Gram retired to his office for the last few hours of his shift, it was a bit short of the required street hours he was supposed to make but he thought that he had seen enough to justify that.

On the very top of his report were these three things:

A Lord and Lady from the capital were sighted at the docks surrounded by a small army of mercenaries. A lone mercenary was sighted with a scholar of some description, they quickly retreated to the the upper district. There was a strange attraction drawing Gram to the lone mercenary. Unnaturally so.

These were the leading details, along with context and descriptions of all involved. Gram hadn’t received much more direction than this so he elected to be as verbose as possible. He hoped that it would be good enough, though that seemed to be a recurring part of his job.

On that note, his official title was “Head Investigator of Blue Runs”, Blue Runs was the name of the “paper”, so to speak. His title of “Head Investigator” was a bit misleading, in that it made it seem like there might be others in the employ of the paper. It was mentioned before, but there wasn’t any publishing infrastructure, at the very least he wasn’t in contact with anyone that might be related to that. It was likely a front for something, and as it went those things tended to present short term mortality to their less-than-faithful employees.

Gram put the last touches on his paper, he nicked his finger on the page, before he could get the lacerated digit to his mouth a single drop of blood dripped down and touched the page be was writing on. He groaned loudly and stood up, the front page of his report was now ruined and he couldn’t let it be taken in good conscience like that. When he stood up from his chair he felt a strange feeling, or rather, he felt the lack of something.

When he was quite young, he was playing in the alleys of the city with his brother. They were stupid kids then and when he took a fall he hurt his knee. He didn’t think anything of it at the time, so he and his brother played for the better part of the day in the filthy covered alleys until the evening oil came on.

When he returned home, his mother scolded him for not cleaning his hurt knee and sent him to bed early. Though normally he would sulk from this seemingly unfair punishment, he was too distracted by the welling pain in his knee. He called for his mother when it became unbearable, they found that the injury was much worse than it appeared. His parents and brother rushed him to the local Medean Clinic and they did the best they could, but an infection had already taken root. They healed his flesh as best as they could, but in the course of it he was left with a faint ache in his knee that followed him for the rest of his days.

When he would sit for more than a few minutes and they stood up, it would ache for the first few steps before the pain faded away. He had felt this same aching pain every time he sat for the last 30 years, without fail. It was so common to him that he barely even noticed it unless the problem was stressed for whatever reason.

Until just now.

He pulled up the leg of his trousers and looked at his knee. The flesh had long since healed in the decades, but there was a small bit of swollen scar material at the place it had been. The Medea claimed it was a result of being healed slightly incorrectly and was benign, but when he looked then, it was gone.

Placed in a moment of absent-minded shock, he sat back down for a minute then stood back up again. The ache was absent once again. He shook his knee, waiting for an ache that never came.

It was nothing short of a small miracle.

Gram was not a faithful man, but he couldn’t help but whisper a small thanks. This distraction did derail his thoughts however and he was reminded of why he stood up in the first place. He turned back to reach for the bloodied paper, but to his utter shock it was no longer bloodied at all. He stopped for a moment to calm himself, in the back of his mind he knew that the only reason suddenly impossible things start happening is when something is amiss.

In a controlled, but frantic feeling sweep, Gram scanned the room for something out of place, or out of order. There was nothing obviously wrong, the papers on the various surfaces, the books on the shelves, the coat on the hook, everything was seemingly still in place.

The room was still warm, but not too warm, there was not out of place breeze, nor an unnatural stillness. No faints whisper or sounds, nothing to suggest that anything at all was wrong.

None of that explained why he didn’t feel comfortable. The hairs on the back of his neck stuck up like the air was filled with static, his nerves were strained sensing something that his eyes, ears, nose and skin could not. There was a vague nothing that rested on him.

He looked at his hand, specifically his cut finger. There was no cut.

With nothing left to help him, he turned to an old trick his mother taught him. Something that only they could do. Not even his brother could do it.

Gram sat back down at his desk and closed his eyes.

He waited until his heart beat rested enough to clear his mind.

This was something that he had known for a long time, but he didn’t know what it was. His mother had no clue to its origin either, she was capable of using magic, but he was not. That told them both it wasn’t magic.

With his heart slowed, and his breathing low, and mind clear. He focused.

He tapped his finger on the table.

The sound was quiet, but it carried beyond its strength. In the dark behind his closed eyes, he could feel it. A wave that spread from the place he tapped and radiated through the room, it passed through the walls, and through the sky above.

It wasn’t a real view, he could not see anything that he didn’t know would be there. If the whole world outside disappeared and he did this, it would give him the same view.

It was also only a glimpse for a single moment, for the duration of the tap at most.

It wasn’t something that had any use for looking deeper into the real world. The purpose, so far as he and his mother knew, was to give perspective. It removed anything and from his mind’s eye. It gave perfect clarity. Gram opened his eyes again and he tried his best to focus exactly on what he was sensing.

He turned his head toward the wall to his left, there was nothing there but an empty and unpainted part of the brickwork, but the brick wasn’t was caught his attention. It was the dust on the floor below it.

There was a small bit of the brick that had chipped off the wall when he was moving his stuff into the office. He had never even mentally noticed it, only his subconscious even considered it, let alone record it in his memory. But with the clarity he had in this small fraction of a second he could recall it existed before.

The small chip was gone, but the evidence was the surrounding dust. It was thicker than the place where the chip was, and just a few inches away in his direction, there was another chip, only this one was still present.

Before a single second passed from the moment he tapped the desk, he had a clue.

Gram stood from his deck and walked over to the coat rack, he put on his coat and left out the front door. The rain was falling lightly from the sky, it was dark now and the streets were empty besides a few. He paid them no might and walked around the side of the building into the alley beside it.

He walked down until he was at the opposite of the wall inside the building. Down on the ground was the vague figure of a person sitting on the rain soaked stone.

Contrary to the mental image that this might evoke, the person before him was not soaked to the bone, much the opposite they seemed to be as dry as one might be tucked under a blanket in front of a warm fire.

The stone around them was bleached of any impurity, as if someone had just scrubbed them clean. The bricks at their back were as pristine as they day they were stacked into the wall.

Gram looked down at the sleeve of his coat, he knew that there was a small tear there from when he caught it on the door a few weeks back. It was too small to care about so he left it.

But here and now, it was gone.

He bent a knee down and got a better look at the one in front of him.

He could see that below the faded white hood was a mess of hair, instead of the face being clear to the open air there was a white mask obscuring it.

The hair was a sign of something being slightly amiss. Generally speaking, when someone has hair, it was one solid color, maybe gray or white at the roots if they were old or unlucky. But this person’s hair was not like that, shocks of White and Black striped through the length of the otherwise blazing red hair. Gram wasn’t unfamiliar with the habit the young folk had of dying their hair. It was something that happened from time to time, but this didn’t look like that. It was unruly and uneven, the colors spilled and blended in such a way that it didn’t look like anything was unnaturally done.

Gram reached forward and put a hand carefully on their shoulder. He gave one gentle shake and something incredible happened, they shuddered for a moment and the shocks of white and black hair instantly disappeared.

The hand of a young woman rose to reach for the blank white mask. She pulled if off and looked at him with two glowing blue eyes.

“Yes?” She asked.