Chapter 1: A Ghost Walks In

Chapter 1: A Ghost Walks In

The rain in Aethelgard had a way of washing the color from the world, leaving only shades of grey and the greasy rainbow sheen of oil on black puddles. From my third-story window, the city was a mess of dripping gargoyles and sputtering neon signs, their lurid glow bleeding across the wet streets. Inside, the only light came from a cheap desk lamp and the faint, unsettling thrum of the half-dozen arcane artifacts cluttering my shelves. A containment rune on a dusty bell jar pulsed with a soft, sickly green.

My office, grandly named 'Spectral Analysis,' smelled of stale coffee, old paper, and the faint tang of ozone that always lingered after a strong psychic reading. The name was fancier than the reality. The reality was a final notice from my landlord slipped under the door, its red ink practically screaming 'overdue.' The reality was me, Agnes 'Aggie' McPherson, nursing a lukewarm coffee and wondering if I could pay this month's rent by pawning a mildly cursed music box.

My gaze fell to my right hand, covered in its customary worn leather glove. A necessary precaution. My gift—or curse, depending on the day and the state of my bank account—was Psychometry. I could read the history of an object just by touching it, sifting through the emotional echoes and memories left behind by anyone who’d ever held it. It was great for finding lost keys, less great when a casual touch on a doorknob could flood my brain with a decade's worth of a stranger's mundane misery. Powerful readings left me with migraines that felt like ice picks being hammered into my skull. The glove kept the noise out.

A sudden, bone-deep chill swept through the room, raising goosebumps on my arms. It wasn't the draft from the old window frame; this cold had weight. It smothered the air, tasting of crypts and forgotten things. The lamp on my desk flickered violently, and the green light in the bell jar sputtered and died. The dust motes dancing in the lamplight froze mid-air.

I didn't reach for the iron-barreled pistol in my desk drawer. Iron was useless against this kind of intruder. Instead, I slowly placed my coffee mug down, my eyes scanning the sudden, deep shadows that had gathered in the corner opposite my desk.

"Office is closed," I said, my voice sounding rougher than I intended. "Come back tomorrow. Or don't. I'm not picky."

The shadows swirled, coalescing like smoke in a vacuum. A form began to take shape within them—tall, aristocratic, and distressingly transparent. I could see the peeling paint on the wall right through his chest. He was dressed in the kind of opulent, high-collared coat that hadn't been in fashion for fifty years, its edges flickering and dissolving like a faulty projection. His face, handsome and sharp-featured, was contorted with a mixture of arrogance and raw, undiluted panic.

"Are you the woman they call the Spectral Analyst?" his voice echoed, thin and reedy, layered with a faint static. "Agnes McPherson?"

"Depends who's asking," I grunted, leaning back in my chair. It groaned in protest. "And what they're paying."

"My name is—was—Lord Valerius," the ghost announced, the title hanging in the air with an almost physical weight. He gestured vaguely at himself with a translucent hand. "As you can see, I am presently… indisposed. I was murdered."

I raised an eyebrow. "Murdered? You look pretty whole to me. No spectral stab wounds, no ghostly bullet holes. You just look faded."

"The specifics are unimportant!" he snapped, his form flickering more intensely. "My life was stolen from me in my own study. The city Wardens are useless. They claim without a body, there is no crime. An administrative oversight of the highest order! I require your services to find my killer and see them brought to justice."

A lord. A murder. The Concordat Wardens already turning it down. This screamed 'headache' from every angle. It also screamed 'a fee big enough to keep my landlord happy for the next six months.' My desire to eat regularly warred with my instinct for self-preservation. As usual, my stomach was winning.

"My rates are non-negotiable," I said, leaning forward and steepling my fingers. "Two hundred crowns up front. A thousand on completion. And I need something to work with. A point of contact. An object tied to your… final moments."

Valerius looked momentarily confused, his ethereal brow furrowing. "An object? I have nothing. I am… this." He gestured again at his incorporeal form. Then, a flicker of understanding. He raised his right hand, where the phantom image of a heavy, ornate signet ring shimmered. "There was a ring. My family signet. It was… important."

"That'll have to do," I sighed, standing up. "The two hundred crowns, my lord?"

He scoffed, a sound like wind through a keyhole. "I am a ghost! How do you expect me to—"

"Most of my clients in your condition have a contingency," I cut him off, my patience wearing thin. "A hidden safe, a trusted lawyer, a sack of gold buried under a floorboard. You look like the floorboard type. Figure it out."

For a moment, he looked like he might dissipate out of sheer indignation. Then, with a pained expression, he focused on a loose-leaf paper on my desk—the landlord's notice. It trembled, then slowly, painstakingly, lifted into the air and folded itself into a crude approximation of a bird. It fluttered across the room and tapped against a specific brick in the wall beside the window.

"Behind there," Valerius huffed, the effort making his form thin alarmingly. "In my townhouse. A small lockbox. Your advance is inside. Now, get on with it."

Well, I'll be damned.

I walked over, my boots echoing on the bare floorboards. The air around him was freezing. "Alright, Valerius. You've bought my time. Let's see if it was worth it."

I stopped a foot away from him and began to work the worn leather from my right hand, finger by finger. The sudden exposure of my bare skin to the room's charged atmosphere felt like plunging my hand into ice water. The little background noises of the building—the hum of the pipes, the faint arguments from the apartment downstairs—all flooded in, sharpened and amplified.

"Hold still," I commanded.

Taking a deep breath to brace myself, I reached out. My fingers hesitated for a second before making contact with the shimmering, phantom ring on his ghostly hand.

The world shattered.

It wasn't a memory. It was an explosion. A tidal wave of raw, arcane power slammed into me, a force so potent and alien it felt like touching the third rail of a subway line. There was no image of a killer, no struggle, no dying breath. There was only a blinding, violet-black light and a deafening roar that was both a sound and a feeling. It screamed of ancient pacts and cosmic hunger, of something being torn apart not with a knife, but by the very laws of reality.

I felt a phantom pain lance through me, the agony of a soul being unraveled thread by thread. It wasn't Valerius's pain; it was the echo of the magic that had done it. Cold. Predatory. Utterly inhuman.

My knees buckled. A single, razor-sharp image burned itself onto the back of my eyelids, a symbol that made no sense: a quill, its nib dripping a single drop of crimson ink that wasn't ink at all, but something thicker, darker, and terrifyingly alive.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. I was on my hands and knees on the floorboards, gasping for air. The ice-pick migraine was already starting its work, a brutal staccato beat behind my right eye. I could taste blood in my mouth.

"What was that?" Valerius demanded, his voice laced with fear. His form was flickering wildly now. "What did you see? Who was it?"

I pushed myself up, my bare hand trembling as I clenched it into a fist. I leaned against my desk, the solid wood a welcome anchor in the spinning room.

"I don't know who it was," I rasped, the words tearing at my throat. "But that wasn't murder, Valerius." I looked up, my eyes meeting his translucent, panicked gaze. "That was a ritual. And whatever you were messing with, it didn't just kill you. It devoured you."