What a terrible fucking day.

The other Archivists won the event? Gabriel wasn’t sure if he should spite them or congratulate them on gumming up that rotten bitch’s plans. He watched the celebration from within the crowd, trying to be as unassuming as possible while passing glances at an increasingly infuriated Isabella.

To think she’d throw him away! He should have known she was nothing but talk, buttering him up to get on his good side.

“We should go while they’re busy, Gabe.” He turned and saw his smoking side piece nervously fidgeting with her hands. It was so cute seeing this side of her like this.

“Don’t you worry, Vicky,” Gabriel puffed up his chest, “Nothings gonna harm you while I’m here.” She was right though; they could and should be taking advantage of Isabella’s glaring weakness.

Even if reveling in her setback was as intoxicating as fantasizing her submission to him once they found a way to break from this geas garbage. It was an angry pleasure that coursed through his veins, that kept him moving forward despite the world being against him. They pulled back from the crowd and walked along with other citizens out of the headquarters and onto the streets of Ileah. The sun was at the cusp of setting in the sky but its heat had already boiled the air around him. To have been born in this godsforsaken climate was an injustice he never forgave his parents for.

“Ah,” Victoria took a deep breath and smiled, “Isn’t this weather pleasant to walk down? Sun hanging on the skies edge while the wind sweeps away the prickling humid heat? Such beauty…”

“I know. I love this weather. I hope it never ends.” Gabriel smiled falsely. The sooner they started their dive into Ileah, the sooner he’d receive his reprieve from the sweltering heat.

“And with those Del Mar siblings winning spots on the expedition, I’m sure that Barnacle Bay will be filled with music.” Victoria clapped her hands together and tilted her head to the sky, probably thinking about the parties and alcohol down there.

All the better for those around him to be sloppy drunk and forgetful of all of tonight.

It wasn’t like either of them were that far off of blacking out today.

“Remember, Vicky, sweetie, we’re going down there for business, not pleasure.” Gabriel held back another remark about business and pleasure, his seething a more immediate emotion propelling him towards his decisions.

Trying to recall that block of time Isabella stole from him gave him a splitting headache, practically debilitating him whenever they directly broached the topic of her conspiracy so he did what any intellectual genius could do and thought his way around it.

He was compelled under a geas, that much he knew. The mark imprinted on his soul was enough of a certainty for him to confirm as much. And if Isabella was the one that casted the geas on him, then that narrowed the number of creatures she could be or the number of disciplines she was familiar with.

“You should lighten up though, Gabe. Stories for sourpusses never end well.” Vicky implored him. He ignored her babble and focused on his plans for tonight.

A glaring hole Isabella had never considered was the extent her geas covered up her situation. They couldn’t directly recall the events of their conspiracy without blacking out but they could remember the edges and he clearly remembered seeing the fisherman in the tunnel and not seeing him when his memory came back to him.

If the fisherman knew something big enough to be killed over, then it was information Gabriel was going to rip the underside apart to get a hold of.

They walked out of the town center towards the colony walls, a few inebriated stragglers moving toward and away from a lit doorway in the distance. Seedy, unsavory men stood guard at the entrance, wearing rags over their heads and bristling for a fight with anyone that stepped out of line.

Victoria walked ahead of him and approached one of the guards, “How’s it looking down there, mister?” Gabriel yanked Victoria’s arm away from the man and gave Victoria a contemptuous glare.

“Hey, is this twerp giving you problems?” The other meathead squinted at Gabriel with crossed muscular arms and a mug only a mother could love.

“We’re together.” Gabriel stated. He stared at Victoria, waiting for her to shake out of her unneeded hesitation.

“Yeah, my friend and I are going down to Barnacle Bay to have a good time.” She finally said in a bubbly cadence.

“To answer your question, miss,” The man he’d started a conversation with sounded like he’d swallowed a sack of rocks, “Things are pretty crazy down there. El viejo didn’t win, but seeing the Del Mar’s get a spot’s enough of a win in our book. Who knows, maybe we’ll even get him on the boat.” The beast made his best attempt at a smile, baring crooked broken teeth like a rotten animal.

