Executive Services walked into the low light of The Ash & Chime, illusory inks shedding from their faces at a wave of Dave’s hand. They paused for a moment, orienting themselves in the cool air that smelled faintly of cardamom, burnt sage, and the ever present mix of pipeleaf smoke.

  The wet of late winter seemed to evaporate from their boots and Dave, long cloak streaming behind him, cast his eyes around the darkwood tables and polished obsidian bar as though searching. His team, similarly attired, followed. They appreciated the mechanical chime installation that took up most of the back wall as they walked past it to the stairs, the slow-moving sculpture of metal leaves and stylised bars moved with the soft, ambient magical currents. It was a beautiful thing, well made and completely unnecessary and in that way, reflected the clientele that Executive Services passed.

  As the team climbed the tightly curling stairs, Johan reached out to reverently run his hand along the well-maintained wood of the rail, so thoroughly lacquered that it caught the glow of the enchanted lanterns like water at night. Velvet runners softened their footfalls so as to avoid any disturbance of the peace that the bespoke building vied in triumph to maintain.

  At the top, a hallway opened into a mezzanine gallery that overlooked the main floor, though the shadows and the veil of mist-glass partitions made the patrons below appear as drifting silhouettes like ink colours spilled across a desk.

  No longer searching, Dave locked eyes upon his target and walked deliberately. He did not slow when he reached the alcove table in the corner — one set slightly back from the rest – and seated himself across from an elf.

  She was unremarkable. Invisible in this expensive place with her impeccably tailored coat in a soft scholar’s grey, one hand resting on a sealed letter, the other nursing a cup of steaming, black tea. Her eyes had been fixed on the table's surface, presumably lost in an internal world, but Dave’s arrival brought to them no alarm like she'd noted every footfall between the door and her seat. She probably had. Her only movement was the slightest change in posture that matched the question she projected into the world.

  “You know, House Ainsworth has the most exciting hunts in the Southern Marches?” observed Dave dryly.

  “But House Ainsworth recommends the fish,” said Mistress Elowen Faraday, completing the agreed upon identification phrase. She gave the briefest of smiles and erected a privacy barrier.

  “What’s the chin-wag, then?” asked Dave, settling in.

  Faraday waited for Executive Services to seat themselves before answering.

  “Let’s start with what you know and I’ll go from there,” said Faraday, matching Dave’s penchant for business without nonsense.

  “I’ve had the summaries that people like you have sent to the Ainsworths over the last few weeks,” said Dave.

  “But whosoever compiled them cannot possibly be present,” interrupted Avril, lifting her chin. “The summaries he quoted to us read like the Adventure and Magic Societies are getting along and that’s a flying troll if I ever heard one.”

  “Explosion caused by dimensional forces, Adventure Society got here first, Magic Society followed, both clueless as to how to proceed, cordoned off the area,” Dave ticked off the major points on his fingers as he went. “How much have we missed?”

  “Every single bit of detail,” said Faraday, sipping her tea. “I don’t know how the Lords Ainsworth missed it. It was all over my reports.”

  Executive Services remained silent with open expressions, willing to listen. Faraday sighed and lowered her tea.

  “The societies are getting along because they’re paralysed with inaction,” groaned Faraday. “When the Adventure Society made the contract to investigate the explosion an open contract it was a mistake. Every adventurer from Frankalbia took the job and brought with them every political affiliation, every house grudge, and every rivalry with them. The Societies are gridlocked: there isn’t a team in the realm that hasn’t been accused of being Builder cultists now.”

  “Ah,” muttered Dave flatly.

  Avril also scowled but the rest of the team looked confused.

  “No one trusts anyone,” explained Avril crisply. “So no one's doing anything.”

  “I can scarcely believe it -” started Johan, agast.

  “Believe it, pretty iron,” said Faraday, smiling warmly at Johan who smiled back. As he always did. “The adventure of the century has started with a double-agent free-for-all and everyone’s invited.”

  “Well, surely,” began Hugh, building up volume through his beard. “One of your position would have – a little – you know, an idea? A hunch? Something to go on?”

  “There’s this,” said Faraday, handing over some no-doubt illicit copies of some reports which Dave took and handed to Hugh without looking. “When the Adsoc ground to a stop, a team of young Magsoc members tried to scan the epicentre for debris. Word is, they had a dimensional resonance signature on one of their divining rods. It wouldn’t have been much if the gold rank instruments here can’t get much. Barely anything, just residue. But, none of them besides the messenger made it back and then the messenger went missing.”

