The Obsidian Wastes were a graveyard of broken things.
Collapsed buildings slouched against one another like drunks leaning on barstools, their rusted fire escapes tangled in vines that had long since devoured the steel. The streets, cracked and uneven, shimmered faintly where old magic had scarred the pavement, leaving runes that pulsed under the moonlight. It was located at the opposite side of Blackthorn slums, with the Crimson Bastian and the Capital in between.
Lucian's safehouse stood at the edge of this forgotten ruin, a three-story shell of what had once been an apartment complex. The windows were boarded shut, the walls riddled with water stains, and the only sign of life was the faint glow leaking from beneath the door.
Inside, the air smelled of old books, gunpowder, and rain-soaked leather.
Lucian shrugged off his coat, the fabric dusting the floor in silence, and dropped onto the worn-out chair at the center of the room.
The contract scroll lay open on the scarred wooden table before him, information about Darius Vale visible to Lucian. He skimmed the details.
Darius Vale. Mage. Formerly affiliated with the Oathbound Legion. Rogue status: Unknown.
Lucian leaned back, running a gloved hand through his dark hair.
He had taken dozens of these contracts, and they all followed the same pattern. A mage steps out of line, the Dominion sends someone to erase them. Simple. Predictable.
But this one felt… different.
He traced the edge of the parchment, feeling the indentations where the pen had pressed too hard, leaving ghosts of words beneath the ink. A hesitation. A second thought.
It made no sense.
The Duskwatch Dominion did not hesitate.
He exhaled through his nose, pulling a small silver cigarette case from his pocket. It clicked open with a quiet snap, revealing a single black cigarette, laced with grounding salts to dull the static of magic in the air.
The flick of a rune-etched lighter. A small flame ghosting across his fingertips.
Smoke curled from his lips, thick and acrid.
The contract sat before him, waiting.
The weight of something unseen pressed against his ribs, a quiet whisper of instinct that he had never learned to ignore.
This job was different.
He could feel it.
Rain whispered against the shattered windowpane, its rhythm slow, deliberate, like the ticking of a clock counting down to something unseen.
Lucian let the cigarette burn between his fingers, watching the ink on the parchment shift subtly under the low lamplight.
A mage. A rogue. A man marked for death.
That much was true.
But the more he looked, the more he felt it in his bones.... Darius Vale wasn't running. He was already gone. And someone was making sure no one asked why.
Lucian exhaled smoke, watching it coil like a specter against the dim glow of the room.
Something about this job was pulling at the edges of reality, unraveling in ways he didn't yet understand.
And for the first time in a long time, he wondered,
Was he hunting a ghost?
Or was something else waiting for him in the dark?
Time was scarce and he had to move. Grabbing his coat, he went for the door.
---------
The rain had a way of making things drown without ever touching water. It blurred the edges of the world, swallowed distant voices, and softened the filth of the city into something almost poetic.
But The Quiet Quill was already a place where things vanished.
Standing at the farthest end of the unknown valley, it was a place that did not invite visitors, it simply waited for the right ones to find it.
Nestled in a crooked alley where the city's forgotten roads met, it stood with the quiet patience of something that had always been there, even before the street itself existed.
The wooden sign above the door was carved with fading gold lettering, its edges worn soft by time and weather, as if it had once belonged to a shop that no longer remembered its own name.
To the unknowing, it was simply an old bookstore, its proprietor an odd, sharp-faced man with a habit of reading books that no one else could decipher, and a drunk who cannot talk straight.
But those who whispered the right names or paid in currencies beyond gold knew the truth—The Quiet Quill was not a place of business. It was a gatekeeper of knowledge too dangerous to be left in the open.
Not all who wander through the crooked alleyways of the Obsidian Wastes find The Quiet Quill for the real reason it served behind the facade of books. Only the desperate ones do it. And desperation comes in many forms.
The people that come to it for purposes are mostly The Lost Scholars, the seekers of truths best left forgotten.
