March 8, 1897 – Road toward Eldridge.
The carriage danced over the uneven stone roads. The air inside was thick with the smell of old paper and the acrid ozone of alchemical equipment. Vincard Kilied sat motionless, a figure of sharp angles and deep shadows, as the flickering light of a single gas lantern swept across his features. His white hair cascaded over his shoulders, a pale memorial to a life that had too often gazed into the unknown.
His fingers slid over the pocket watch in his vest. It was no longer ticking, but vibrating, a nervous hum that echoed through his chest.
After a while, the carriage came to a halt with a metallic screech. Vincard stepped out into the gray mud of an outpost. Before him towered the wall of the Eldridge quarantine zone, a monstrosity of iron plates, barbed wire, and despair. Steam hissed from the heavy gates, and the light from the lamps cut through the eternal fog like a scalpel.
A member of the Iron Guard stepped forward, his face hidden behind a leather gas mask that made him look like an insect. He raised a heavy handgun engraved with alchemical symbols.
"Stop. No one goes in there unless they're looking for a grave," croaked the mask.
Vincard handed him a sealed letter without removing his gloves. "I'm not looking for a grave, soldier. I'm looking for the architect who designed it."
The security guard stared at the seal, then at Vincard's unnaturally white hair. He took a step back, an instinctive reaction to the aura surrounding the investigator. "All right, go ahead. But if you transform, we won't waste any mercury. We'll just burn you."
"A fair trade," Vincard replied with a smile that lacked warmth. "At least the fire is honest."
The gate opened with the rumbling of a dying giant. Vincard stepped into the streets of Eldridge's quarantine zone, and the atmosphere changed immediately. It wasn't just cold; it was a pressure, as if the city itself were trying to crawl into his pores.
The inhabitants were shadowy figures. They pressed themselves against the damp walls, their faces wrapped in rags. Some trembled uncontrollably, their limbs twitching rhythmically in a way that Vincard knew only too well: the early stages of blood toxicity.
The rain mixed with the smog from the factories that had come to a standstill. The water in the gutters was not clear, but had the iridescent consistency of oil and congealed blood.
No one sought eye contact. A child sat on a street corner, staring at a puddle with wide, milky eyes, quietly repeating a chant that made no sense. It was the whisper that was already reaping the weak spirits.
Vincard felt the scar on his palm begin to burn. A deep throbbing, in sync with the distant tolling of the bells in the cathedral district.
„It took a long time, but you're back home, Vincard," the wind seemed to howl through the alleys.
Vincard's fingers twitched toward his inner coat pocket, a habit, not necessity. A lot had changed since his last visit.
He exhaled through his nose, watching his breath curl into the greasy air. Eldridge had reconfigured itself like a dying man thrashing in his deathbed. Streets had collapsed into sinkholes where the old sewer tunnels gave way. Entire districts were cordoned off with hastily erected barricades, their wood already blackened with the telltale veins of creeping corruption.
Vincard reached out to grasp the arm of a hunched woman shuffling past, her fingers clutching a stained shawl tight around her shoulders. The moment his gloved hand made contact, she flinched violently, as if burned. Her head snapped up, one eye milky with cataracts, the other darting like a trapped animal. "Where—" he began, but she was already twisting away, muttering fragments of prayer under her breath. Her footsteps quickened into a staggering run, disappearing into the fog.
A rasping chuckle came from a recessed doorway nearby. Vincard turned to see an old man perched on a broken crate, his legs wrapped in soiled bandages that wept something iridescent. "You won't get answers that way," the man wheezed, tapping a rusted flask to his lips. "Touch folk here, and they'll think you're sharing the gift." His yellowed teeth gleamed in the half-light. "Though looking at you, maybe you are."
Vincard crouched to the man's eye level, careful not to touch the damp cobblestones. "Where would one acquire a current map of Eldridge?" He kept his voice low. The old man's gaze flickered to Vincard's vest pocket, where the outline of the silent watch pressed against the fabric. "Ah," the drunkard mused. "You're that kind..." He leaned forward, the reek of cheap gin and rotting meat rolling off him. "Try the Widow Hawtrey. She keeps records. Runs a tea shop near the old clock tower. Or what's left of it."