Victoria giggled, “Thank you so much Mister. If there are crazy’s down there, I hope your shift’s uneventful.” She pranced past the both of the guards and descended into the belly of the colony. Gabriel followed after her, ignoring the boorish glares and nose flares from the riff raff on either side of him. Honestly, seeing Victoria debase herself and lie on their behalf was too much. It surprised him that someone so cute could expel falsehoods out so easily but that was women for you.

He descended after her silhouette down flight after flight of meandering stairs, avoiding the metal plates jutting out from the walls and the sporadic spouts of hot steam from the pipes. The path was sparsely lit with small crystal lights embedded in the walls. Each step was uncertain as he strained to gauge the distance between one dilapidated step to another.

Fucking feat of engineering this rust bucket was. The dead gods were a bunch of incompetent halfwits if they didn’t consider maintenance of these vessels to be such a nightmare.

“There’s music below!” Victoria’s voice echoed below him. Her rapid steps downward followed and he was left groaning and irritated. The floor beneath him started to have that disgusting sticky squish at each step, a sign for him that he was getting close to the underbelly of Ileah.

A chaotic mess of accordions and horns and bongos carried up to him, gaining in volume the further he descended.

It had his ears ringing with pain and his chest uncomfortably vibrating with the beat of the noise.

“Hurry up, Gabe!” Victoria’s silhouette was waving for him at the entrance of the tunnelway.

“Ah!” Gabriel slipped on a slippery pool of unidentified liquid and tumbled out of the tunnelway into the raucous streets. The mixture of decapitated fish and machine oil was another unpleasant indicator that told him he’d arrived at the ‘vibrant’ Barnacle Bay.

Lanterns were hung on the corners of each thatched roof, huts built one on top of another to remind him of ant colonies setting up shop in confined spaces. The motion of Ileah was slightly more pronounced here. Her gears hummed and whirred as she diligently moved through the swamp lands below.

The dullards were out in full force, swinging their drinking steins to and fro with the rhythm of the music, slurring their words as they sang old shanties.

Gabriel wasn’t sure if they were singing about hand rashes or land gashes with the way they dropped syllables and enunciated their words.

“The guards above weren’t kidding. This is a celebration! Look,” she pointed at a street down to a crowd of sweaty working folk hooting and hollering at a tower game. Sloven drunks climbed the stilts of the ‘king’ at the tower and tried to take their place before a stilt leg crossed the finish line, wherever that was. “We should go and-”

“We didn’t come here for that you stu-” Gabriel took a deep breath, “You easily enamored woman. We can join in on those...festivities when we’re done with what we came here for.”

Victoria visibly deflated. She crossed her arms and pouted at him but walked away from the crowd. It was like wrangling a toddler with her.

Gabriel led her along towards the wharfs, scrunching his neck down to the collar of his jacket to hide his face from passersby. The stench of fish and stagnant water grew ever noxious as they approached the Hole. His muscles ached just looking at the rickety planks of wood that made up its Docks and the near pitch blackness if some unsuspecting person stepped off the edge. The crowds were sparser out here, only a few stragglers conversing with one another under the arcane light of the lanterns hanging over their addled faces.

He could make out a few chariots docked around the Hole with crew members coming in and out of their barges to inspect superficial damages or nurse oncoming hangovers before their untimely arrival.

To think he idolized those people once.

“Thwack,” Gabriel crushed a soulsipper with his palm to the back of his neck. And he knew they’d become increasingly common with every step taken towards the noxious dump this fisherman lived at.

“Where did the fisherman live at again?” Victoria asked while pinching her nose with her fingers. As oblivious as she was, even she wasn’t capable of avoiding the stench radiating from the wharfs like a haunting miasma.

