The job came sooner than he’d expected.
Eiran was halfway through his first cup of tea the next morning when the wards at the front of the house thrummed again—three short pulses, sharper this time, riding along the stone like a held breath.
He set the mug down, unchecked, and went to the door.
The projection that flared to life when he opened it wore the formal crest of the Ministry of Post-Mortem Affairs, not the generic consultation seal from the day before. The text that followed was clipped, urgent.
MINISTRY OF POST-MORTEM AFFAIRS
Field Consultation – Hollowfall Perimeter
Location: Temporary memorial site, Veins Sector 3 / Loom border
Purpose: Assessment of residual necromantic disturbance in public gathering area
Priority: Medium
Assigned Consultant: Eiran Vale
Medium priority. Public area. Hollowfall perimeter.
They were worried—not enough to say so plainly, but enough to call him by name this time.
He accepted the request, felt the wards register the change, and went to get his coat.
The skeletal assistant watched him from its accustomed place near the wall, sigils dim. When he reached for his bag, it straightened automatically.
“Yes,” Eiran said. “You’re coming.”
It picked up the bag without being told and followed him out.
The Hollowfall crater was too far to see from where the Ministry wanted him, but he could feel it long before he reached the perimeter.
Not as a specific point. As a thinning in the weave of things. As if the city’s foundation had been punched in the chest and was still trying to remember how to breathe.
He moved through the Loom toward the Veins again, following increasingly obvious markers—temporary signage, rerouted transit paths, Ministry tape blocking off certain streets. The closer he drew, the more the normal noise of the city shifted.
Less casual chatter. More hushed voices. More clusters of people standing together without talking.
The memorial site had been set up in a cleared square just shy of the official cordon. From a distance, it looked almost festive—strings of paper cranes, flowers tied to railings, candles clustered in makeshift shrines. Up close, the illusion cracked.
The flowers were already wilting. The cranes had been folded with shaking hands. The candles guttered more often than they should have in still air.
Weight pooled here, thick as fog.
Eiran stepped through the edge of it and felt it curl around his ankles, tugging at his awareness. Not hostile. Heavy. Grief had its own gravity.
He let it brush against him, then set the quiet boundary he always did when walking into places like this. Present, but not permeable.
A Ministry liaison spotted him almost immediately—a young man this time, nerves tucked behind tight professionalism. He hurried over, eyes flicking to the skeletal assistant and back with a visible effort not to stare.
“Consultant Vale?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Thank you for coming.” The liaison gestured toward the square. “We’ve had… incidents. Minor manifestations. Voices, cold spots. The families are already on edge. We don’t want this turning into a full haunting.”
Reasonable. The last thing the city needed was ghost phenomena added to the crater’s list of problems.
“Anyone injured?” Eiran asked.
“No. Just frightened. For now.” The liaison cleared his throat. “If you could… smooth things. Enough that they can hold memorial activities without interference.”
That was how they liked to phrase it. Smooth things. Soften the edges.
“I’ll assess,” Eiran said. “If there’s anything unstable, I’ll anchor it. If there isn’t, I’ll tell you that too.”
The liaison nodded gratefully, already stepping back, eager to be out of the way.
Eiran moved into the heart of the square. The skeletal assistant kept a respectful distance behind him, its bones muted and compact, sigils barely glowing.
People were scattered in small clusters—families, coworkers, friends. Some sat on low walls. Others lingered near makeshift shrines, hands hovering over photographs and offerings. A few children chased each other in a half-hearted game near the edge, watched closely by adults who flinched at every sharp sound.
And weaving through it all, camera in hand, was a woman.
She moved with easy familiarity, slipping between groups without jostling anyone, pausing to speak quietly here or there. The camera strap rode across her shoulder, the device resting against her hip like a natural extension of her. She wore a dark jacket over a soft shirt, jeans, boots scuffed from actual use. Her hair—dark, pulled up in a loose, messy knot—escaped in strands around her face.
Eiran watched her raise the camera, focus, and snap a shot of a man sitting alone on a bench, his hands clenched around a folded hard hat. For a moment, the ambient Weight around the man flared.
