Potentate knew it was the hideout, but he hadn't betrayed Sera's connection to it to the Court, so it's either he didn't know or he knew but didn't want to prosecute his son and heir to the dynasty.

The second option was harder to believe, so Sera would have to go with the first one.

Of course, some noble decided it was better to attribute the arson to the random bursts of unquenchable fire in the city. The gods' punishment—they would start calling it from now on. Anyone who tried to defy the Potentate's holy reign would be subject to judgment from the same gods they didn't believe in. But these people would use anything—believe anything—just to secure their position and their power.

A gaggle of witches. Through and through.

That's why Sera was out here, in this ridiculous get up fairies outside the insufferable desert wore. If his friends perished in the fire, the least he could do was soldier on and avenge their deaths by bringing them justice. The least. He still had to do a ton of things after, but for now, solving the arson was a priority.

Why was he fixated on this case being one of arson—meaning, done with deliberate purpose and motivation? Whenever the fires showed up, the entire vicinity would be disturbed. When he arrived that night to find the embers still hot inside the building, the rest of the alley was fine. Nobody ran around in circles and in a panic. To them, this was one of the isolated cases of fire accidents. Maybe they thought a flower-child was learning to control their synnavaim for the first time, or a lantern tipped over in the night and went wild. Whatever it was, it's not their concern.

Sera walked across brittle boards, praying to whatever god he could think of for them to never give in under his weight. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary. The objects, despite now being half melted and broken, were untouched. The basement...

He couldn't bring himself to knock down the charred backdoor, fearing it'd betray piles of charcoal which once had been his friends. Instead, he turned towards the door and tried to imagine what the arsonists would have seen when they entered through the facade. The bell would have signaled those in the basement that someone had entered. Darmer knew Sera's footsteps, and that he always came alone. If there were two people inside, he would have known.

They would have known.

He inhaled, ignoring the gust of wind stirring the ash closer to his lungs. A strange smell—something he hadn't smelled before—zipped through his nose. What was that...? It's acrid, like those volcanic fumes in Gaimouth, but milder...and somewhat like burning rust. Following his senses, he ended up in one of the corners, just inches from the backdoor. It's where this strange smell was the strongest. He bent down, noting a different shade in the carpet of ashes.

His finger swiped at it, and they came off streaked with some kind of powder that dried off after being made into some kind of paste. Or maybe it's mixed with water or some other flammable material. Just one spark, and it'd ignite.

Sera fixed his hat and trudged out of the ruins. With shaking fingers, he straightened his back and relaxed his shoulders. He took a deep breath, forcing his senses to forget the lingering smell of that vile substance responsible for burning the press down. He could do this. It's just fieldwork. Like any other rounds he had done in the past.

This was work. And he had to do good, even if just for today.

"Excuse me," he said to the first sprite who crossed past with him. A bare-chested man wrapped only in a kilt looked down on him. "Do you know what happened here?"

And soon, he had interviewed a variety of sprites who were up to talk and had witnessed the fire that broke out. The main vein of the story was that in the middle of the night, somewhen in the last hour of the third quarter going to the first hour of the fourth, two people dropped by the building. One of them went out for a while, before coming back after a "few minutes". It could have been half an hour at most (at the insistence of a middle-aged merchant), and after the two of them left, a huge explosion rocked the building.

"The tremor scared the living cinders in me," a woman reported, clutching her purse to herself as if the fire would come and get it. "I have children at the house. Children! And they have the gall to start demolishing the poor building."

Sera knitted his eyebrows at that. "Demolishing?" he asked. "What gave you the impression these people are demolishing the building?"

The woman scoffed. "Have you seen the state of that thing? It's a miracle it stayed upright for as long as it did," she said. "I thought they were the original owners, and they're looking to build something on top of it. You know—make use of the property. All I ask was for them to not have done it during the night!"

And then, Sera started asking around for descriptions, and he got the same thing. Both couldn't have been middle-aged, judging from the way some people described their mannerisms and gait. They wore shoulder-to-floor dark cloaks, blending well with the night as if they came with thicker shadows. Their hoods were on, covering their faces, but some reports told him they saw flickers of ember-red hair. A woman? Or a man? Either way, it's something most reports agree on. While the appearance of the other person remained a mystery, he had something to start with now.

Whoever they were, they weren't fire sprites. Otherwise, they wouldn't have resorted to using underhanded tricks and crappy materials to start a spark. To avoid getting tracked and leaving traces of their trails, they wouldn't use magic either. And if they were fire sprites, they would know there were more effective ways of burning down a building hewn out of clay and stone than a few explosions.

That's how Sera found himself striding through the patrol halls of the border sentries. The walls were something he protested against when the Potentate first got the idea. Sera claimed it'd just increase the ire the foreign traders had when it came to visiting Lanbridhr, but the Potentate eventually won over with a lot of salient points. Points that Sera never expected to be useful to him at the moment.

The walls were a latest addition when the Potentate realized some merchants cut past the regular trade routes to avoid the entry tax. Now, not only do they have to pay the entrance and exit fee, they have to present any proof of identification to signify which company they were registered under as well as their names. It's a stupid system—people should be able to come and go as they pleased—but for now, Sera would yield.

He had opted out of his street disguise, going for his good old vest, and no sentry stopped him on his way past the metal gates and the halls between the brick walls. Inside, thousands of torches burned inside their sconces, lighting his way towards the records section. First door to right—it's what the sentry said when Sera asked.

The door whined as he threw it open. Wasting no time, he pored through crates and boxes of records of identification. Hand-written columns across bundles of crinkly parchment detailed entry points, what type of identification they came in, their identifying traits, how many companions they had, and what company they're affiliated with.

He didn't have an eternity to scan through all of these, so he retrieved those from the past week and ran a finger down list after list, page after page. They could be anyone, but the witnesses said they traveled in a pair. He skipped any line that didn't tally the number. There's still a lot.

Okay. Features. He switched columns and skimmed the squiggly penmanship. Red. Red. Ember-red. Wait. Wine red. Close enough. Oh. They came with seven more people. Okay. Red. Red. Hmm—carnelian hair, dark blue eyes. Good. They came with...

One. Pair. They came with only one companion. Sera pursed his lips and scanned the next pages. There might be more entries with the same conditions. Red hair and entered with one companion. He reached the most current intake, which was somewhen around yesterday. Nothing else. The next batch would be transcribed later today or tomorrow. For now...carnelian hair and dark blue eyes were his best bet.

He traced the entire line, memorizing everything. Lavir Skonoa. Employed under the Aprikoon Trading Company.

Lavir Skonoa. Aprikoon.

Lavir. Aprikoon.

Sera tucked the records away and slipped out of the room and the walls. Aprikoon. That's a crap name to have for a company. For one, it's vague. Was it an animal, a joke, or something else? And that name–Lavir Skonoa—it's more of an anagram than an actual name. Did those witches have some residual humor Sera didn't get?

It clicked. Of course. Far from middle-aged, based on their gait. With an attitude like this, they might as well be children. Witch children, but children, nonetheless.

Which meant...

As soon as he reached home, he headed straight to his room, shut the door, and grabbed a parchment and a quill. Ink splotched on his writing table, but he couldn't care less. He scrawled his message on the clear sheet, spelling his small request.

With a shrill whistle, a dark heartridge dropped on his windowsill. It pecked at the sand particles while he secured the rolled message around its foot with a twine. "Ariden Sarethol," he ordered the bird. "Take it to him, please."

As if the bird understood and acknowledged the destination, it clucked and tilted its head at Sera. Then, it spread its wings and darted into the empty sky—one Sera couldn't reach even if he tried.