  Executive Services wasn’t familiar with the Adsoc, Magsoc slang but they were either clever enough to figure it out or clever enough not to say anything.

  “Who’d the messenger tell?” asked Avril, looking at the papers over Hugh’s shoulder.

  “And, who was the messenger’s lord?” asked Johan, his jaw set.

  Dave ruefully recalculated. Johan’s words reminded him that he had no inherent rights. That’s not how this world worked. He only had the protection of a lord and while the Ainsworths had a good reputation, it wasn’t the strongest. The investigation could only reach as far as his patron’s influence extended. And that protection came wrapped in the politics it served.

  To House Ainsworth, Dave was a useful tool. But a useful tool that, if misused, could become a dangerous liability. He had to stay the former.

  “Both questions have the same answer,” said Faraday. “Lady Rosamund Pennleigh of Bosham Hall. A minor, but ancient family. Rural holdings, a private chapel, and ancestral ties that stretch back to before the Guild Wars. They know people. Which is just enough quiet clout to be dangerous, if you forget that about them.”

  “Terribly sorry,” began Hugh, waffling his way into the conversation, “but I fear I’m not entirely clear on a rather essential point.” He fumbled his way through the folio Dave had handed him earlier. “See, these readings are all extremely indicative of a reality cascade signature. We know exactly what happened here – if not, of course, how it was done – you see, the thing is; the work’s already been done.”

  Hugh looked at his team and Faraday as though he’d made a point but their expressions persisted. He went on to clarify.

  “Why abduct someone and draw all of this attention for readings from mere hand-held equipment that would be nothing more than different versions of, or same-rank confirmation of what the gold ranked long-range equipment here has already given us?”

  Hugh relaxed as comprehension dawned in the eyes of his team and Faraday. If the dimensional magic specialist said that all the research on what’s happened has already been done, then that part of the magic investigation was over. They weren’t scanning the epicentre or anything about the explosion generally. They were scanning something else.

  “They must have found something,” whispered Faraday, her eyes wide. “And the Magsoc are pretty tight lipped about it.”

  “Or, they don’t know,” grumbled Hugh. “Most Magsoc researchers are… well, they—the mathematics is—” he trailed off, waving hopelessly with a hand. “You know.”

  Everyone nodded with Hugh trailing off. For particularly esoteric and difficult subjects like dimensional magic, chronocausality, or soul-bound field theory, the aristocrats who liked to dress up as researchers were, not-so-strangely, absent from the room.

  Dave focused on an exclamation mark that only he could see hovering gently above Faraday’s head. He accepted the quest.

  "Well," Johan declared, rising slightly in his seat and straightening his collar, "why don’t we find it?"

  Dave gathered the folio from in front of Hugh and handed it all back to Faraday.

  “Got it in here,” said Dave, tapping the side of his head.

  Faraday gave him a nod that was almost a bow, and stood, withdrawing the privacy ward as she did.

  “House Ainsworth appreciates your custom, detective,” she said. “And good luck.”

  Three members of Executive Services walked slowly through the fog near the blast zone. It still tasted faintly of ash and ozone. They arrived at the meeting point: a broken fountain in a shuttered square, the kind that once held market carts was now home to mildew.

  Both Dave and Sam had sight abilities and their eyes flicked towards the same alleyway but even knowing she was being watched, Avril waited with her left hand resting comfortably on her rapier.

  "Detective Booker! You came!" a voice hissed loudly from the alley.

  Blackwood emerged first, nearly bouncing on the balls of his feet, and was quickly joined by Fournier, Lefevre, Payne, and Valleron. All five bore the confidence of teenagers involved in something grownup. They looked like children about to show off the forbidden books hidden under their floorboards.

  “Not in haste, I might say,” said Valleron, punching Dave in the arm.

  "It is a grand day indeed," Fournier breathed and added with pride. "We told them you would not disappoint."

  "We’re among them now," Payne said, grinning. "The Adventure Society. None have eyes upon us."

  "The finest part," added Valleron, with a conspiratorial nod, "is that they think us naught but eager little fools. We pass through their halls as we please."

  "Our mentors say we are the very image of The Builder's hope," Lefevre chimed in. "Hard workers with sharp eyes and clean cause. The old world’s roads are ours to walk as they are His to unmake."

  "Later," interrupted Avril, lifting a hand. Her voice was cool and precise. "Anyone could be listening."

