=•=•= Bryson
Anyone who ever stepped outside their little village in search of those who trafficked in the unseemly knew taverns were gold mines for information. Drunks are generous with secrets, and a man who thinks he’s safe talks louder than he should.
Most grog shops were forgettable holes—which suited me fine. I liked places where no one cared who you were. Hunters and marks alike knew the value of a crowd that wouldn’t look twice. In a town like Hathroon, a bar full of blurred faces was as close as anyone got to anonymity.
What always amazed me was how predictable men could be. Those wanting to disappear somehow ended up exactly where anyone with sense would start looking. You’d think after the first dozen got caught, the rest might learn. They didn’t.
Not that I was complaining. If it weren’t for stupidity, I’d have to be a hell of a lot smarter than I am.
Outside, the night storm hammered the shutters and roof beams. Inside, the Low Downe held its usual stink of smoke, wet wool, and sweat. The place could’ve held a hundred; tonight, half that number hunched in clusters of three or four, dice cups rattling, mugs clinking, the barkeep keeping his rag moving.
To most, the tavern would’ve been smoke and shadow. To me, it was lines and pulses—every body in the room wrapped in a small storm of energy. I called it Sight, though it wasn’t sight the way others meant it. Through gnats and flies drifting near the lanterns, I caught outlines, movement, and the faintest glimmer of the Ley Threads. It wasn’t much like what other people described seeing. But it was enough.
I’d already run a thread across most of them, tugging the weave just hard enough to feel where the lies sat. The small knots of drinkers were mostly ne’er-do-wells talking shit or whispering about business they didn’t want on a sheriff’s ledger.
Only one group mattered. A couple of tables off, a half-circle of roughnecks leaned close. At their center sat the reason I was there: Hasko Skinter.
If anyone else knew what the bastard looked like, I’d have needed to move quickly. But with Skinter’s knack for shape-shifting, I doubted any of them had a clue. The bounty listed the crimes he’d committed with his gift for slipping skin—and that gift was the only reason the notice demanded him alive.
The storm worked in my favor. No patrol would hurry through Hathroon’s mud when they could stay dry. And in towns like this, where magic was outlawed, patrols weren’t a minor concern. They liked to make examples of anyone suspected of it—guilty or not.
All I had to do was wait for the right moment.
Skinter was brazen, not stupid. He flashed artifacts and tricks like a rooster showing feathers, but never where the law could swat him quickly. Hathroon was the perfect choice—small enough for him to vanish, weak enough on patrols to tempt him into arrogance.
He had no idea I’d been tracking him long enough to be patient.
If he’d been willing to keep to the backwaters where magic flowed free and crimes were easier to hide, he could’ve lived in relative peace. Maybe even made it a few decades. But like most men who itch for the edge, he couldn’t help himself.
Men like him—men like me, if I’m honest—thrive on dancing too close to the fire. The difference is I know when to step back. Skinter didn’t. His long list of crimes kept him moving, and that cursed shape-shifting gift made him harder to pin than most.
For nearly a month, he’d gone to ground. The law had lost its urgency. I hadn’t.
Hunting bastards like Skinter scratched a lot of itches. Sure, it paid well—kept me living better than most men without a trade. But it also gave me the satisfaction of pulling teeth before they bit anyone else, and I won’t deny the jolt of adrenaline sweetened the deal.
These days, that jolt was about the closest thing I had to feeling alive.
Hurman would’ve hated hearing that. He had this way of going quiet when I said something too honest, as if silence itself might shame me into becoming wiser. Back when I still had him in my ear, the work he was training me to do had meant something cleaner. Discipline. Purpose. A reason not to turn every ugly thing I was learning into a living.
Now? Mostly, I hunted monsters because I was good at it. Because it kept coin in my purse, blood off innocent floors, and my mind too busy to notice how empty the rest of my life had gotten.
It was like one of those role-playing games some fool might run in a back room—only this one left bodies.
