1st Kekel 6039
Another year dawns and I can’t keep on like this. Pretending. The entire world might be blind but I’m not and I’m sick of pretending otherwise. I see them everywhere. The dead, or whatever they are. I see their red eyes in my dreams. Sometimes they see me too. How is it possible, monsters can look so sad? School is a waste of time. I’m learning lies, nothing I read is real. What good is a degree in nonsense? What can it teach me about the world I see but no one else admits is real? Father will be angry. Esa will understand, I think. She won’t admit it. She’s always been better at pretending than I am, but she knows what’s really out there.
14th Kekel 6039
I walk the streets, everyday, all day. I walk and I see. Truly see. There is a whole world hidden away in the cracks, the allies, the shadows of this seedy little city called home. I feel alive for the first time in twenty-one years. All my senses are alert. I see colours I never knew existed. I hear the dead speak. I go where they go. I live as they live, and somehow that is not an oxymoron. The dead truly do live, because, I am learning, they are not dead. Not in any sense that means anything. They might have died in flesh but they think and they feel the same as I. It has only been a few weeks but I have already learned so much. All it took was opening my eyes.
Father is disappointed, of course. He was so proud that Esa and I were accepted for higher learning; we are the first of our family to go to the university and I know that father feels I am letting not just myself, but our family down. Esa told me so to my face, but am used to ignoring her when she’s in her snits. Father says nothing, he never does, but I know he blames himself for what I am. The magic in me. I tried to talk to him about the dead. We fought. Father tells me I have to stay away from the dead. That they are dangerous. But he won’t say why. Hypocrite. The man trained me and Esa in magic, just as his father trained him. But he never told us how much more there was to the world, than normal eyes can perceive. Although it hurts me, I am sickened by his cowardice and that he would inflict that cowardice on me.
I will show him. I’ll keep going on my journey of discovery. There is so much to learn. Where do the dead come from? Why do they stay here, when their lot is so miserable? It is my goal to have the answers to these questions within the month.
13th Vihonin 6039
Father was right. The dead are dangerous. What a horrendous curse it must be, to feed on the life of others. What a joke the Cloister’s teachings truly are. There is no grace, no promised land beyond the sky. When we die we are condemned to walk the streets invisible and starved until we fade away. Yet I am not afraid of the dead because they hunger for my life. What could be more human than to hunger, after all?
More so than ever I am determined to learn more. I cannot believe that this is the way things are meant to be. That all of life is struggle and death offers no surcease. These ‘greys’ need someone to champion them. They are people too. There must be something I can do.
21st Vihonin 6039
I am learning so much. There is some pain, yes, but this life has become my classroom and I have never felt more alive than when I am with the dead. Death defines life, it gives our struggles meaning. And if that meaning is merely defined by that of predator and prey? Well then, so is the natural world. Perhaps this is how we humans remain connected to the natural and the primal?
There is an irony, great and profound, in the knowledge that I did not know I truly had a soul until I started to give it away.
3rd Dalon 6039
Even as spring blossoms, I am as the walking dead. As my mind opens to the real I feel myself slipping away from the world I knew before. Esa is worried. We are twins, she is the other side of the coin that is my self. How could she not sense how I have changed? She came home from school to see me, prompted no doubt by our father. I don’t know what to say to her. How can I tell her that I would willingly sacrifice every piece of myself for the answers I seek? My eyes are open and I fear nothing more than my old blindness.
My new grey friends have begun to trust me. They speak freely around me and it is only now that I realise how much they kept back before. I have been learning about the magical underworld. The street practitioners, as they call themselves. These men and woman –all of them like me –who refuse to be bound by the laws of the blind. They fascinate me, I admit, but not enough to distract me from my mission to find out why the dead are trapped here.
To that end I have had some success, while none of the greys I have spoken to know why they linger on this mortal plane they have begun to speak of a place where they were free of their hunger and able to regain their living form. They call it the “Eyrie”. The way they speak of this Eyrie one would believe it was the blessed Sky Kingdom, but they assure me it existed here, in the city.
I am determined to know more about this Eyrie and why the greys speak of it only in the past tense. I am sure if I knew more about it, if perhaps I could find it, I could learn more about the nature of the dead and how I might help my new friends.
7th Dalon 6039
Sometimes I feel so raw inside, it is like my mind is bleeding. The shadows have sharp edges and colours assault me. The world is too much and I am always cold. Except when the rage comes. Sudden and strange, like a tidal wave. I am angry. I am raving. I am laughing as I cry.
I made my sister cry. I punched my hand through the window, just to watch myself bleed. I wonder, am I dying inside?
