The pamphlet wouldn't leave Aric's hand. The paper was cheap, the ink uneven, but the signature—those two small letters—burned into him more than any scar.
He sat in his office, a dim square of space above a pawnshop, the kind of place where dust grew thicker than trust. The war hadn't been kind to private detectives. People came for missing debts, missing daughters, or missing ration cards. Nobody came asking for truth. Truth cost too much.
Yet here it was, dropped into his lap like a curse.
He laid the pamphlet on the desk beside his sister's old pocket watch. The second hand was frozen at the hour of her death. He'd never fixed it. He wanted it broken.
"Why now, Liora?" he muttered. "Why now, when I almost stopped chasing shadows?"
A knock interrupted him. Three sharp taps, urgent. Aric's hand went to the revolver under his coat before he opened the door.
A woman slipped inside. Dark coat, scarf pulled low, eyes sharp as broken glass. She carried the smell of smoke and ink.
"I heard you got one of the papers," she said without introduction.
Aric studied her. "And who might you be?"
"Someone who doesn't want to end up like your sister."
Her words cut through him, but she didn't flinch.
She pulled a matchbox from her coat and slid it onto the desk. On its underside, written in hurried scratches, was a single phrase:
"The files aren't gone. They're buried."
Aric's chest tightened. His sister's last whispers before her death had been about "files that didn't fit."
He looked up to question the woman, but she was already at the door.
"You'll find me in the Hollow Docks," she said. "But come alone. They're watching."
And then she was gone, swallowed by the stairwell.
Aric sat back, the pamphlet in one hand, the matchbox in the other. Outside, Greyveil's ruined streets hummed with silence and suspicion.
The war was over, yes. But the real battle—the one his sister died trying to reveal—had only just begun.