“This fisherman lived over there,” Gabriel pointed to a dilapidated building at the other end of the Hole. Most of the buildings were ramshackled but this building was distinct as an older fishermans hovel that was repurposed into a fisherman's lodge and then repurposed again into living quarters for the general public of Barnacle Bay residents. Where the ‘newer’ installments to Barnacle Bay were built from repurposed scrap metal or second hand planks of mangrove wood, the Crows Nest was repurposed into a building from a husk of a sailing vessel caught in the bogs so many years ago. It was fascinating what someone could learn about a piece of architecture given enough time and motivation.

“So we enter the building and just look around for stuff to jog our memory?” Victoria asked.

“If you were paying attention when I was talking about our plan, we’re going into the building to gather evidence of who this fisherman was and what he knew. For fucks sake, we can’t even recall his name.” Gabriel was sure that he’d never have associated with a guy who made a living catching and preparing fish but that Victoria couldn’t recall his name sent alarm bells through his head. It could also have been the man was secretive outright. The documents Gabriel kept around of the other conspirators didn’t offer up much beyond a general contact point if they needed to meet up outside of the tunnels and this mysterious man's document didn’t even offer a proper location beyond the name of the building.

“And what are we looking to find in there?” Victoria asked innocently.

Gabriel sighed in frustration, “I guess we’ll know when we see it, Vicky.” He grinded his teeth together. It was so difficult to keep his composure when she was being such a stupid bitch.

She wanted clear instructions because she wanted to be led to the answer and he didn’t have anything beyond intuition to work on at this point.

“Do we even know which room he was living in?” Victoria asked with an air of annoyance now. Before he could react, he bit his tongue.

Fuck, they didn’t know where he was staying.

“Yeah, of course I know where he lives,” Gabriel lied, “Let’s just get into the building and avoid getting caught out here. I don’t know how far she’s watching.” He emphasised the ‘she’ to Victoria and the girl got the hint. They walked inconspicuously to the building, its creaking becoming audible the closer they got.

Sometimes he was grateful his parents had passed down a plot of land topside for him, even if it was a rinky dink hut at the edge of town.

The two walked up the steps and entered the building, welcomed with a gust of salty cold air. The first floor was dim. From the faded framed photos and mounted monsters on the wall to the bartop turned receptionist desk, the lounge area was certainly a relic of its time. No one was hanging around but Gabriel could hear the muffled arguments of a couple from a room above and a radio loudly blaring news from an Odalla line.

“Lead the way.” Victoria smiled at Gabriel and waved her hand at the ascending staircase. He didn’t hesitate to take the initiative and coolly walked up the stairs, hearing Victoria following closely behind him.

Discreetly, he sent out a pulse through the hallway in front of him and checked whether the rooms had occupants inside of them. There were five floors to go through, excluding the empty lounge floor. The second floor was thankfully a dud. From what he could sense, there were living souls moving around the room or resting in an out of the way space. He only felt the presence of six rooms on the floor and confirmed as such with his eyes by tiptoeing once through the hall with an eye on the door signs.

“What are you doing?” A gruff voice called out from the staircase above.

Fuck! Who was-

“Good evening, mister,” Victoria responded, casually walking up the stairs to meet the figure halfway. Gabriel matched Victoria’s casual demeanor but his heart was pounding with fright.

“Don’t mister me, lady. Why are the two of you skulking around here?” The man emerged from the darkness and Gabriel held back a laugh. The kid couldn’t have been much older than thirteen, a young black baby face but with the physique of a seasoned dock worker hinted at through the holes of his unwashed tank top. A fillet knife was tightly bound in his hand, fist trembling but eyes calm and expectant.

“We’re here trying to connect with a friend of ours. My associate here must have gotten mixed up looking for the door since it’s been so long since we’ve come to visit.” Victoria offered to the boy.

“Yeah, it’s so dark here and I couldn’t remember if he lived on this floor or…” Gabriel mumbled out something incomprehensible at the end of his sentence but it didn’t seem to be necessary. The mention of a friend living in the building was enough to cause the young man to lower his weapon away from Victoria.

“What’s your friend's name?” The young man asked.