18th Dalon 6039
I have a job, tending bar on Milos Street. Father is pleased; I can see the hope in his eyes. The futile, ridiculous hope that I might leave my studies behind and rejoin the tedium of the blind. If he knew what sort of club it is he would not be so pleased. I get to see my friends there. But more than that, I watch the owner, Mladin Yaraslav. He is a street practitioner; a conjurer and a crook. My friends say he is the New Boss. The Old Boss, they say, built the Eyrie before Yaraslav put him away. They say the Eyrie fell to ruin when the Old Boss was deposed. Now they have no choice but to work for Mladin Yaraslav as if they are the spoils of war; one king falls, another rises and the greys go where the hope is, slim and corrupt as it might be.
I am not a fool, for all that father and Esa think I am sick in the head and whisper about me behind my back. I know that my studies are dangerous. I walk a one-way street; there is no turning back. I want to know who the fallen king was. I want to find the Eyrie. I need to know if this all there is to life and death.
25th Dalon 6039
An interesting thing happened today. A man came to see Yaraslav. Most patrons come for my friends “services” but this man was uninterested in my friends’ charms. His name was Anorin and, from overhearing him, I have found he is in debt upto his eyeballs with unsavoury people. Yaraslav said he would help him, but only if someone called “Annika” agreed to a job (I am under no illusions that said “Job” involves criminal activity. However, the pair were careful to avoid discussing details in public).
I asked my friends after closing if they knew Anorin and Annika, they would not answer. I have learned that reticence always means yes, but that I am not yet to be trusted with the particulars. It is annoying, but I understand that my friends have little left to hold onto save their secrets. I do not know if this event has any relevance. I have little interest in Yaraslav’s criminal activities per se, but, perhaps I will gain more clues about the mysterious Old Boss by learning all I can about Yaraslav’s associates?
4th Silkaholin 6039
A woman comes to see Yaraslav sometimes; under certain lights one could be forgiven for thinking them siblings. The woman is as blonde and fair as Yaraslav and cuts just as dramatic a figure in her own way, but where Yaraslav favours the guardy colours and trappings of a circus ringmaster, the woman favours leather and dark hues. She unnerves me. My friends all fear her. I think I do too. There is something famished about her; almost as if she had a gauntness of the soul. Looking at her, I am reminded that under that pretty flesh is a grinning skull. It is odd that I should spend so much time around the deceased, but it is this living woman that makes me fear death.
She and Yaraslav spend time in his office. I wonder how he can stand it, but then I remember this is the man who now rules the dead. I do not know what they talk about, but it is clear that this woman has power over Yaraslav.
I asked my friends about her but all they would tell me is that she is a predator; they know not where she came from, only that she is a new arrival to the city. They say that she is part of a new group who have made their home in Miran-Kovahna district. They warn me to stay away from there, it is a wild place where the wild things roam.
8th Silkaholin 6039
I think I nearly died today. It wasn’t Ingat’s fault. It was mine. I offered to feed him and I knew he was close to losing control. I did not want to die, but I am now convinced that flesh or spirit, it matters not; humanity is greater than the packaging it comes in. In fact, I feel I am now so familiar with the dead that living is a charade. I am tired of pretending there is any point in living when I know what comes after.
All the same I did not die. Something saved me. A vision of spider legs. A voice in my head.
“You are mine, child of my soul.”
I feel different, as if I am no longer alone in my own mind. There is a hole in my skull and strange eyes peer inside, tasting the flavour and tenor of my thoughts.
I wonder if I am going mad?
10th Silkaholin 6039
I am ablaze with fever; laid low by dream and delusion so gripping, I no longer know if I am asleep or awake. Visions crowd my head, my skull is split wide and spider legs prize open my soul.
A whole new world has opened up inside the folds of my brain.
I see a man in the shadow of a huge, winged horse, bathed in light and power. He shines like a beacon and calls to him a dragon and a scorpion.
I see a chamber deep in a mountain. The dragon takes the white horse there but does not tell him about the horned ghost imprisoned within. The dragon is wrathful, but the scorpion feels guilt when she looks on the ghost. It is her fault. She has betrayed her people and done great wrong trying to do good.
I see a man with antlers. He and the ghost are one, this I know, but I do not know how they were sundered. Only that many, many souls will suffer as the man fights to take it back.
12th Silkaholin 6039
The fever abates, but I do not feel like myself. In fact, I no longer know who I am. I am a mutable creature; changing as the world shifts under me. I feel like I am flayed alive; layers and layers of myself fly away into thin air. I am a thread of a man clinging to a single purpose.
I need to know what it all means.
18th Silkaholin 6039
Today two people I have never seen before came to the club. A woman with cinnamon skin and a man who looked sad when he saw my friends cavorting in front of the customers. I poured them drinks and listened to their conversation. The woman is Annika, sister to Anorin. She has come to make a deal with Yaraslav to save her brother. Before they vanish into his office, I hear mention of a “Bank Job” (it does not take a genius to parse what that means).
