Erika's steward barely raised an eyebrow when five students stepped in the foyer dripping and half-breathless.
"We need beds for four guests. Let them use the empty rooms on the first floor. If my parents finally decide to pay me a visit tell them we cannot accomodate them."
"I trust this is temporary, Fräulein?"
"Of course, Mr. Irschen," Erika said, shedding her coat with practiced dignity. "My friends are just passing through. Five nights to a week, perhaps."
The elderly man's eyes settled on Irvin, whose limp was unmistakable.
"An accident? Nothing serious, I hope."
Irvin stepped forward, weirdly composed despite the bloodstained trouser leg. "A brawl over cards. The kind of lesson I should've learned last year."
Irschen sniffed, clearly unimpressed. "Very well. Try not to bleed too much."
They waited until he retreated to the far side of the hallway before breaking into quiet laughter. Erika led them to the second floor, to a modest sitting room full of pale green wallpaper, polished wood, and an empty fireplace. She locked the door. Outside, the streets of Weyer lay dark and quiet, except for the rain tapping against the narrow stone roads. Dawn had yet to break. As soon as he set foot inside, Adrian already had the grimoire open.
"Where's the part you used?" he asked, running a finger over a page inked in long, barbed strokes.
"There," Irvin said, pointing. "The very first paragraph."
Adrian squinted, then swore. The script meant nothing to him: it resembled no tongue spoken in Eisenerz or any neighboring state. It almost looked like scratches on stone, or veins in old wood.
"This is… not quite Nieteri, is it? It looks like it, in certain passages, but I can't make out the words." Rupert asked, looking over his shoulder.
Irvin nodded, smiling to the other student. "You're right. It's older, which means it's at least fifteen hundred years old, maybe more than that. A dialect no one speaks anymore. I can read fragments, but this is like poetry spoken underwater. I was thinking of letting a senior of mine take a look at it, but we'll have to wait until we're not being stalked anymore." Irvin studied at the languages department and was widely considered a good student, if a bit erratic in his methods.
Adrian tilted the book to catch the lamplight better. "You got a spell out of this mess?"
"I got a meagre result," Irvin corrected. "After hours of trial and error, two misfires, and a fever so bad I thought I was going to die. It's not as elegant as it should be."
"And that's just the first paragraph," Erika said. "Which raises the real question."
Helge looked up. "If divination is the starting point…"
"Then what else is in there?" Rupert finished.
They sat in silence, the implications making their way into their minds.
Adrian stood and began to pace. "You said they were following you. That they cursed your leg from a distance. That's a kind of magic we haven't even seen. Which means they've likely read more of this than you."
"Or they had another copy," Erika murmured.
"No," Irvin said. "After hiding for a while, I went back. The chapel was burned. The stone altar smashed to bits. Someone destroyed the site after I fled."
"Which means," Adrian said slowly, "they're not going to stop."
"Not until they get it back," Helge agreed. "If they had a second copy they'd just kill you from a distance and send someone to track the grimoire down later."
Erika poured herself a small glass of red wine. "No, we can't say that for sure. If they got the first curse off we must assume one of two things: either you don't need the grimoire on your person to cast its spells or the curse is not contained within this specific book. It might be a style, a school, but that's not even the problem here. We must ask ourselves why you're still alive."
"What do you mean?" Rupert was the first to express his confusion.
"Well, it seems to me that they could have kept attacking with curses instead of pursuing him physically. There must be a reason why that wouldn't work."
Helge only had to think about it for a moment before coming to a conclusion. "They must be using the swamp's water as the catalyst. Now that Irvin has left the area, they can't cast those spells anymore. When I was inspecting the river I felt something, but I'm willing to bet they were just scrying in a way similar to mine. " From Helge's expression it was clear there was more on his mind, but the others chose to not press him yet.
"So what do we do? Run until they catch us? Wait and hope they give up?"
Adrian looked up, suddenly animated. "No. We get rid of him. Whoever he his, or whatever they are."
"That's murder," Rupert sentenced flatly.
