The First Case?

Before another word could be spoken, a fleeting shadow hurtled past the veiled archway of the shop. Then, in a display of shocking violence, a dark, lithe shape hurled itself with a terrible violence against the window's vast, amber-litten pane.

The material did not shatter like glass, but instead gave way with a soft, wet pop, stretching and distorting like rubber before the creature passed through it. In the next instant, the pane sealed itself, rippling for a moment like the surface of a pond before becoming perfectly smooth once more.

The mask of serenity that the Lady Seraphina wore seemed to dissolve from her features, supplanted in an instant by a deep frown that betrayed a most severe and potent vexation. "That is the fourth time in the past three rotations," she murmured, more to herself than to us, her voice laced with a tired irritation.

Her words were lost to me, overwhelmed by a strange confluence of emotions that surged through my breast. Gratitude for her inexplicable kindness was met with the hunter's instinct, the detective's demand for order. Before the others could react, before my own mind could fully grant its consent, I turned and fled through the archway, my new shoes striking the causeway's lilac-hued stones as I took up the chase.

I burst out onto the lilac causeway to see a fleeting, diminutive shape darting into a narrow fissure between two of the great buildings. In its wake, it left a faint, shimmering trail of motes that hung in the air, a phosphorescent dust that smelled of night-blooming flowers and ozone.

Relying on instinct and the strange, ethereal spoor, I plunged after it into a labyrinthine network of passages. This was the city’s hidden anatomy, a veinous system that ran between the grand arteries of the plazas, a world of echoing footfalls and deep, encroaching shadow. The trail of glittering dust was my only guide, leading me up forgotten stairwells and along precarious ledges that bridged the gaps between the ancient, lilac-hued stones.

The winding path suddenly opened out, and I stumbled from the oppressive quiet of the alley into a scene of such overwhelming and chaotic life that I came to an abrupt halt.

It was a street, or something like it, choked with a dense and motley throng of beings. Faces both fair and monstrous moved past me in a great, jostling river of bodies. Great, vertical banners covered in glowing, unreadable sigils hung from the buildings, casting a stark, monochromatic light upon the crowd below. And everywhere, there were eyes—carved into lintels, glowing upon the signs, staring from the faces in the crowd—a thousand points of silent observation.

My gaze swept the crowd in a desperate search for the diminutive thief, for the scintillating spoor it had left behind; but the luminous trail had grown faint, and was soon extinguished altogether, lost amidst the ceaseless shuffle of feet and the cloying, strange perfumes of the throng. I stood an island of flesh in that monstrous sea, a stranger in my new and severe attire—so terribly alone in a congress of monsters—the very object of my pursuit driven from my mind by a sudden and terrible awareness of my own isolation.

For a long moment, I could do nothing but stand frozen, a statue of severe, dark silk amidst the jostling, chaotic river of the crowd. The purpose of my chase, the memory of the boutique, even the faces of my companions—all were momentarily washed away by the sheer, overwhelming sensory assault of the street.

Then, the instincts of the detective, the ingrained habits of a lifetime took hold. I pushed down the rising tide of panic with a familiar, practiced discipline. My eyes, now keen and analytical, began to scan the concourse, searching for the familiar, cheerful face of a fox-woman or the pale, white-silver hair of a timid vampire. I tried to pinpoint the alley from which I had emerged, but in the shifting, monochromatic glare of the unreadable signs, every dark fissure between the buildings looked identical. The crowd was too dense, the faces too alien, the architecture a labyrinth designed to confound.

The detective in me faltered, and the terrified woman took command. The cacophony of strange voices, the press of demonic bodies, the overpowering scents of exotic spices and things less pleasant—it became too much. My only thought was to escape the suffocating assemblage, to find a space where I could breathe, where I could think.

All semblance of methodical thought abandoned me to a raw urgency, and I turned to cleave a path through the monstrous assembly. I was heedless of the malformed visages that turned toward me, and of the bestial sounds of protest, for my entire being was consumed with the need to gain the sanctuary of a narrow and less-frequented thoroughfare I had spied in the distance.

I tore myself from the crowd, finding refuge in a narrow and serpentine alley where the din of the city was muffled to a low and constant thunder. Above, only a ribbon of the orange sky could be seen between the looming edifices. The air was cool, the lane empty, but for the strange, fluttering scraps of some material like paper or dried skin that stirred in the breeze. I rested against a stone wall, my pulse a wild drum against my throat, and was at last overcome by the simple fact that I was hopelessly lost.

Once my heart had slowed its frantic pace, I pushed myself from the wall and began to wander down the narrow, winding lane. It was a place of quiet strangeness. Shadows seemed to cling to the walls in shapes that did not correspond to any light source, and I heard faint, musical whispers that ceased the moment I tried to pinpoint their origin.

In search of some small and familiar comfort, I plunged my hands into the pockets of my new jacket, whereupon my right hand met with the cold, familiar steel of my revolver. The contact sent a jolt through me, as if from a galvanic battery; in the tumult of my transformation and arrival, the memory of the weapon had been utterly lost to me. How it had come to be secreted in the depths of that pocket, I knew naught.

A shadow of my old professional confidence asserted itself, and for a wild moment, I felt a sense of security. It was a foolish and momentary solace. What could a simple bullet avail against a being that knew no physical impediment, or a seraph who could shape the world with her very fingertips? What power did the laws of woman possess in a realm governed now by the edicts of the demonic?