Before they left, the man talked to my friends. I was both jealous and intrigued. I had not known my friends had living associates aside myself. The man called many of them my friends by name but they ignored him. This saddened the man quite visibly. After he left, I asked my friends why they shunned someone so obviously concerned for their welfare. They told me simply that the man did not have the power of the Old Boss and could not help them. Ingat confessed that soon he thought the man would be dead.
1st Bakov 6039
I dreamed of the woman, Annika, tonight. I saw her die, bleeding out on the street. The constables tried to take the body, but a swarm of butterflies descended and stole the body away. I saw the man with antlers take a stylus and a pot of magic ink and begin to draw upon her naked torso, signs and symbols I do not know but which burned like molten gold. I saw her grey ghost sit up out of her corpse and start to scream. And then to change. In an instant she was a fiend of horns and antlers.
When I woke, I read in the papers about a failed robbery at the First Imperial Bank.
7th Bakov 6039
Ingat is gone. It happened on my day off. I have failed him.
9th Bakov 6039
Esa clings to my side. She pushes and she prods and tries to provoke me to some semblance of life or energy. She has returned home now term is over and seems determined to hound me at every turn. I know she fears I am losing my mind.
It is not my mind I am losing. It is my soul.
What good is a soul, when I know that having one condemns me to the misery of becoming a grey? Better to barter it away helping my friends than risk surviving my death.
31st Bakov 6039
Something happened today and I can scarce keep my hand steady to write, such is my excitement. A man attacked the club. I’d take him for a madman where it not for the fact that he came armed and prepared. It was an extraordinary thing. The man attacked with a squad of drones and, more remarkable still, homunculi. The only time I have seen a homunculus in person was when mother –seraph guard her soul –took us to Tremenz International airport. I remember Esa cried when she saw the metal men.
These homunculi were nothing like those faceless automatons; one wore a housecoat, another a floppy brimmed hat. I’d hazard a guess the attacker built them himself because they did not look like military issue.
They broke the wards by walking through them and ripped the doorframes straight out of the wall. My friends scattered in panic but the attackerwas not interested in harming them. He’d come for Yaraslav.
I hid behind the bar and listened to the exchange between Yaraslav and the attacker. His homunculi had Yaraslav pinned and the man held a gun to his head. The pair traded insults at first, which leads me to believe they knew each other.
Then the attacker – I think his name was Ludo? Accused Yaraslav of kidnapping (or perhaps killing?) his friend (lover?) a woman called V(?).
It was then that things grew interesting. Ludo accused Yaraslav of betraying a friend of his – “Yasha” by having him put in prison. Naturally this piqued my interest. Could this be the mysterious Old Boss I’d heard so much about, I wondered? Alas, neither man spoke more about this Yasha, specifically. Although it was clear that Ludo believed Yaraslav was targeting his friends one by one, he mentioned the woman Annika by name. What chills me is that Yaraslav did not deny it. In fact, he goaded Ludo, telling him, and I quote: “You’re lucky Matriev wants you spared”.
Yaraslav then did something that had I not witnessed it with my own eyes I would think was nothing more than a figment of a fever dream. He grew wings. Great, iridescent wings shimmering like a mirage. This was more than mere conjugation. This was a work of immense magic. I could feel it in my soul. A great power rang through me like a heavy bell.
The room was suddenly full of glittering butterflies, the same as I had seen in my dream. They surrounded Ludo, who could not fight them off. Yaraslav then ordered Ludo to take his “toys” and leave.
Far more than visions of wings, that one moment has left ice in my soul. I had heard talk of possession, of thraldom, of necromancy that could make one man another’s slave, but to see it in person? I am shaken.
5th Smytaen 6039
The summer heat is upon us and the city swelters. I am in a torpor; there is much I wish to do but I have no energy to do it.
Life with father and Esa grows unbearable. I cannot hold my temper. This house is a cage and I wish to smash it to pieces.
8th Smytaen 6039
Today I met Varnah, Yaraslav’s newest recruit. I did not dare ask her if she was the “V” Ludo came to save but it seems impossible that she could be anyone else. She speaks little and appears unbearably sad. I confess I am surprised to see her here. I had thought her soul would go to the man with antlers.
11th Smytaen 6039
My friends are dying, burning away in the summer heat. It is worse than anything I could imagine. They twist and they snarl, they claw and roar and die screaming in rage.
My soul screams with them.
There is no hope and life is cruelty.
20th Smytaen 6039
The dreams return in earnest, I feel as though they are pushed upon me by the spider burrowed in my brain. Warnings and portents. Images of places I have never been and people I do not know.
A bird in a tree watches hunters under an orange sky while a dark eyed king sits in a cell and waits.
In the heart of the mountain the horned ghost lingers. It is a thing at once stolen and coveted; a burden to those who guard it and something mourned and lamented by the man with antlers.