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Seeing Dave's nod at her words, they fell into a reverent hush.

  “Blackwood, Fournier, Lefevre, Payne, and Valleron meet Garnier and you already know Sam,” said Dave, gesturing to each in turn. “Garnier, the aforementioned.” Dave waved his hand at the cultist team.

  Respectful nods and handshakes were exchanged.

  Before the journey began, Dave caught Blackwood’s arm. “One thing,” he murmured. “I don’t want the inner circle knowing our names. Not yet.”

  Blackwood blinked, then nodded solemnly.

  “We already have a few members like that,” he assured Dave. “People of rank or renown. Don't worry, you'll be just another pair of nameless working hands in the grand design if you wish.”

  “Good,” Dave murmured. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  Lefevre offered him a worn linen bag. “You must be hooded. To travel to the meeting. It is... tradition.”

  Dave accepted it with a faint nod for the cultist's approval. Internally, he sighed. Calling a bit of security theatre 'tradition' was exactly the kind of thing this world would name a ritual. Still, he played the part.

  "Of course it is," he replied evenly.

  He slipped the bag over his head and started idly playing around in his UI.

  Sam was already pulling her own hood into place. She said nothing, her ever-present smile delicate and brittle like clear ice in the sun. Her fingers gripped tighter than usual but she seemed otherwise unaffected.

  Avril, after a moment's hesitation, accepted the hood with the poise of one accustomed to, even bored by, everyday ceremony. She lowered it over her head with deliberate grace, saying nothing, but the set of her jaw and the practiced economy of her movements made it clear she was enduring the ritual, not impressed by it.

  The iron rank cultists led them. The journey began on foot — narrow alleyways, half-collapsed fences, and slush-slick cobbles. Then came a waiting carriage, its wheels creaking over broken cobblestone streets covered in ash. Inside, no one spoke. Afterward, another walk — this one longer, winding, up and down shifting grades. Dave mentally left markers on his map at regular intervals so he could find the exact route again if needed. Eventually, they arrived at a large building and their hoods were finally removed.

  Revealed to them was the inside of a building that had once been a communal hall: windows blown out and now boarded up, the scent of scorched wood still thick in the walls. It had been half-collapsed by the cascade explosion but reinforced. A shell of plaster and ritual chalkwork held it together like a skeleton.

  Near the back wall, a ledger table buzzed with quiet activity. Dave’s eyes unfocused for a moment and he saw the text of volunteers taking names, assigning tasks, tallying inventory — flour, timber, spell paper. Avril noted another group nearby pinning hand-written rosters to a noticeboard: patrol rotations, tutoring circles, shared childcare duties. To Sam, it was all too familiar. The revolution wasn’t a dream being passed around pubs and made of only half-drunk words of wish. It was organised and being scheduled as they watched.

  As the newcomers followed their cultist sponsors into the open space of the hall, the slow pools of amber candlelight flickered on paper banners, lovingly made, that proclaimed in hand-lettered paint: Equity, not Entropy. Essences are for All. No Lords, No Leashes.

  Dave’s jaw tightened. He knew those slogans. Different ink, same message. Essence for All was part of Sam's backstory. He looked at her, just briefly. Her eyes had gone wide, looked around frantically and then gone taught at a figure across the chamber. Dave put it together. It had to be someone from her old cult. Not good. Avril didn’t catch the meaning but her instincts picked up her companions tension and she became wary.

  Blackwood gestured for them to follow deeper into the crowded community hall and as they did, they took in the room. The hall had been rearranged into a makeshift forum. Wooden crates and ash-scorched benches formed uneven rings around a repurposed lectern behind which a speaker was giving an impassioned speech, raising hands and voices alike to a crowd that drank in the message of change for the workers.

  "We are the future the nobles fear!" cried the woman at the lectern, her voice, magically amplified, trembling with conviction. "We deserve more than servitude. We deserve the right to wield our own tools — that we own! And, wield them not to clothe nobles in gold finery or hand their umpteenth child the rarest, most expensive of essences. We deserve to use our tool to shape what comes next!"

  Applause rippled through the room and cries of 'hear, hear!' echoing through the crowd — but no raucous cheering followed. This was a serious place with serious people. It reminded Dave of the descriptions of the late 19th-century revolutionaries he'd studied in history class back on Earth. If these were the same kind of people, then they were the kind with a zeal you didn’t argue with, even when you were on their side and only wanted clarification. However, he had no argument. Perhaps more than he should, knowing how those home reality revolutions worked out.

