Nerida Quickwave's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Nerida found the cache behind a loose stone in her mentor's old quarters, three months after they buried him. The Luminescent Soil-Stained Journal lay wrapped in oilcloth, its pages thick with notes she'd never seen. She flipped to the last entry and read it twice, then a third time because her hands had started shaking. The beast wasn't hunting. It was being hunted. Her mentor had written the words in unsteady script, underlining them so hard the page tore. The council knew about it for years. They tracked it, studied it, let it roam. They even built that iron gate near the eastern shelf to mark where they'd found it first. The entry ended with a single line: They want someone else to kill it so their hands stay clean. Nerida pulled the coral lockbox from deeper in the hollow. Inside lay a wax-sealed envelope and a strip of cloth bearing the council's seal. The cloth was stained dark at one edge. She broke the seal on the envelope and found a list of names, each one crossed out except the last. Her mentor's name sat at the bottom, ink still sharp. Above it, six others. All dead. She packed the journal and the lockbox into her satchel and left through the sealed metal door of the old chamber. The council had sent her mentor to die. Now they were waiting to see if she would follow. Outside, the current pulled east toward the shelf, and she let it carry her. The hunt hadn't changed, but now she knew who else she was hunting.