23rd Smytaen 6039
The bear has a secret and all the blooms are bloody.
This is important. I do not know why or to whom.
1st Shion 6039
The sun is cold and I am tired. I scream so that I can hear my own voice.
There is a snake in a tower where half the rooms do not exist. She has a squatter she cannot remove. The man with antlers is building an army to lay siege the mountain.
16th Shion 6039
I am candle with wick all but burned to ash. The spider in my brain shows me the path to salvation, but to what end? I know now there is no true salvation. The Sky Kingdom is a lie. There is no peace. No paradise. We are all lost souls in this world. Why fight the inevitable?
I am resolved to die satisfied. I am going to do what I should have done weeks ago. I will seek out the man with antlers where he hides.
21st Shion 6039
Invigorated by purpose I breached the invisible divide that separates Miran-Kovahna district from the rest of the city; here I found the world of my dreams. Magic and entropy ruled this primal wonderland.
I walked as a man guided by the hand of fate. Aenion’s blessing was against me, if the voice in my head was any indication, but still the spider could not obscure my sight. What soul I have left to me served me well, as I moved unseen through streets littered with oddities of flesh and blood and spirit.
At last I found the tower I sought, prosaic in its concrete ugliness. I waited until two strange creatures sought entry and snuck in at their heels before the doors closed. Like a thief I climbed the floors, searching out a room I had only seen from the inside.
I do not know how long I searched before I heard voices. The man with antlers and the female predator. They walked right past me, and I followed them upstairs. They spoke of things I could not parse. Transmutation and the spellcraft of something called Calvahno, and of failures and a Vanguard.
To a room they led me, one that was warded with magic that burned my eyes. I was forced to withdraw back down the stairs as the magic was so strong I feared it would penetrate my glamour.
When they disappeared inside I had no choice but to leave.
24th Shion 6039
There is a man in a deerstalker hat following me. He does not try and hide. He follows me as I roam the streets by day and waits under the streetlight at night. I see him through my window now.
The spider tells me there is still time, my fate is not yet sealed. She whispers always of escape. I do not seek escape, only answers.
I will confront the man right now.
25th Shion 6039
I am alive, which I confess I am surprised about. I confronted the man in the deerstalker hat last night. I told him I knew he worked for the man with antlers. I demanded to know what the man did in the warded room and why he had killed and taken Annika’s body, and I suspect, the bodies of many other practitioners. I had nothing to lose and nothing to hide. No reason at all to restrain my curiosity now that I had a real shot of getting answers.
I think I amused the man with my candour. He asked me how I’d learned so much and it is here that I hesitated as it suddenly occurred to me that while I have no fear for my own safety, Esa and father are very much innocent, and more dangerously, ignorant in this affair. I told him that I worked at the Butterfly and had seen a lot of very incriminating things –which no less than the truth. The man in the deerstalker hat seemed to accept this, although he appeared displeased with Yaraslav.
The man asked me if I wished to play hero and interfere. I told him I did not believe in heroes and that my interest was purely intellectual. This seemed to amuse the man further, although it must be said, he gave very little away of his true thoughts. To further prove my point I said I was interested in learning more about the boundaries of life and death and how a soul might transmutate. That last was a spur of the moment inspiration, as I remembered some of what I had overheard yesterday.
However, it was when I mentioned the horned ghost in the mountain that the man in the deerstalker hat’s demeanour changed. He was instantly alert, interrogating me. How did I know about the ghost? Had I seen it in person? Was I sent by the Vanguard?
It was not hard to appear ignorant under the circumstances. The man in the deerstalker seemed aggravated by inability to answer. More than once I wondered if he might kill me. Everything from the man’s suspect behaviour to his association with the man with antlers, led me to believe he was capable of such a thing, but he did not harm me.
He told me that if I wished to know what “Matriev” was up to, I was to meet him at midnight on Rhadic Bridge on Thursday 28th. I was tell no one where I was going, or speak of this meeting. I agreed to the terms. Why would I not?
I asked but one more question before the man left, not expecting an answer and therefore surprised when I got one. I asked him what the horned ghost was to Matriev and why he wanted it back so badly.
The man in the deerstalker hat told me simply that it was his godhood.
28th Shion 6039
I can no longer hear the voice of the spider. I think she has abandoned me, my fate now sealed. I do not begrudge her. I have refused her counsel at every opportunity.
Instead, as I go to what is likely my death, I make one plea to the seraph who watches over mortal destiny: protect Esa and father.
I leave this diary as a testament to all I tried and failed to do. Perhaps it is hubris, but I have felt for sometime now, while writing these entries that I am keeping a record not for myself, but another pair of eyes. I harbour a suspicion who you are; I hope you find my words useful when you come to take your city back.

As for myself? I am off to see what comes next.