Fuck, that was the whole reason we-

“That’s why we’re here actually,” Victoria started, “We think that something happened to us that we can’t remember his name at all and were trying to find him down here.”

What the fuck was she doing, offering information like-

“You expect me to believe that you can remember where he lives but can’t remember his damn name?” He sounded incredulous and rightfully so. He wouldn’t have been so indignant if Victoria hadn’t-

“I know it sounds crazy but he told us to come here in case he didn’t make it back.” Victoria looked down at the ground. Was she acting right now? He couldn’t get a good look from behind.

“Wait, what happened to Santiago?” At the mention of the name both Gabriel and Victoria recoiled with a severe splitting headache. Just the recollection of the name and lightly approaching the concept in his mind sent a prickling sensation ready to pound through his skull. The memory he could access, if only for a moment, didn’t bode well for their prospects finding a way out of this mess.

“Yeah, we’re here to meet up with Santi.” Gabriel lowered his register as he hoarsely delivered his statement.

“Just a mention of his name hurts us to recall so if you could please-”

“Viejo estupido!” The boy loudly cursed and gave the both of them a hard look. “Follow me.” He ran up the stairs and the pair trailed behind him. They walked up to the fourth floor and entered a room at the end of the hall shrouded in darkness. Gabriel made note of the carvings on the door and how similar they were to some of the symbols used in Grimoires for ritualistic spell castings.

Was it a ward of some kind, and if so, what was it warding against?

“Close the door!” The boy called out from another room. Gabriel slammed the door closed. Who does this punk think he is?

Victoria pinched Gabriel’s arm and gestured with her eyes at the worn wooden walls on either side of them. Similar sets of sigils lined the walls the same way as the door up front, with ley lines carved to connect all of the visible symbols to the back of the door.

Who the fuck kind of person was this fisherman?

“Hurry up!” The young man called out, the sound of rummaging and metal clattering now ringing throughout the abandoned home.

Gabriel walked ahead and entered the room the mystery man was sifting through, a small living room with a chair and a circular dining table doubling as an unsanitary workstation. Uncleaned plates were next to carving knives and traditional alchemist tools. A small window gave them a view of thatched roofs and brilliant lanterns in the distance away from the wharfs, music carrying through the wind from this far out.

“Wow…” Victoria looked around the room and picked up one of the knives, “He was really into knives.” Gabriel noticed in the arcane crystalline light that hung over them, the blade shimmered with its own vibrant magic. He yanked the blade from her hand and began identifying the properties of the weapon.

“It’s made of some magically enchanted silver. It’s meant to cleave into the souls of creatures but why would the fisherman keep something like this around?” Gabriel asked aloud. Looking at the other blades on the table, all of them contained that same multicolored sheen.

“The old man had a bunch of this stuff traded to him by locals of the Great Glades. The blades are made of plata fantasma. Find the stuff underneath the roots of mangrove trees that have grown over the corpses of old shit. Pins a cut to the body and soul.” The young man explained as he rummaged through a dresser, throwing clothes on an opened trunk.

“What would a fisherman need with knives like this?” Victoria asked, pricking her finger with the knife point and recoiling suddenly from the expected pain.

“La maldita bruja! Le dije a tener cuidado pero estaba comiendo mierda, y ahora…” The young man stopped himself, movements becoming sloppier with the anger and sadness coming over him.

Gabriel needed to move this conversation to a productive topic.

“He mentioned a witch and you did too. What or who do you mean by this?” Gabriel locked eyes with the man and did his best to appear sympathetic. The young man stopped his movements.

“He’s not coming back, is he?” Tear streaks ran down his cheeks as he bit his lip, physically doing his best to hold off the flood.

“There, there… come here…” Victoria walked up to the young man and embraced him, his face buried deep onto her shoulder.

The lucky bastard.

“That hag got him! He promised!” The young man was inconsolable, crying impotently at the cards he was dealt.

Gabriel couldn’t stand being in the living room with a scene like that happening so he shuffled off to the fishermans bedroom.

