Grynne stood at the window in his office, watching Eleysia leave. She had replaced her hood and moved swiftly down the street. Within moments she had disappeared into the thick of the crowd, scores of bustling locals and street vendors. Something made him think that she was no stranger to sneaking out of the Alabast towers. As inane as he found the affairs of nobles to be, he could not help but feel a sense of excitement about her and her case. She seemed different than most of those he had met before. The upper echelon had largely shunned him and treated him lower than dirt for the past fifteen seasons. Everyone but his sister.

He had spent the last hour grilling Eleysia with a routine battery of questions, though he was sure it would yield little. And it didn’t. According to her reports, Khyael seemed like the kind of young woman everyone liked and wanted to be liked by, as much as her wild nature miffed some of the more proper nobility. Eleysia described her as being charming, affable, smart, talented, and particularly bull-headed.

There were a number of reasons someone might want to kidnap a woman such as this. It could be something as textbook as a jealousy or blackmailing. From what he knew about the Five Families, however, and what little information he had been able to glean from Elesyia, his gut told him this felt otherwise. Who knows, maybe she merely got bored of the privileged life and ran off. A small part of him hoped that was the case. It would make his job that much easier.

The Monsante Family had been keeping Khyael on as a ward. As a woman with great magical potential, the Queen had wanted Khyael to spend time with each of the Families who specialized in one of the Five Kabals; Laen with the Monsante Family, Skyen with the Gristling Family, Corren with the Crowling Family, Milen with the Dromlicht Family, and Kaen with the Archimaedes Family. The Kabals were named after the five deities practiced in Kyrelle, for Lael the Trickster, Skyel the Healer, Correl the Hunter, Milel the Inventor, and Kael the Berserker. The Five Kabals had been men and women once, so the religious texts would have everyone believe. Long ago, humankind had been beset upon legions innumerable comprised of giant grotesque beasts equipped with razor sharp claws the length of a man’s arm and grisly maws capable of decapitating warriors, armor and all, with one quick snap of the jaws. These howling hordes were lead by men with large, dark leathery wings and eyes of flame, barking orders in inhuman tongues from astride giant warhorses bedecked in cloaks of shadow. With his host of monsters behind him, the Demon King led his armies throughout the realms of man, killing those who stood before him and enslaving those that chose to flee. If not for the efforts of The Five Kabals, in creating magics at the time unknown to this world, the Demon King and his ilk would still rule Kyrelle. Thank the Gods for fairy tales, thought Grynne.

The Five Families of Alabast each boasted more pure bloodlines to the Kabals than other noble families in the city, and the continent. They each attended to the trueborn traits expressed by their kin as they reached adolescence, often by about twelve years of age. Once displayed, the families held the Attuned close, and sought to marry them off to cousins of similar skill. To keep it in the family, as it were. That was not to say, however, that Attunement did not appear in the common born folk of Alabast. Many attributed these occurrences to the bastard population of the city, for even the noble born were not immune to their more base desires. These individuals were also swept up by the aristocracy and cultivated by families seeking to hold stronger monopolies over these abilities. Further, many of those Attuned to the Kabals became crucial to the military and trade strength of Alabast in relation to its fellow capital cities on Kyrelle. Yet, for all The Five Families’ pure bloodlines, no family held as eclectic a set of abilities as those born of the Royal Family, who could claim bloodline relations to each of the Five Kabals.

Eleysia’s choice of Grynne for the job had made sense. While most of his family had stopped speaking to him fifteen years ago, he was still close to his little sister, Annabelle. Khyael had recently finished her term with the Archimaedes Family before proceeding to train with the Monsantes. According to to Eleysia, Khyael had disappeared from her bed in the Monsante Manor a week and a half ago. No one claimed to know anything about her disappearance although a few family members had noted that she had seemed more withdrawn, and at times even jumpy. The Monsante Family were a frantic wreck at the moment, for good reason. Grynne did not envy anyone standing in the way of the Queen’s potential warpath.

Khyael’s next term of service was to be with the Gristling Family learning Skyen. Eleysia speculated, due to the nature of the relationship between her family and the Gristlings, that they were the conspirators behind the girl’s disappearance. She had crafted a scenario in which the Gristlings could blame the Monsantes for the disappearance and then produce the girl after a harrowing “search.” Afterwards, she speculated, the Queen might favor one family significantly over the other and give them a political edge in the running of the city. Rumors suggested that whomever has access to the Queen’s ear had access to power, only rivaled by the Queen herself. It was a convenient story.

Grynne typically did not like involving himself in missing persons cases. It was messy work. More often than not, at the end of it all, you were left with no happy customers. Collecting bounties on dead men was much simpler. Grynne had made a name for himself in some of the more disreputable circles in Alabast. Bounty hunting had come naturally to him after his training with the Shadowed Dagger, a special unit within the city’s military. The perks of noble birth.