  Sam still had sympathy for the ideas, she hated that nobles could be so casually cruel even if she liked some of them personally. For her, it was the familiar zealous, revolutionary fervor that unhinged her. She’d seen it before. She’d lived it. She’d taken a death essence for it.

  Avril was numb. She'd expected crude shouting. Maybe drunken sloganeering. Not lists of charity obligations. Not purpose found in helping each other. And worst of all: she understood it. She'd seen it herself — nobles given enchanted gear while tenant families could barely afford candle-essence for night reading. Whole swathes of her father's account sheets recorded income from lands he’d never even visited. But hearing those same grievances spoken aloud — clearly, articulately, by the very peasants they’d harmed, and met with sincere applause — that reached into Avril and whispered: they’re right. Her gut twisted.

  Each member of Executive Services watched the faces in the crowd — drawn, eager, utterly sincere. The people who’d been penned too long at the margins of power, and were finally glimpsing the gates of change swing open. Dave felt the room. This could have been something real. But, no. That wasn’t right. It was here and now. It was real. You could feel it in the room. A groundswell of the honest desire to make a better world for their children. He could tell that Sam and Avril felt it too. Despite their discomfort they were standing a little taller. He could even feel it in himself. Their collective gaze was softening to the Builder’s Revolution. Even Avril, for all her breeding, looked momentarily thoughtful, caught between contempt and curiosity. Dave arranged his thoughts and lamented; if it weren’t for the Builder behind it all.

  As Executive Services and their sponsors found a place to stand at the back of the listeners, they couldn’t help but overhear off to one side, a few younger initiates clustered around a senior member, who was copying runes of power onto slates.

  "Spell structure is for all," the instructor repeated. "Access, not ancestry, defines mastery."

  Sam’s gaze lingered on them, thinking of how Essence for Everyone had been in the early days, before Alani Laird had changed from leader to dictator. She blinked away tears and turned back to the speeches.

  Another speaker took the dais — a younger elf, more measured — and launched into a calm deconstruction of the licensing guilds, drawing sharp lines between magical ability, merit, and inherited access. The audience leaned in, hungry not for spectacle but clarity. Sam listened intently, her hands folded neatly in front of her. Avril, for all her scorn, raised an eyebrow at the speaker’s logic. Even Dave, despite himself, found the rhythm of it compelling but he couldn’t help but mentally list the logical fallacies as they came up. The audience though. They didn’t cheer. They didn’t shout. They listened.

  Around the edges of the hall, younger initiates handed out tea and ration biscuits, nodding along with the speakers. Where the ration distribution was coming from, two people had emerged and were going around asking if anyone needed flour to take home with them. When the children came with tea and rations, Sam took one of each with a polite smile, but she didn’t eat or drink throughout the lecture. Her posture had shifted again — poised but guarded — and Dave caught her eyes flicking across the crowd, searching.

  Avril, betraying her noble background, accepted nothing and dismissed the urchins. Her expression was neutral, but the slight downturn of her mouth spoke volumes. She watched the proceedings with a kind of tight-laced detachment, as attentive as the peasants but not eager. She was sad.

  After some time spent speaking, the elf concluded, brining into stark focus their point that neither merit nor magical power are naturally inherited but passed down between generations. The same polite, serious applause followed and another speaker came forwards.

  This new speaker, a human woman, began reciting a litany of those deemed enemies of the cause — saboteurs of justice, hoarders of magic, suppressors of the common will. No accusations, just names. Quiet. Clinical. And many wrote names down. He felt chill. He’d been waiting for the dark side. ‘Fiendlisten’ the nazis had called it. A list of enemies. He wondered if this was what it had felt like before the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Sam and Avril watched him shudder but said nothing.

  The names kept coming. Each name on the list came with a notation: disrupt distribution chain, leverage household staff, sow doubt among their tenants. By this list, vengeance against the aristocracy wouldn’t be a screaming tantrum, it’d be strategy. Grassroots aristocrat destabilisation, one ledger entry at a time.

  Avril found herself taking a deep breath and feeling the room. It was equal parts rebellion and ritual, and it would’ve been easy to mistake for a mere civic gathering — if not for the way every speaker spoke for collapse, demolition, and the clearing of old orders to make way for something newly built and forged by different hands, it could have been the business side of a guild finance ball.

  After the speaker with the list of names stepped down, the crowd started to break up. Blackwood leaned in and tapped Dave’s shoulder.