Then, strangely, it settled.
Eiran’s brows inched together before he smoothed them out.
Imprint-attuned, then. That would explain why the Ministry let a civilian mage operate here without complaint. They were good at helping grief find edges instead of becoming a shapeless sea.
The woman lowered the camera, said something he couldn’t hear. The man gave a brittle, grateful sort of smile.
As Eiran turned his attention back to the ground beneath his feet, she noticed him.
He felt the glance before he met it—a prickle at the back of his neck, the sensation of someone categorizing him.
When he looked up, she was already walking toward him.
“Let me guess,” she said as she approached. “You’re here to make sure nobody starts spontaneously screaming at the sky mid-vigil.”
Her voice was warm and blunt at once, like she didn’t see much point in easing into things.
Eiran regarded her for a beat. Up close, he could see the fine lines of tiredness at the corners of her eyes, and the way her gaze didn’t flinch when it met his.
“Something like that,” he said.
She flicked a glance at the skeletal assistant, then back at him. “You the Ministry’s corpse guy, or the freelance corpse guy they pretend they don’t use?”
“Independent consultant,” Eiran said. “They prefer that term on the paperwork.”
“Of course they do.” The corner of her mouth ticked up. “I’m Esmerée Solace. Esme, unless I’m in trouble I don’t know about.”
She stuck her free hand out. No hesitation around the necromancer, the skeleton, the Weight. No careful edging away.
Eiran took her hand. Her grip was firm, warm. “Eiran Vale.”
“I know,” she said, releasing him. “You’re the name they mutter when they’re nervous something will blow up. Or when they’re hoping it won’t.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Depends who you ask.” She shrugged, the motion casual, the camera bumping lightly against her side. “You mind if I work while you… do your thing? The union hired me to document all this. They’re worried it’s going to get rewritten later.”
He almost said it will.
“No issue,” he said. “Stay outside any circles I draw, and if the temperature drops more than ten degrees in under a second, move.”
She snorted. “Good safety tip.”
He left her with that and turned his attention fully to the square.
The Weight here was diffuse but dense, like fog spread thinly over a large area instead of pooling in one place. It gathered around certain objects—helmets, photographs, a row of boots lined up along the base of a wall. Physical anchors for loss.
He moved slowly, letting his awareness drag over the stone. Bones were distant: Hollowfall’s dead were still mostly within the restricted zone, or in formal burial. What lingered here were echoes and impressions from the living—the kind of thing that could, under the right conditions, congeal into something more dangerous.
He stopped near one of the shrines. Candles flickered in front of a cluster of printed photos, their edges already curling from the heat. A faint shimmer hung above them, visible only from the corner of his eye.
He reached out, not with his hand, but with trained focus. The Weight brushed against him—cold, desperate, clinging. It wasn’t trying to form into a ghost. Not yet. It just didn’t know where else to go.
“Easy,” he murmured under his breath. “You’re here. That’s enough.”
He took a piece of chalk from his pocket and, with a few quick strokes, marked a stabilizing sigil low on the wall behind the shrine. Nothing dramatic—just enough to anchor the Weight to the offerings instead of letting it wander. The shimmer calmed.
Somewhere behind him, the camera shutter clicked.
“How much of that is for them,” Esme’s voice came, “and how much is for you?”
Eiran glanced over his shoulder. She stood a few paces away, not close enough to intrude on the circle of grief, not far enough to be uninvolved. Her camera hung loose in her hand.
“For them,” he said. “They don’t need to worry about something whispering in their ear when they’re trying to remember how to live without someone.”
“And you?” she asked.
“I’m used to it.”
She hummed, noncommittal. “Doesn’t mean it doesn’t stack.”
He didn’t answer that.
She let the silence hang for a moment, then lifted the camera and took another shot—not of the shrine, but of his hand as he finished the last line of the sigil.
He straightened. “Those will be… strong,” he said.
“My photos?”