The inside of the bedroom was surprisingly clean and well kept, the green wool blanket tucked underneath the cot without crease or fold. There were a few paintings hung on the wall, a rough sketch of Ileah’s outer shell, a sketch of a featureless statue resting in an open field with the horizon enveloped by the sunset, and a peculiar sketch of a twinned tree colony with archaic boats resting on mangrove roots and woven lichen draping sections of the tree bark like a curtain.

Each sketch had Santi’s name written on their backs. An artist then.

Turning his attention to the nightstand of the old man, he opened the drawers and found more knives bundled up with his socks and underwear. It felt like he was paranoid with the number of knives he had around his house, what good it did him, the dead bastard.

Wait a minute.

Gabriel placed his hand on top of the nightstand and extended his soul to the cold wood. It was a larger object but if the fisherman was as paranoid as he was, then he had something to hide.

The nightstand was not made of any magical material but the superficial identification made note of a false bottom. He pulled at the panel acting as the drawers floor and pulled out a book bound in leather and weaved with lichen as well as a hefty bag of coins.

Just from the weight, he guessed that there were enough coins here to book a ticket out of this dump and carve out a piece of land topside. Hell, with this much coinage, procuring passage on a racavan to get out of the colony outright was a possibility.

Gabriel turned his attention back to the book and opened the first page to reveal a sealed envelope. It was addressed to Marquis. Probably the snivelling brat in the living room. Before he could turn to look at the next page, his ears perked up.

“Footsteps?” Gabriel was suddenly on high alert. He walked into the living room, “Hey, get over it. I’m hearing footsteps.”

“It could just be our neighbors.” The man wiped his eyes, getting his message through between sharp inhales and shakes.

“No, they’re coming this way.” Gabriel closed his eyes again focused on his enhanced sense of hearing, fine tuning the image painted in his head of the builds of their mysterious guests. One massively large man and a woman of an average build, both wearing cloaks over their bodies. Dismissing the enhancement to shake off the growing ringing in his ears he tiptoed his way to the door and pressed his ear to the door.

“...don’t have to go in?” The man was in the middle of a conversation and even through the muffled effect of listening through the wood, his voice sounded artificially modulated.

“That’s not what we were asked to do and I don’t plan to go above and beyond for that bitch.” The woman responded, an air of indignation in the voice coming through the modulation.

“Gabriel, what are you hearing?” Victoria asked him as she tuned her lyre to prepare for trouble. He pressed his finger to his mouth to stress silence and pressed his ear back to the door.

“... okay?” The man sounded unsure.

“If you won’t do it, I will.” The woman grabbed something from the man’s hand and Gabriel felt flecks of sand or something granular hit the door. He pulled away from the door.

What does he do? He couldn’t get caught here.

Gabriel turned back to the living room and assessed the dimensions of the window. It was large enough…

“Why are you silent, Gabriel?” Victoria stopped tuning her instrument. His eyes shifted back to the window.

There was a click from the other end of the door and an inferno blocked their entrance.

“Fire!” They heard an old woman yell from the opposite dwelling there.

Before he could think through his decision, Gabriel’s body was already moving on its own. He grabbed at the knives on the table with an open hand while having his other tightly clamped onto the book and bag of coins.

“What are you-” Victoria angrily called out to him but Gabriel had smashed through the window and out of the building.

Was it enough distance?

He rolled his body and braced for imp-

“Ah!” Gabriel yelled as his shoulder collided with the thatched roof of another home, feeling the splintering pain of bone either shattering or jutting out of place. He couldn’t make out the pain in the dark and refused to stop, the adrenaline in his body the only thing keeping him moving. He turned back and saw the building rapidly being consumed by the flames, an explosion thundering out from the top floor.

“I’m sure they’re okay…” Gabriel mumbled to himself. What the night taught him was that Isabella was keen to destroy any trace of the fisherman for some reason, and that it would be unwise to go to his home where he was vulnerable to any of her plots. There was a lot to do and through his adrenaline fueled delirium, he was going to do what he could with the cards at his table.

What a terrible fucking night.