A Funeral for Every Spell

Chapter 3

The metallic clanging of the Magisterium’s emergency alarms reverberated through the subterranean vaults, shaking loose flecks of ancient mortar from the arched ceiling. Down in the darkness of the chamber, the hollowed Cleansers groaned—aimless, broken husks stirring blindly on the dust-covered floor.

Vaelric’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The man in the obsidian coffin remained motionless, his starlit eyes fixed on the ceiling, but the blood-red ink on the inner lid had begun to smolder, vanishing back into the dark stone. Right at the coffin’s shattered rim, where the first seal had exploded, lay a jagged fragment of the obsidian casing. It was no larger than a man’s palm, its edges sharp and glowing with a faint, pulsing violet light.

Footsteps echoed in the far corridor—heavy, iron-shod boots belonging to the secondary guard unit scrambling down from the upper levels.

Driven by an instinct he couldn't quite rationalize, Vaelric reached down and scooped up the stone fragment. The surface felt strangely warm, like a sun-baked cobblestone, humming with a faint, electrical vibration that made his fingertips tingle. He shoved it into the inner pocket of his heavy wool vest alongside Kaelen Thorne’s stolen letter, turned on his heel, and ran.

He knew the Saint Orwyn Catacombs far better than any armed guard. Ducking into a narrow drainage alcove, Vaelric pressed his back against the damp stone wall as a squad of heavily armored guards rushed past his hiding spot, their torches casting frantic, dancing shadows against the corridor walls. As soon as their footsteps faded toward the vault, Vaelric slipped out, navigating the pitch-black secondary shafts used by grave-diggers until he reached the surface.

Rain was pouring over the city, washing the soot-stained streets of the Saint Orwyn district in a cold, slippery sheen. Vaelric kept his head down, pulling his cowl tight over his face as he sprinted through the winding alleys.

Ten minutes later, he threw open the door to his attic-level quarters above a cramped bindery shop. He slammed the door shut, slid the heavy iron deadbolt into place, and collapsed against the rough wood, his breath coming in ragged, white plumes.

For a long time, the only sound in the room was the rhythmic tapping of rain against his small glass windowpane and the fast, shallow sound of his own breathing.

"Crazy," he muttered to himself, running a trembling, ink-stained hand through his damp hair. "I've officially lost my mind."

He pushed himself off the door and moved to his worktable. With hands that wouldn't stop shaking, Vaelric lit a small tallow lamp. The weak yellow flame cast a feeble circle of light across his desk, illuminating stacks of blank parchment, dried inkwells, and binding needles.

He pulled the obsidian stone fragment from his pocket and set it down on the wood. In the warm lamplight, the jagged piece of the coffin looked almost like broken glass, but the ancient script carved into its face was undeniably clear to him. The symbols didn't look like static marks anymore; to Vaelric’s eyes, they reads as a sequence of sounds—a phonetic cadence that hummed in the back of his mind like a song he had forgotten he knew.

Beside the fragment lay an old brass desk key. It was an heirloom, the key to his late grandfather’s writing desk, which had snapped cleanly in half years ago when Vaelric had accidentally turned it too hard in a rusted lock. He had kept the two pieces out of sentiment, buried under a pile of unused blotting paper.

Vaelric drew the two broken brass pieces toward the center of the desk, lining up the fractured edges. He stared at the obsidian fragment, his throat dry.

"There's no way," he whispered. "Magic requires a price. It always takes something."

Yet, the memory of the hollowed mages flashed in his mind. The coffin hadn't used standard Magisterium High Arcana. It didn't tap into the caster's soul-tether or demand a sacrifice of personal memory. It was something else entirely—a syntax that operated outside the rules he had been taught his entire life.

Overcome by a terrifying curiosity, Vaelric leaned over the desk. He placed his right index finger on the broken brass key and focused on the phonetic sequence etched into the stone fragment.

He opened his mouth and spoke the ancient syllables aloud.

The words felt heavy on his tongue, guttural and strange, unlike any language spoken in the modern provinces. As the last sound left his lips, a thin thread of violet light bled from the obsidian fragment, slid across the tabletop like liquid silk, and wrapped around the broken key.

The brass hummed. The jagged, broken line down the middle of the key glowed white-hot for a fraction of a second, then faded back to dull brass.

Vaelric held his breath. Slowly, he picked up the key.

The seam was gone. The brass was smooth, unbroken, and perfectly solid, as if it had been forged an hour ago. He tugged at it, tried to bend it with his fingers, but it held firm.

He blinked, checking his own mind. He recalled his grandfather's face. He recalled his childhood, his name, his third-grade scribal exams, his favorite meals. Everything was intact. His memory was completely untouched.