He nodded toward the camera. “This place is already thick. With your attunement on top of it…”
“Yeah,” she said. For the first time, a thread of seriousness edged into her tone. “Some of these aren’t for public display. They’re for the people here, and maybe for later, if anyone tries to claim this never happened.”
That he understood.
“Have you been closer to the crater?” he asked.
Esme’s eyes flicked briefly toward the direction of the cordon, though the crater itself was out of sight behind buildings. “Once,” she said. “Didn’t go all the way. Just far enough to get a sense of it.” Her mouth twisted. “Feels wrong. Not just tragic-wrong. Edited-wrong.”
He looked at her more closely. “Edited how?”
“Like someone took a picture and cut pieces out before printing it,” she said. “You can still tell something’s missing, even if you don’t know what. The angles are off. The shadows don’t line up with the light.” She shifted her grip on the camera strap. “I’ve got shots from the early days after, when the dust was still settling. Compare them to the more recent ones, and it’s like someone’s been tidying the scene without understanding how light works.”
Harvesting, he thought. Removing pieces, leaving gaps.
She didn’t say Black Veil. Neither did he.
“Do the families know you see that?” he asked.
“They know something’s off,” Esme said. “They hired me because they’re tired of being told everything is under control when most of them can’t sleep through the night.” Her gaze slid back to him. “You see it too, don’t you?”
“I see enough,” Eiran said.
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s a ‘more than they want me to write down,’” he said.
She huffed out what might have been a laugh, or just a sharp exhale. “Yeah. That tracks.”
He moved on, continuing his slow circuit of the square. She shadowed him at a distance—never in his way, never ignoring him entirely. Occasionally he’d feel the faint tug of her magic as she snapped another photo, the way the emotional Weight near her subjects would flare and then settle, anchored to the captured moment instead of leaking outward.
By the time he finished the last of the minor stabilizations—small anchors, nothing like the heavy work of Hollowfall proper—the air in the square felt marginally easier. People still grieved. The Weight was still present. But it was less slippery, less liable to spiral into something sharp and uncontrolled.
The liaison at the edge of the site looked visibly relieved when Eiran returned to him with a short nod.
“It won’t haunt,” Eiran said. “There’s enough ambient Weight that you should rotate clergy or counselors through regularly, but nothing’s trying to form.”
“Thank you,” the man said quickly. “That’s—good. Very good.”
He started to ask for a formal statement, then seemed to think better of it and just gestured lamely at the crowd. “If you could, ah, stay for a bit? In case anything… spikes?”
“I’ll walk the perimeter,” Eiran said. “If it holds for another hour, you’ll be fine.”
The liaison nodded gratefully and hurried off.
Eiran turned back toward the memorial.
Esme had moved to one of the outer benches, where a young boy sat clutching a photo to his chest. She crouched in front of him, saying something low and steady, pointing to the picture, then to the sky, then to the candles. Whatever she said, his grip loosened by a fraction.
She didn’t raise the camera for that one.
When she did straighten, she caught Eiran watching and lifted a brow.
“Gonna linger?” she asked, walking toward him. “Or do corpse consultants have somewhere else to be?”
“Today?” he said. “Apparently here.”
“Well.” She slid her camera strap higher on her shoulder. “If you decide you want to see what edited-wrong looks like, I’ve got prints. Early ones. From Hollowfall.” Her gaze sharpened. “Not the sanitized versions on the newsfeeds.”
“Where?” he asked.
“Hearthfall Row.” She jerked her head toward the direction he’d passed the previous day. “Skylight House, third floor. I’d say follow the string lights, but that’s half the Row.”
He stored that away. “Noted.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, stepping past him. “I won’t be offended if you pretend you forgot. Repressed men are my best customers. They’re the only ones who still act surprised when the world is on fire.”
“I don’t act surprised,” he said.
“That’s what I mean.”
She left him with that, weaving back into the crowd with the easy, assured movement of someone who’d long since decided she belonged wherever she stood.
Eiran watched her for another heartbeat, then let his attention drift back to the ground, to the subtle lines of strain in the stone, to the way the Weight moved now that it had anchors.