  “The inner council wants to see you three,” he whispered, glancing at Dave, Sam and Avril. “They've heard what we said about you. Now they want to see for themselves.”

  Blackwood gestured for them to follow through the crowd. They passed through a narrow door and down a hallway lit with flickering runes, climbed a steep stairwell whose stone steps curved like a spiral shell, then crossed a landing of worn carpet and careful silence. Finally, behind a makeshift curtain of repurposed arcane cloth, they found a half-circle of older revolutionaries waiting.

  They offered no names.

  “So,” one of them stated, “one of you comes with glowing recommendations. What do the three of you bring to the cause? We accept all into our ranks, of course, for we are for everyone but in our glorious rebuilding, our sponsored adventuring team says you deserve special consideration. So, we’ll listen to what you can offer the movement now that you've been brought this far?”

  In response, Dave reached into his inventory and slid a folder onto the cracked wood table. The string binding came loose with a flick.

  Inside were five dossiers. Each one stamped with details of a noble’s corruption, cruelty, and mismanagement. Estate maps. Personnel logs. Arcane irregularities. Rumours cross-checked with shipping manifests.

  One of the older revolutionaries raised an eyebrow. "B- Astral things bear witness... This is..."

  "Actionable," another muttered, though with less ceremony. "Enough to make them take notice, anyway."

  "Glad you approve," Dave said. His tone was wry. Nonchalant. A touch of the sardonic for those who knew him.

  Blackwood stepped forward, bolder now.

  "There's something else. The task my team has which the council has delayed — because it is delicate, yes? Difficult. Risky. But not for him."

  “His steadiness is beyond question, masters,” Payne added quickly. “He led us through the Society’s field exam like ploughing soft fields.”

  "If the revolution means to speak through new hands — let it speak through those that have already serve," declared Valleron, gesturing at Executive Services.

  A silence followed, filled with the weight of unspoken calculations among the revolutionary leaders of this gathering.

  Finally, one of the leaders exhaled through his nose.

  “Fine. If you swear by his worth, the task is his to test,” the leader conceded.

  “And if it fails,” another added sharply, “it’s your blood that will pay for your recommendation.”

  “We understand,” said Lefevre, eyeing Dave sideways but not backing down.

  The elders conferred briefly, then returned to their places. One turned toward Dave with a measured tone and spoke.

  “There’s an object. We call it the Lodestone. It must be moved from the interior blast zone. Discreetly.”

  “Size?” Dave asked.

  “Barrel-like,” another said. “Delicate. Resonant. Not magical, not exactly.”

  “And the route?” Dave prompted.

  The revolution leaders gave vague boundaries. City checkpoints. A compromised customs agent. After summoning his Tome and his face flickered through several uses of Stop And Think, Dave responded.

  “Just put the stone in a barrel and smuggle it past the compromised customs agent stamped as salvage,” declared Dave, gesturing at Tome as he spoke who flicked through examples of salvage declaration forms and transport permits. “There are simple, electric-based formations that can disguise a lodestone which could be worked into the barrel's lid and although the magical background changes several times along the main road out of Lutetia,” Dave gestured at Tome who was now showing a map. “multiple barrel lids could be made ahead of time with a different formation for each area and changed mid-route without attracting attention.”

  “It won’t work,” one of the elders cut in. “Not with this Lodestone.”

  “Why?” asked Dave neutrally. "That's how lodestones.... Work. It’s how they’re detected. The magnetism."

  A pause.

  “It pulses,” one admitted. “In ways that most lodestones don’t. In ways that can interfere with dimensional forced like the kind that the magic society are pointing at the epicentre to measure the dimensional stitching.

  “Idiot.” Another swore under their breath.

  Dave folded his arms.

  “If it can do that, it sounds like it's primarily not a Lodestone,” drawled Dave. “Look, just now, not only did I solve your fake problem in record time, I also saw through your decoy enough that you had to give me some real information. Admit it, you need my team. How about we see what I can do with the real information?”

  A long silence followed.

  “Volcanic glass,” confessed the leader of the revolutionaries. “Veined with memory-stone. A fragment of the construction that made the cascade event. Metamagical. If the Societies scan it, they’ll be able to use the frequencies in it to detect... something. Its workings are arcane, but those wiser than us assure me it matters greatly.”

  “There it is.” Dave nodded. "Volcanic glass veined with memory-stone holding a metamagical resonance. I can work with that."

  He gave them a plan.

  They listened.