A breathless, incredulous laugh escaped his lips. "It worked... No tax. No sacrifice. It's just... free."

The euphoria lasted for less than a minute.

From the hallway outside his apartment, a sharp, crashing sound shattered the midnight quiet, followed by a high-pitched, hysterical shriek.

"No! No, let go of me!"

Vaelric froze, the brass key dropping from his fingers and clattering against the desk.

"Mrs. Gable?" a man's voice called out from the floor below—it was Old Thomas, the apothecary who lived on the second floor. "Mrs. Gable, calm down! What are you doing out in the hall in your nightgown?"

"Get away from me!" the elderly woman screamed, her voice shrill with a terror that made Vaelric's stomach drop. "Who are you? Where am I? Where's my room?!"

"You live right here, door number four!" Thomas pleaded, his footsteps shuffling on the wooden stairs. "You've lived here for thirty years! What's wrong with you?"

"I don't know you! I don't know where my house is! Somebody help me! I can't remember my house!"

Vaelric backed away from his desk, his face turning as pale as the parchment scattered across his room. His eyes darted frantically from the mended key to the ancient stone fragment resting innocently under the lamplight.

No, he thought, a cold, sickening horror blooming in his chest. No, no, no.

The magic hadn't bypassed the law of equivalent exchange. It hadn't canceled the cost of the spell. It had simply redirected it. Instead of taxing the caster, the ancient rune had pulled the required energy from the nearest living soul—harvesting thirty years of a helpless old woman's spatial memory just to fix a broken brass key.

"I did that," Vaelric breathed, his stomach twisting into a painful knot. Guilt hit him like a physical blow, choking the air right out of his lungs. He fell back against his chair, gripping the edge of the wood as the old woman's frantic sobbing echoed through the floorboards.

Before he could process the horror of what he had done, the low, booming sound of war horns blasted through the rain-slicked streets outside.

Vaelric leaped to his feet and rushed to the window, pulling the curtain back an inch.

Down on the main street, dozens of torches flickered through the downpour. A full garrison of city guards, flanked by Magisterium enforcers in black coats, were fanning out through the neighborhood. They were kicking down doors, shouting orders, and dragging civilians into the street.

"Door-to-door sweep," Vaelric muttered, his panic spiking anew. "They're searching every house in Saint Orwyn."

They knew a scribe had breached the vault. It wouldn't take them long to figure out which scribe had been on duty near the record room, nor would it take them long to match his handwriting to the unfiled death logs. If they found the obsidian fragment, the stolen letter, or his notes in his room, he wouldn't just be executed—he would be hollowed out like the Cleansers in the catacombs.

"Focus, Vaelric. Think," he ordered himself, forcing his analytical scribal mind to take over the panic.

He couldn't burn the research—the obsidian fragment wouldn't burn anyway, and Thorne's letter was his only proof of the Magisterium's systemic corruption. He needed a hiding place that no guard or auditor would ever think to check.

His eyes fell on the far corner of his room, where three massive, leather-bound ledgers lay stacked. They were duplicate volumes of the official "Book of Departed"—heavy, official record books with thick, wood-reinforced leather covers, waiting to be bound and archived.

Vaelric grabbed a fine scalpel from his binding toolkit. Working with frantic, precise speed, he sliced open the inner seam of the thickest leather cover. He carefully hollowed out a compartment inside the heavy wooden board backing, carving just enough space to slip the flat obsidian fragment and Thorne's folded letter inside.

He smeared a quick layer of fast-drying binding paste into the incision, pressed the leather smooth, and wiped away the excess glue with a rag. He dusted the cover with bone-ash to age the seam, making it look as weathered and untouched as the rest of the ledger.

He had barely placed the heavy book back onto the stack when heavy, iron-bound boots began pounding up the wooden stairs of his building.

"Magisterium search!" a harsh voice yelled from the floor below. "Open up, every door! Standing order of the Inner Circle!"

Vaelric wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers, blew out the tallow candle, and stepped away from the desk, trying to force his trembling breathing into a steady rhythm.

In the sudden dark of his room, the rain continued to beat against the glass.

Then, a faint, tiny glint caught his eye.

Vaelric looked down at his worktable. The newly mended brass key wasn't dark. It was glowing with a tiny, pinprick pulse of dark, violet light.

Slowly, without anyone touching it, the brass key began to slide across the wooden surface. It turned smoothly on its stem, its notched teeth swiveling like a compass needle until it stopped, pointing with absolute precision toward the west—directly toward the high towers of the Royal Palace.