-DISCLAIMER- This is fanfiction of the "Lord of the mysteries" Webnovel by "Cuttlefish that loves diving", it is not recommended to read without having read the source material.
Volume 1 - Knight takes pawn
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INDOW HARBOR, FEYSAC
The room was a coffin.
Not a grand, polished one, but a splintered, damp-smelling crate at the top of a rotting building. The only light, a sickly gray smear from a single window, caught the dust motes dancing like final, frantic spirits.
A single piece of paper lay on the rough wooden table, a stark white accusation in the gloom. It was a debt notice, crumpled and then smoothed out again, as if the hand that held it couldn't decide between fury and despair.
"Gotta be a mistake! it must be an error!."
The number on the paper swam before his eyes. It was an impossible sum. It all came back to him in a sickening rush: Baron Vogler's voice, smooth as oil. "A young man with your talents shouldn't be scraping for pennies, Lutz. This shipment is a sure thing. A small investment for a large return." The investment had been his life savings. The shipment had never existed. It was a test, and he had failed.
His gaze fell on a small, neatly folded handkerchief in a drawer. His one decent possession. He remembered the con it represented: posing as a merchant's son from Backlund, swindling a visiting noble out of a week's wages. He'd been so clever. So sure he was smarter than the world. Now that cleverness felt like a noose he had tied himself.
Lutz Fischer was past despair.
His breath hitched, a ragged, ugly sound in the silence. His heart wasn't pounding; it was a trapped bird beating itself to death against his ribs. The clever gray-blue eyes that could spot a mark across a crowded market were now wide, unseeing, fixed on the frayed rope coiled on the floor like a dead snake.
'They're comin' tonight.'
The thought wasn't a voice, just a cold, certain fact that had crystallized in his gut. The Harbor Vipers didn't send second notices. The Baron's patience, a thin veneer over bottomless cruelty, had finally worn through.
'Run?' The thought was a fleeting ghost. And go where? The Vipers had eyes in every port from Feysac to Lenburg. The Baron didn't just kill those who crossed him; he made examples of them. Running would just mean dying tired and far from home. This room, this splintered coffin, was the only place in the world that was his.
He remembered Hagen, the enforcer, breaking a man's fingers over a much smaller debt. The sound had been like dry twigs snapping. The man's whimpers. Hagen hadn't even blinked. That would be him tonight. But slower. The Baron liked to talk first.
"Moron... fuckin' moron" he muttered to the empty room, his voice cracking. "Thought you were so goddamn clever. Thought you could play with the Vipers and not get bitten, shit!" He let out a wet, shaky laugh that was almost a sob. "Well, you were wrong, Fischer. Dead wrong." The pun was so awful it sealed his fate.
His hands, usually so steady when palming a coin or dealing a crooked card, trembled as he picked up the rope. The coarse fibers felt like destiny. He didn't pray. The Gods of Steam or Combat held no sway in this tiny room. The only ritual was the scrape of the wooden chair leg against the floorboards.
He looped the rope over a heavy, exposed beam—a testament to the building's failed ambitions. Each movement was mechanical, a final, desperate scam. A trade: his life for his debt. The only deal left.
As he stood on the chair, the noose a cold promise around his neck, the world narrowed to the grain of the wood beneath his feet and the sound of his own terrified breath. He took one last look at the four walls that had contained his entire, short, struggle of a life.
A single, clear image flashed in his mind: the sun on the harbor water on a rare good day. The smell of salt and tar. A simple, uncomplicated moment of peace. It was gone as quickly as it came, replaced by the cold touch of the rope. There would be no more good days.
He kicked the chair away.
The fall was a short, brutal punctuation. A crack. A final, choked gasp.
Then, nothing.
BUCHAREST, ROMANIA
The sound was a different kind of silence.
The gentle hum of a laptop, the distant sound of traffic. Andrei Hayes rubbed his tired eyes, the glow of the screen reflecting in his glasses. A half-empty cup of coffee sat beside textbooks on linguistics and history. The words were beginning to swim on the page.
The coffee in his cup was cold. He'd brewed it hours ago, a automatic ritual meant to fuel productivity that had instead just fueled his anxiety. He drank it anyway, the bitter taste a perfect match for his mood.
Andrei stared at the dense paragraph of linguistic theory. The words, usually his refuge, today felt like bars on a cage. Each term—"phonemic shift," "proto-language"—was just another reminder of how esoteric, how impractical his passion seemed to everyone else. He could deconstruct a dead language, but couldn't construct a convincing argument for his own future.
He leaned back in his chair, the weight of a different kind of debt—student loans, familial expectations—pressing down on him. It was a relentless, grinding pressure, not a sudden, sharp snap. His phone buzzed on the desk. A message from his mother, a string of text filled with unspoken worry about tuition. Another from a classmate, asking if he'd finished the translation assignment. He hadn't.
Hidden in a folder was a half-finished translation of an obscure Romanian folk tale. It was his secret project, the kind of work he dreamed of doing. He opened the document, looked at the screen for a long moment, then closed it again. The gap between that dream and the reality of his student debt felt like a chasm he was too tired to cross.
He sighed, a long, weary exhalation, and pushed back from the desk. The walls of his small apartment felt like they were closing in. He needed air.