I scoffed at my own folly, a short, bitter, and soundless laugh. It was a useless relic of a life that was no longer mine.

It was then, as I lowered my gaze in a moment of renewed despair, that I saw it—a few, lingering motes of that same phosphorescent dust, clinging to the edge of a high, dark windowsill far above my head. The trail was not lost after all.

I tilted my head back, my eyes tracing a path up the sheer, dark wall to the distant windowsill. From a purely human perspective, the climb was a fool's errand. The stone was slick with some manner of strange, dark lichen, and the few ornamental ledges were far too shallow and widely spaced to provide a reliable acquisition for an unassisted ascent. In my old life, I would have dismissed it as impossible and sought another way.

But I was no longer living my old life, and I had no other path to follow.

With a grim resolve, I set my jaw and reached for the first purchase that offered itself—a small fissure in the alien masonry. The stone, which ought to have been slick with damp, instead afforded my fingertips a perfect and preternatural grip. I drew myself upward, bracing for the familiar, agonizing protest of muscle and sinew, but to my great astonishment, the expected strain never came.

I felt impossibly light, my muscles imbued with a cold, effortless strength that felt alien to me. The desperate scramble I had anticipated became a simple, swift ascent; my new shoes found footing where none should have existed, and my hands affixed themselves to the stone with a certainty so unnatural as to be quite terrifying.

The ascent was complete in a startlingly brief passage of time, leaving me crouched upon the high windowsill. I gazed down at my own hands, marveling with a kind of horror at the impossible strength they had just displayed, and a profound disquiet seized me. For this body, with the terrible and graceful power it now possessed, was a vessel to which I felt I had no rightful claim.

Shaking the thought away, I turned my attention to the sill. The phosphorescent dust was thicker here, a clear trail leading not into the window, but away from it, across a narrow, precarious ledge that connected to an adjacent rooftop. The chase was not over.

Perched high above the alley on that narrow sill, a moment of hesitation took hold of me. Common sense, a faint and distant voice from my former life, urged me to retreat. I was alone, a stranger in a monstrous city, and my only companions, Ashley and Xiao Ru, were lost somewhere in that wild multitude. The prudent course, the sane course, was to descend and attempt to find them.

But how? To re-enter that labyrinthine alley and plunge once more into the swarming street seemed a task as hopeless as finding two specific grains of sand upon a vast and desolate shore. To go back was to embrace my own helplessness, to once more become a lost and passive thing waiting to be rescued.

But the trail... the trail was a purpose. It was a thread of logic… a case to be solved. It was the only thing I knew how to do. To follow the evidence, to pursue the culprit. To abandon the chase felt like abandoning the last, tattered remnant of my own identity.

My doubt was a fleeting thing. I cast aside the thought of retreat with a resolute and final air, and rising from my crouch, committed myself to the treacherous ledge. My eye was fixed upon the scintillating dust that served as my sole guide. Come what may, I had resolved in that moment to meet my fate not as a hapless victim, but as a hunter upon the trail.

The ledge afforded a path no wider than my two hands, a treacherous suture in the city's polysemous flesh. Though my heart was a knot of ice within my breast, my limbs moved with a surety my mind could not comprehend, my new shoes finding a perfect and unnatural leverage upon the crumbling masonry. At the ledge's terminus, and without a moment's thought for the act's intense insanity, I cast myself across a gulf of empty air. My landing upon the opposite roof was possessed of a silent, feline grace that should have meant my ruin, but the impact was a mere tremor, a thing of no consequence.

The chase continued in this fashion, a fluid and terrifying dream of motion. I scaled a steep, tiled roof as if it were a simple ladder, my fingers finding influence in the smallest of imperfections. I ran along the high ridge of a parapet, the city a dizzying tapestry of light and shadow below, with a balance that defied all reason. There was no thought, no planning as I had been trained to do. There was only a cold, clear instinct, my body knowing its own impossible capabilities better than I did.

After leaping another impossible gap, I paused for a moment, crouched in the shadow of a grotesque stone gargoyle, and looked back at the path I had taken across the rooftops. A strange, almost hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up from my chest. Could this truly be me? This creature of the rooftops, this shadow that moved with the wind? I was a stranger to myself, a ghost inhabiting a body of terrible and newfound power.

My breathless moment of self-discovery was cut short. As my eyes scanned the rooftops ahead, my gaze sharpened. And then I saw it. There, silhouetted against the contused orange of the eternal twilight, upon the very peak of the next roof, was a small, winged shape. It was paused, as if to look back, and in that instant, I knew the chase was not yet over.

The winged shape did not linger. With a final glance in my direction, it folded its shimmering wings and dove headfirst, not off the roof, but into it, disappearing through a great, circular grate made of that same coppery-green metal I had seen before.

It took but a moment to reach the opening, my footfalls strangely silent upon the tiles. I gazed into a great, circular shaft that plunged into an absolute dark, from which a faint, chittering sound could be heard. My mortal reason recoiled from the sight, but this was answered by a cold and predatory impulse, a thing born of my new and terrible grace, that bade me continue. Heedless of the consequence, I swung my legs over the edge and committed myself to the darkness below.