"That's survival," Adrian countered. "And don't pretend we're above it."
"No one's suggesting we go hunting in the streets," Erika said, even though Adrian had practically just suggested they do exactly that. Her voice was calm and steely. "But we'll need a plan. We need to be on the lookout for any clue which could help Irvin heal, as well as try to decipher the grimoire as quickly as possible. I suspect that'll be our way out of this mess."
Irvin nodded. "We'll trap them, eventually. We know this city better than they do. But first, we need time."
Adrian gently closed the grimoire. Irvin was way too calm. He would need to get Rupert's help and look into their friend's emotional state. Something was off, he could feel it.
"We all found our own, didn't we?" he said after a pause.
The others nodded.
Erika's grimoire was bound in white stitched leather, taken from a collection her father, baron von Lainach, had once dismissed as "folk nonsense." Rupert's was a small brown journal, purchased from a street vendor at a fair for nearly nothing and filled with footnotes which could only be read on the first of each month. Helge's had no cover at all — just pages wrapped in oilcloth, found in the keel of a wrecked merchant ship. Adrian's was different. If one had looked at his body long enough, he maybe would have noticed it. Faint lines, almost similar to scars, intertwining on his skin. Only the ones on his hands were visible. Irvin was the last to find one.
"I thought I'd missed my chance," he said. "That all the power in this era had already been distributed."
Rupert shook his head. "You got the most dangerous one. We should have seen it coming."
His friend answered with a beaming smile. "Is that good or bad?"
No one answered. The room grew quiet again. Outside, the streets of Weyer were starting to get busy. The first sailors headed to the docks, soldiers marching, regular workers grunting, still half-asleep. But in this house — quiet, lamplit, fragile — the air was thick with new decisions. Plans took root and, as they did, fear followed. The fifth grimoire sat heavy in Irvin's hands. It was knowledge, magic, a declaration of war on ordinary lives, written in ink red as blood. And somewhere, beyond the river, someone was tirelessly searching for it.
They agreed not to leave Irvin alone. Helge and Erika would stay behind, at least for the first night, tending to the wound and watching the hill's sloping streets from the upstairs windows. The house was far from the university's campus, tucked into a decent neighborhood where the gas lamps were numerous and the ground didn't turn muddy in the rain. The steward, Irschen, had been warned to let no one in — though Erika's claim that Irvin didn't need to look for medical help left him more than skeptical.
"Whatever we do, don't tell him anything," She explained. "He'd report anything suspicious to my father. Our best bet his playing this off as nothing serious."
Rupert and Adrian went in search of a physician. Rupert had pushed for the idea, as he didn't trust his own abilities to the point of not looking for a professional. They ruled out the clergy immediately.
"You want to explain catalyzed curses to a parish priest?" Adrian said under his breath, mostly to himself. "He'll say it's the devil's work and burn us at the stake as heretics. A bishop would understand, but good luck getting close to one."
Rupert, who was even less religious than Adrian, nodded grimly.
The small clinic they found was quiet and devoid of patients. The doctor, an elderly man wearing round spectacles, followed them to Erika's residence at nighttime without asking questions. He cleaned Irvin's wound as best he could and prescribed rest, faith, and patience.
"It's like the muscle turned inside out," he muttered. "Never seen anything quite like it."
"How encouraging," Adrian said flatly.
Around midnight they went out for a second round of watch. Rupert kept glancing behind them. His eyes were growing tired, his mind anxious. The empty streets seemed narrower, the clouds low and grey, darker than they usually were.
"You think he's still watching?" He asked, after a while.
"If he's smart, then yes. It's unlikely Irvin could have skipped town overnight, wounded as he his."
Rupert didn't respond. His mind flicked again to the strange feeling he'd had when they fled through the docks — the sense that someone's hatred had brushed past him like a chill wind. It had clung to them, clung to Irvin especially. He hadn't told the others, but he'd felt two of those presences. One had been close. The other... farther off. Watching, waiting. Rupert had only sensed it for a fraction of a second, but that had been enough to make him realize. The second pursuer wasn't human.