He’d meant what he’d said. He would stay, for a while.
But the name Hearthfall Row had lodged itself in his mind like a pebble in a shoe.
By the time the last of the candles had been relit and the first speeches began, the air in the memorial square had settled as much as it was going to.
Eiran lingered at the edge for another half hour, watching for spikes—sudden chills, sharp flares of Weight, the telltale tug of a forming echo. There were none. The sorrow stayed where it belonged: with the living, rooted in candles and photographs and the thin, wavering lines of the speakers’ voices.
When he was satisfied, he gave the liaison a brief nod and slipped away.
The Ministry’s request hadn’t included anything else. Officially, his day’s work was done.
The city, however, didn’t care much for official boundaries.
He could have taken the longer route home, skirting the Loom entirely and circling back toward the Underwake through quieter streets. Instead, his feet turned almost on their own toward Wardline 7, then along it, following the curve that would eventually spill him into Hearthfall Row.
Curiosity wasn’t an emotion he liked to indulge. It had teeth.
Still, he walked.
The air lightened gradually as he left the Hollowfall perimeter behind. The grief-thickened fog of Weight thinned, replaced by the ordinary background noise of the Loom—old losses, old joy, the residue of lives layered atop each other for years.
By the time he turned into Hearthfall Row, the city felt… softer.
Worn flags hung from windows. Someone had draped a string of mismatched lights between two balconies, half of them burnt out, the other half determinedly bright. The narrow street was cluttered in the way of places people actually lived: bikes leaning against railings, crates stacked under windows, potted plants claiming any flat surface they could.
The skeletal assistant walked at his shoulder, careful not to brush against anything or anyone. A child darted past, chasing a ball. She glanced at the construct only long enough to decide it wasn’t interested in playing, then kept going.
Eiran’s awareness brushed the ground out of habit.
The bones beneath Hearthfall Row were old, settled. Whatever had happened here had been resolved long before his time. The Weight was low and even, like the slow, steady breathing of someone in deep sleep.
It should have felt ordinary.
It didn’t.
Halfway down the Row, something… tilted.
Not dramatically. Just a faint skew in the weave of things. A hairline fracture in the pattern he’d grown used to sensing—like one note slightly out of tune in an otherwise simple song.
He stopped without meaning to.
The sensation wasn’t Weight. It wasn’t death. It was more like watching a coin roll toward the edge of a table and, instead of falling, change course at the last possible moment.
Entropy, his training supplied distantly. Or something like it. A nudge.
His gaze tracked instinctively to the source.
She stood on a low stoop across the street, halfway between a sagging doorway and a cracked support pillar. Long, wavy blond hair fell over her shoulder as she leaned forward, bracing one hand against the stone. With the other, she dragged a large, overfull planter a few inches away from the edge of the step.
The planter had a hairline crack running through its base. Eiran could see it from here. Another week of weight and rain and it would have split, sent soil and ceramic and whatever plant survived the fall tumbling down onto the narrow walkway below.
She shouldn’t have known that. Most people wouldn’t have known that.
She paused, fingers resting on the damaged clay like she was listening to something only she could hear. The odd tilt in the air sharpened for a heartbeat.
The crack deepened—cleanly, along a line that kept the structure intact instead of shattering it. A few crumbs of clay dusted the step. The stress shifted.
The danger dissipated.
Eiran exhaled, slow.
She straightened, pushing the planter firmly into the corner where the stoop met the wall. Satisfied, she brushed her hands off against her leggings and stepped back.
He saw her clearly then.
She was small—she’d come up somewhere around his chest if they stood side by side—built with the kind of softness people mistook for fragility until it didn’t bend the way they expected. Her long blond hair caught the late afternoon light in gold strands. Her eyes, when she glanced up, were blue with a ring of gold, bright and startling against the worn brick behind her.
She wore an oversized sweater with the stylized silhouette of a dinosaur on it—sharp teeth, tiny arms—and socks that didn’t match under rolled-up lounging pants. There was a mug on the stoop behind her, steam still curling from its lip. Also dinosaurs. Smaller ones.