The old man's grin widened as Vincard straightened up, revealing a row of blackened gums. The drunkard slumped back into his alcove, his flask slipping from bony fingers to clatter against the stones.
Vincard's boots clicked against the cobblestones, the sound swallowed by the thick, greasy fog that clung to Eldridge like a second skin. The clock tower loomed ahead, its face cracked, hands frozen at 3:17, the exact moment, he recalled, the first quarantine sirens had sounded.
The Widow Hawtrey's tea shop crouched between two leaning tenements like a sickly animal hiding from predators. Its sign, once gilded with floral motifs, now hung askew, the letters flaking away to reveal the wood's gangrenous rot. Vincard paused beneath it, listening to the arrhythmic drip of moisture from the eaves.
The door groaned as Vincard pushed it open, its hinges stiff with rust and disuse. Inside, the air was thick with the scent of stale tea leaves and burnt herbs, perhaps, or the metallic tang of old blood. The shop's interior was a claustrophobic maze of shelves crammed with jars of murky liquids and desiccated roots, their labels peeling like sunburnt skin. A single oil lamp flickered on the counter, its flame guttering weakly, as if exhausted by the effort of staying alive.
The counter was unmanned, but Vincard felt the weight of eyes on him before he saw their owner. A woman emerged from the shadows behind a curtain of hanging dried herbs, her movements unhurried, deliberate. She was older than the city's decay suggested, perhaps sixty, with a face like cracked porcelain, fine lines spiderwebbing from eyes that held no warmth, only calculation. Her fingers, long and skeletal, curled around the edge of the counter as if bracing against an unseen tide.
The Widow Hawtrey's voice was drier than the herbs hanging above her. "You're either very lost," she said, "or very stupid." Her gaze lingered on Vincard's white hair, then dropped to his gloved hands. "But you don't look stupid."
Vincard let the door creak shut behind him, the sound swallowed by the oppressive silence of the shop. "Neither lost nor stupid," he said, his voice a low rasp. "Just in need of a map."
The Widow Hawtrey exhaled through her nose, a slow, deliberate sound like a bellows expelling the last of its air. Her fingernails, blackened at the tips, tapped against the counter. "A map," she repeated, as if tasting the word.
The Widow Hawtrey's tapping ceased. She reached beneath the counter, her movements slow, deliberate, as if handling something volatile. When her hand reappeared, it held a rolled parchment, its edges brittle with age. "The last accurate map," she said, laying it on the counter between them like a gambler revealing a winning hand. "It was brought to me last week by a hunter."
Vincard's fingers hovered above the parchment, not yet touching it. Hunters didn't surrender maps, not unless they were dead, or worse; changed. His gaze flicked to the Widow's hands, the blackened nail beds, the way her tendons stood taut like wires beneath her papery skin. "A hunter," he echoed. "And did this hunter leave any... conditions with his gift?"
"He left the area while he still could," she said, her voice a whisper of rusted hinges. "That's why he didn't need it anymore." Her lips curled into something that might have been a smile, if not for the way her teeth pressed together too tightly, like a trap about to spring.
"I see," he replied curtly. "What do you want in return?"
"What do I want?" she echoed, her voice curling like smoke from a dying fire. "I don't need anything. You're here to help, right? I'll gladly give it to you for that."
„Strange, but I'm not complaining," he thought to himself. He accepted the brittle parchment with a nod, tucking it into his coat without unfolding it, the Widow's shop wasn't the place to study such things.
As he left the store, the fog was still thick, clotting between buildings like congealed broth.
Vincard found a hollowed-out husk of an old apothecary's shop, its windows boarded up with planks that had long since gone. The door hung at an angle, one hinge rusted through, squealing like a wounded animal as he pushed it open. Inside, the scent of dried herbs had turned putrid.
The table listed to one side, its broken leg propped up with a stack of mildewed almanacs. Vincard righted the chair beside it, a spindly thing with a back like a consumptive's ribs, and sat, letting his coat fall open just enough to access the inner pocket where the Widow's map rested. His fingers brushed against the parchment, its surface oddly warm.