Shoving his hands into his pockets, Andrei walked the evening streets. The city lights were a blur. His mind, a skilled multitool for declensions and etymologies, was stuck on a single, weary track: Is this all there is? The constant struggle to keep his head above water was exhausting. He felt like a ghost in his own life, fluent in the languages of the world but unable to speak his own dissatisfaction.
On his walk, he saw an old couple arguing amiably in front of a grocery store. He caught a snippet of their conversation—a debate over what kind of fruit to buy. It was so normal, so beautifully mundane. A sharp, unexpected pang of loneliness hit him. He was fluent in five languages, but had no one to have a simple, pointless argument with.
As he walked past a dimly lit antique shop, something caught his eye. In the clutter of the window display, nestled between a brass compass and a stack of old books, was a small, tarnished object. It was a coin, but unlike any he'd ever seen. It seemed to be made of a dull, lead-like material, and was stamped with a symbol that was half-rubbed away—a twisted, impossible spiral that seemed to drink the light from the streetlamp.
A strange, irrational urge pulled at him. To hold it. To know its history. It was the same instinct that drew him to untranslated texts. But the shop was closed, and he shook his head, dismissing the fancy as fatigue. Just a weird old coin. He walked on, the image of the spiral lingering in his mind's eye like an afterimage from a bright light.
Later that night, back in his apartment, the feeling of restlessness hadn't left. He tried to focus on his work, but the symbols on the page seemed to shift. For a fleeting second, the Romanian text looked like the sharp, angular script of Jotun. He blinked, and it was normal. I need sleep, he thought, his head beginning to pound with a dull, unfamiliar ache.
His phone buzzed. Another message from his mother. He ignored it, went to bed, and slept a fitful sleep haunted by dreams of spirals and falling.
THE NEXT DAY
The fight wasn't a explosion of shouts, but a cold, quiet detonation. It was over the phone, his mother's voice strained with a disappointment that cut deeper than anger. "We are sacrificing so much, Andrei. When will you stop chasing dreams and find a real career? This language nonsense…"
He tried to explain, to articulate the passion he felt for the history woven into words, but his own words failed him. They always did. The call ended with a click that echoed in the silence of his apartment. The walls, once a sanctuary, felt like a prison of his own failures.
After he hung up with his mother, the silence in his apartment was absolute. He could still hear the echo of her words, not the ones she said, but the ones she didn't: "You are a disappointment...an error" He didn't slam his fist on the table. He just sat there, the fight draining out of him, leaving behind a cold, hollow emptiness. It was a feeling far worse than anger.
This is it. This is the rest of my life. A tiny room, a mountain of debt, and a phone that only rings with reminders of my failures. The thought didn't arrive with drama, but with the quiet certainty of a death sentence. It was this utter, profound certainty that made him stand up. The action wasn't one of rage, but of surrender. The person who cared about consequences had already given up.
Something inside him broke. The carefully maintained dam of resilience cracked, and a wave of hopelessness washed over him. It was all too much. The debt, the expectations, the loneliness. He stormed out, slamming the door behind him, with no destination in mind.
He walked until his feet ached, past happy groups of friends spilling out of bars, past couples holding hands. Their lives seemed like plays performed on a stage he could never join. He was just a spectator, a ghost haunting his own city. The urge to feel something, anything other than this numb despair, became a physical ache.
He walked for hours, until the sun dipped below the rooftops and the city lights began to flicker on. His feet, moving on their own accord, carried him down a familiar street. And there it was again: the dimly lit antique shop.
The coin was still in the window.
In the deepening twilight, the tarnished, lead-like disc seemed to pulse with a faint, dark light. The twisted, impossible spiral etched on its face was clearer now, an hypnotic vortex that seemed to pull at his very soul.
The rational part of his mind was silent, drowned out by the day's humiliation and a lifetime of frustration. An irrational, all-consuming urge took hold. It was more than curiosity; it was a desperate, primal need. This coin. He had to have it. It felt like the only thing that mattered.
He looked around. The street was deserted. The shop was dark, closed.
Without another thought, driven by a compulsion he could no longer resist, he acted. He pulled the sleeve of his jacket over his hand, made a fist, and drove it through the lower corner of the shop window.
The sound of shattering glass was shockingly loud in the quiet night. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, terrified rhythm. Ignoring the jagged edges, he reached in, his fingers closing around the cold, heavy metal of the coin.
The moment his skin made contact, a jolt like static electricity shot up his arm. The world swam. The spiral on the coin seemed to twist and writhe.
Panic finally cut through the haze. What have I done? He stumbled back from the broken window, the coin clutched in his stolen hand, a thief in the night.
He started to run.
He didn't get far. A dizzying wave of vertigo hit him. The streetlights elongated into streaks of sickly yellow. The sound of his own footsteps became distorted, echoing from an impossible distance. The coin in his hand grew burning cold, then burning hot.
The last thing he saw was the spiral, now glowing with a malevolent, grayish light, expanding to fill his entire vision.
Then, nothing.
A sensation of falling through layers of reality.
And a new, terrifying sensation: the brutal, agonizing bite of a coarse rope around a throat that was not his own.