He left his office onto the bustling city street, giving a curt nod to his administrative assistant, Glen Digby, on the way out. He had found a place to rent his office in between downtown Alabast and the Rat’s Nest. An undesirable part of town to be sure, but when people came for his services they were normally more interested in privacy than niceties. On both sides of the street vendors had set up their tents and blankets rickety wooden stands. They yelled constantly to passersby, offering a number of wares ranging from scarves, fans, hooded cloaks and baubles to herbs, “magical” items, snake oils and “high quality” weaponry. It was a clear day and the sun blazed high in the sky. The thick heat mixed with the dust and sand kicked up from the crowded streets made the air practically impossible to breathe. Grynne wrapped his scarf up over his head and then around his nose and mouth and ventured out into the crowd.

Many on the streets attempted the same as Grynne to protect themselves from the heat of the day. Some wore large straw hats while others wrapped bandanas or scarves around their faces as Grynne had. One burly, tanned man standing guard over a stand’s jewelry had opted to wrap his shirt around his head in a small turban. His torso was riddled with a variety of scars, old and new. Grynne noticed some of the scars looked to have been inflicted by claws or teeth. He was most likely a prize fighter, or had been one. Many of the immigrants to this city were brought here to pay off debts. Life-or-death fights in the Cage were a common way to pay that off if you could survive it. The man stared Grynne down as he passed, his brawny, gnarled hand resting casually on a large knife at his side. Good afternoon to you too, Grynne thought.

As he made his way further into downtown, the buildings became taller, and less dilapidated. Thick wooden planks propped up to serve as doors became replaced by ornately carved pieces. Peoples’ dress shifted from dulled, sandy tans and browns to garishly colored silks. After pushing his way through a throng of townsfolk, Grynne made his way to the local messenger office. Although surrounded by much finer, grander buildings, the messenger office was a modest one-story building that advertised its presence with a small, crudely etched sign hanging from the front window. The simplicity of the building disguised the presence of the incredibly elegant machinery inside.

Grynne pushed open the beaten, wooden door and strode in, his eyes adjusting to the darkness of the musty office. Inside was a desk covered in a fine layer of dust, upon which lay several messy stacks of papers that looked primarily like invoices. A small, frail-looking man sat behind it whose face could hardly be seen behind a set of thick, ridiculously large spectacles and a massive gray, wiry beard that curled all the way down onto the desk. While mostly bald, what little hair he had left was white and blown back from each corner of his head like small pyramids. He wrinkled his nose as Grynne entered and looked at him from over the top of his glasses.

“Well well, come to pay me for the last time I did your job for you?” sneered the old man.

Grynne snorted and threw himself into the stool on the other side of the desk. He raised a hand, displaying an Alabast gold squeezed between his fore and middle finger.

“Will this cover it Cardy?”

Cardyn snatched the gold coin, staring at it suspiciously. He shrugged and slipped it into a coat pocket.

“You know I hate it when you call me that,” Cardyn paused. “I’ve never seen you this happy to part with a gold piece.”

“Things change,” Grynne shrugged. “I’ve got another job for you.”

“Not just here to pay an old friend a visit? For shame. What’s the job this time? Another fugitive?”

“Business in a moment, first I was hoping you could send a message to my sister through the tubes.”

“Ah, Annabelle to receive another visit from her Fallen brother? She’ll be thrilled I’m sure,” Cardyn jeered.

“Tell her to meet me at our place on the hill for dinner tomorrow would you? Just before sunset,” Grynne replied.

“Mhm. And the other thing?”

“Have you heard any word on a missing girl?”

“Sure sure, lots of girls. Any in particular?”

“Khyael. Of the Tines.”

“One of the Queen’s cousins? If she was missing I’d have assumed we’d all know about it.”

Being a Messenger, Cardyn had access to more information than most. He had fashioned himself a profession out of knowing what was going on in this city and selling that knowledge to the right buyers. Or the wrong ones, depending. Well, aside from his nominal job of merely sending messages through the tubes for customers. Luckily for Grynne, he had a history with Cardyn. Soon after Grynne had Fallen from nobility, Cardyn had looked after him. He did not know much about Cardyn’s past but was sure that if not for him, he would have become gutter trash like most of the denizens of Rat’s Nest. Grynne owed Cardyn his life and more besides.

“Sure,” Grynne said. “But have you heard any rumblings from the upper crust? Anything duly nefarious?”
Cardyn shook his head, “Nothing unusual. Same old grudges, same old griping, same old affairs. Nothing of interest for the likes of you and me. What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into? I thought I taught you better than to get tangled up in their business.”

Grynne rolled his eyes, “It’s just a job.”

“If you say so. I’ll keep my ears to the ground for ya. Now get on out of here, I’ve got work to do.”

At this Cardyn stood up and shuffled to the back of his office. Standing, he as not much taller than sitting. The years had not been kind to him and he hunched over as if bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. Once at the back of the room he pulled open and curtain that revealed a much larger room behind the office and Grynne was able to catch a glimpse of the tubes. Against the wall was an array of cylinders into which a number of clear pipes funneled into, that then disappeared into the floor, illuminated by a faint, dark blue glow. The machine had been constructed using Milen magic. Milen users were proficient engineers and typically powered their machines using sets of runes and crystals. Grynne could see a number of runes carved into the sides of the gray, whirring cylinders lining the wall. The crystals required to run machines like this, however, were not cheap. Grynne mused to himself about how Cardyn was able to acquire this sort of machinery as the curtain fell back into place and he stepped back out into the hot, Alabastian sun.