She didn’t see him at first.
Her attention was on an older woman at the door, who was shaking her head at the planter and the crack and, presumably, the state of everything else. The blond-haired woman laughed—light, quick, a sound that somehow didn’t bounce off the stone so much as settle into it.
“Trust me,” she said, voice carrying just far enough across the narrow street for Eiran to catch the shape of the words. “If it was going to explode, it would’ve done it on my toes. I bribed it.”
The older woman snorted. “You and your bargains with furniture.”
“Structural negotiations,” she corrected. “Very official.”
The older woman muttered something fond and disappeared inside, leaving the door propped open.
The blond-haired woman bent to pick up her mug. As she did, her gaze flicked, almost idly, toward the street.
Their eyes met.
It was nothing like being struck. It was more like recognizing, belatedly, that he’d been listening for a particular note in the city’s song without realizing it, and there it was.
Her attention passed over him the way it did everyone else on the street—polite, brief, cataloguing. Necromancer, his coat and the bone-white shape at his side made that obvious enough. Whatever she thought about that, she didn’t flinch. Her gaze snagged for a fraction of a second on the skeletal assistant, then returned to him.
Then she smiled.
Not wide. Not performative. Just a small, acknowledging curve of her mouth, as if to say yes, I see you, and we are currently sharing the same piece of world, how strange and ordinary that is.
He inclined his head in return.
The odd tilt in the air—whatever had made his senses stiffen—eased as she turned away, stepping back into the doorway with her dinosaur mug cupped in both hands. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
The street settled.
Eiran stood there for a moment longer, the ordinary sounds of Hearthfall Row washing back in around him—someone laughing two floors up, pans clattering in a kitchen, music leaking through a half-open window.
The skeletal assistant shifted minutely at his side, waiting for direction.
“Keep moving,” he said.
It did.
So did he.
By the time he reached the end of Hearthfall Row and turned toward home, he’d almost convinced himself that what he’d sensed was nothing more than residual strain from the Hollowfall perimeter. Stress in the stone. In his own nerves.
Almost.
The city had a way of hiding what it didn’t want him to see.
Today, for the first time, he had the distinct feeling it wasn’t hiding from him.
It was circling.
The Ledger House greeted Eiran with its usual stillness.
The wards sealed behind him with a familiar hum, and the skeletal assistant shed the last of its active sigils, returning to its idle place near the wall. Eiran removed his coat, set his bag down, and stood for a moment in the entryway, listening to the old stone settle around him.
Hearthfall Row lingered in his mind.
Not the Row itself—that was ordinary enough. Lived-in. Warm. No unusual concentrations of Weight. No restless remains. The bones there slept soundly.
It was the tilt he couldn’t let go of.
He crossed to his desk and opened the ledger, flipping past today’s earlier entry without rereading it. His pen hovered over a blank margin on the next page.
This wasn’t a case. Not yet. There was nothing official to document, nothing the Ministry would accept, and nothing he could quantify cleanly enough to justify an investigation.
Still.
He wrote a single line, smaller than the others.
Hearthfall Row — non-thanergetic anomaly.
Environmental stress redirected. Source unidentified.
He paused, then added beneath it:
Not hostile.
The pen scratched softly as he drew the small personal mark he used when something didn’t fit his usual categories. A reminder to pay attention later.
He closed the ledger and slid it back into the drawer, locking it with a practiced motion.
In the quiet that followed, his awareness brushed the house again—old bones, settled echoes, the steady, predictable weight of the dead who had been accounted for.
Nothing answered back.
Eiran turned toward the narrow window above the shelves. From here, Hearthfall Row was out of sight, hidden behind layers of stone and streets and lives he didn’t know.
For reasons he couldn’t articulate, he found himself hoping she was there still—wherever there was—negotiating with furniture and coaxing cracks into behaving.
He frowned at the thought, dismissed it, and reached for the kettle.
Curiosity, he reminded himself, had teeth.
And yet.