They arrive with shaking hands, clutching frantic notes, eyes hollow from sleepless nights. They reek of old parchment and burnt candle wax, their minds frayed by questions they should never have asked. Some seek a spell from a dream, others chase knowledge their masters forbade. Scholars, exiles, madmen, all drawn to a truth that will ruin them.
Viktor always asks:
"Are you certain you want to know?"
Those who do not hesitate, who lean in, hungry for damnation, he lets them pay their price and take their ruin. Most never return.
Second are The Hollow-Blooded, they are the cursed, the marked and the unwanted. They arrive bundled in scarves, gloves tight, hiding the wrongness beneath their skin. The Hollow-Blooded, once human, now becoming something else. Some were born cursed, others made, their bodies warped by magic too powerful to bear. They do not seek spells or knowledge. They seek salvation.
Viktor watches, patient as ever.
"There is no cure," he says. "But there are ways to live with it."
Some believe him. Others don't. Those who refuse the truth leave behind only empty skin and a whisper between the shelves.
Third are The Silent Hunters, killers with questions. They arrive with blood under their nails, presence sharp as a blade. Some kill for the Duskwatch Dominion, others for the highest bidder. But the worst? They don't come for contracts. They come because they've seen something wrong. A body with no corpse. A man who died twice. A name erased overnight. They do not fear death. They fear what does not die.
Viktor never answers outright.
"If I tell you, will you leave it alone?"
No hunter ever does. So The Quiet Quill hands them the shovel— and lets them dig.
The owner of The Quiet Quill, Viktor Graves did not inherit The Quiet Quill. He found it.
Or perhaps it found him.
A bell didn't ring.
Instead, a sighing wind passed through the entrance, whispering through the bookshelves like it resented being disturbed.
The interior smelled of scorched parchment, dried lavender, and grave-dust—an oddly comforting scent if one had ever stepped through battlefield ruins or walked the necrotide swamps beyond the Wastes.
The shelves bent with age, stacked with books bound in strange leathers—some stitched with runes, others sealed with nails made of bone. A spiral staircase led to a second floor that might not have always existed. Candles floated freely in the stale air, flickering without flame.
"Don't step past the third aisle," came a voice from deeper inside. "She's still restless today."
Lucian's gaze flicked toward the shadowed rows. Something... shifted between the spines. A shape not quite shaped. He didn't step forward.
Lucian followed the voice.
No one remembers what Viktor did before the shop. Ask him, and he will give a different answer every time. A disgraced scholar. A grave robber. A man who died once, but came back wrong.
The truth is, Viktor Graves knows things he shouldn't. He speaks languages no living soul remembers. He can pull a book off a shelf and tell you who last touched it, even if it was a century ago. Sometimes, when the candles burn low and the shop is empty, he pauses mid-sentence, as if listening to something no one else can hear.
And once in a while, a book moves on its own. Not in a grand, haunted way, no floating tomes or slamming pages. Just... a slight shift. A book no one touched will be found open to a particular passage, its words suddenly relevant to a question not yet asked.
Viktor never acknowledges it. Neither does the shop.
Viktor wasn't a traditional necromancer. He didn't summon skeletons, didn't raise the long-rotted dead to do his bidding. His magic was stranger, older, more insidious.
He was a conduit.
Spirits clung to him like candle smoke, pressing against the edges of reality, whispering secrets through the gaps in his ribs. Some were memories that had never faded, playing like echoes trapped in time. Others were voices that did not belong to this world anymore, their presence flickering in and out of his mind like a poorly tuned frequency.
It made him… disconnected.
Half here, half somewhere else.
To most, he appeared drunk or lost in a permanent daze, his eyes unfocused, his words slurred as if he were caught between conversations with the living and the dead. Sometimes, he would laugh at jokes that no one had told. Other times, he would pause mid-sentence, turning his head slightly, listening to something no one else could hear.
Lucian hated it. Not because it scared him, but because he knew Viktor wasn't faking it.
The rain drummed against the glass of The Quiet Quill, slow and rhythmic, like fingers tapping against a coffin lid.