Sylvara Spellweaver had copied every spell she could buy, borrow, or beg in Blightfall, and it was not enough. She sat at a corner table in a tavern that smelled of wet ash, her grimoire open to a blank page. Her black hair was pinned back. Her green dress caught the lamp light. The pendant at her throat hummed against her collarbone, warm the way it always went warm when magic passed nearby. Around her, drunk mercenaries traded rumors of the old war. None of them knew a single spell she did not already own. The blank page was the problem. If she could not find rarer work soon, her grimoire would end here, half-full, and every year she had spent chasing it would sit on a shelf as a pretty book. A small weight landed on her wrist. The faerie dragon she had raised from a shard-egg tucked its wings and pushed its nose at her sleeve. It had a habit of sniffing out enchantment the way hounds found blood. Tonight it would not settle. It kept looking at the booth behind her, where a hooded courier had been nursing the same cup for an hour. Sylvara turned. The courier was dead. His head rested against the wall as if he were only tired. No wound she could see. Her pendant went cold. She moved before the room noticed. She slid into his booth, kept her back to the crowd, and searched his coat. Inside the lining she found two things. A folded map, brittle at the creases, marked in runes she did not know. And a dark, cracked crystal the size of her thumb, green light flickering inside the fractures like something trying to speak. The little dragon stared at the crystal and would not blink. She pressed one finger to the stone. A voice bloomed inside her skull, not words, but the shape of a spell — long, layered, unfamiliar. A spell she had never seen written down anywhere. The stone was leaking it, slowly, the way a cracked jar leaks water. Whatever was inside would be gone in days. She unfolded the map on her knee. The runes along the routes matched the runes cut into the crystal. Seven marks. Seven stops. The courier had been carrying a route between vaults, and someone had killed him for it before he finished the run. Sylvara slipped the map into her sleeve and the crystal into the pouch at her hip. She left coin on the table for a dead man's drink and walked out fast. Behind her, a chair scraped. Someone had been watching the courier too, and now they were watching her. Her collection would not stall. She had her lead. She also had, at her back, whoever had been willing to kill for it.

Sylvara stepped out of the tavern into a narrow street. The map was warm inside her sleeve. The cracked crystal pulsed against her hip. Behind her, boots hit the tavern threshold. She did not look back. She walked fast, then faster. The faerie dragon clung to her shoulder and dug small claws through the silk of her dress. The boots stayed with her. When she turned a corner, they turned. When she stopped at a stall, they stopped a few paces off. She could not see the face under the hood, only a gloved hand resting near a knife. If he caught her in the open with the map on her, he would take it, and probably her throat too. Her pendant went cold, then hot, then cold again. It always did that near strong magic. She followed the pull. Two streets down, the pendant burned so hard she almost gasped. She stopped in front of a plain wall between a cobbler's and a shuttered bakery. Nothing there. Just old stone. The faerie dragon leapt from her shoulder and pressed its nose to a seam in the mortar. The stone lit up under its snout. Runes bloomed across the wall in cold blue lines, the same runes marked on the map in her sleeve. Sylvara pulled the map out. She held it to the wall. The runes on the paper and the runes on the stone matched at one point: a small tower drawn in the map's upper corner, ringed with spires. The map was not just a route. It was a key. The boots turned onto her street. She pressed her palm flat against the runes. The pendant screamed heat. The wall folded inward like cloth pulled through a ring. She stepped through with the dragon at her heels. The stone sealed behind her without a sound. She stood in a hall she had not known existed. The ceiling climbed higher than any room in the city. Stained glass in a dozen colors threw light across a stone floor. Doors lined the walls, each carved with a different rune. The air hummed against her teeth. Every door leaked a spell she had never heard before. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. Her grimoire pressed heavy in her satchel. She had come looking for a lead. She had walked into a library of them. Outside, the pursuer would find a blank wall. Inside, Sylvara was alone with more magic than she could copy in a year, and no way to know how long the door would stay shut behind her, or what already lived in the halls ahead. The little dragon growled at a door on the far end. Something on the other side growled back.