Tonight, I was fairly certain Skinter wasn’t carrying anything enchanted. Which meant the patrols and their aurawraiths had no reason to come sniffing around.
Most people had never seen an aurawraith up close and counted themselves lucky. Half animal, half spectral, they looked forever a second out of step with time. Even for me, they were unsettling. They glowed faintly, as if lit from within, and when they moved, they seemed to drag the world after them.
Let one off the leash, and it became something else entirely. Aurawraiths fed on magic—tore it out of you and left nothing but a husk. They destroyed enchanted items, crippled magical beings, and even if you weren’t magical yourself, you could still walk away with burns, slashes, or worse. Some never walked away at all.
I’d thought more than once about slipping an enchanted trinket into Skinter’s pocket and letting the aurawraiths do their work. Tempting. But you don’t get paid when the corpse is dragged off by lawmen. And I don’t work for free.
The truth was, the bounty—while handsome—was the least of it. The real prize was the hunt itself. Taking changelings like Skinter off the board meant fewer innocents bleeding for his pleasure.
Make no mistake, Hasko Skinter was filth. Murderer, robber, embezzler—pick your poison. Worse than his crimes was the way he carried himself, convinced he was some poor soul wronged by the world. The kind who thought every cruelty he dealt out was “reparation” for an injustice no one else remembered.
Some days it was coin he wanted. Other days, he took flesh. If he thought you threatened him, he’d cut you down—children included. And he’d do it smiling, because in his head, he was the victim, not the monster.
As if murder, theft, and arrogance weren’t enough, Skinter’s mind seemed as fractured as his skin. He was the kind of walking disaster who could’ve filled a physician’s casebook: multiple personalities layered over a sociopathic streak, all wired through with the dead calm of a psychopath. Wicked combination. Deadly one.
That unpredictability made him a nightmare even for oracles. Mediums usually hunted through the Aether by anchoring on a soul’s fixed traits, but Skinter didn’t have fixed traits. No true gender. No true face. Sometimes not even the same species twice.
Most shapeshifters could manage a handful of forms—five at best. A touch of skin, a close watch of the gait, and they could wear your likeness for a while. But the more unnatural the form, the faster it burned out. Few could hold one long without paying in blood and bone.
If the tales were true, Skinter put them all to shame. Supposedly, he could take nearly any animate shape he touched. Human, beast—it didn’t matter. He favored men and manlike things—sasquatch, rumor said—and could keep the disguise for days. I doubted the length, but not the talent. And if the whispers about mimicking clothes and scent were right, the rest of his kind looked like children playing dress-up beside him.
I caught wind of his trail—robbery, double murder, the usual résumé entries—and followed it to Hathroon. Weeks earlier, he’d lifted jewels off Baron Manchester and gutted a man for daring to stop him. Then he did what only Skinter would do: turned into the Baron and hid in the man’s own barn.
The hunters found him—or thought they did. Bloodhounds baying, noses buried in straw. Skinter, they said, found a sweat rag, breathed it in, and stepped out as the Baron to the last button and stink. Demanded to know what all the fuss was about.
The dogs howled at the hay bales. He cursed them and ordered the men to get their mutts out. They obeyed.
Should’ve ended there. But Skinter never knew when to leave quiet luck alone.
He rode straight back to the manor, bold as brass, and let the lady of the house greet him. He kissed her.
And that was his mistake.
The real Baron never put his tongue in his wife’s mouth. Skinter did. She screamed and clutched him like she’d caught a demon by the horns. Guards dragged him off, stripped the jewels from his pockets, and threw him in chains until the Baron returned.
By the time word reached the magistrate, Skinter was already bound for the King’s Bench.
On the way there, he pulled his favorite trick. He turned into one of his captors, pointed at the real man, and swore he was the impostor. Chaos followed—the kind that always does when men think they’ve trapped a wolf only to find it already inside the pen. In the confusion, someone loosed an arrow and dropped the wrong man. As he lay bleeding, begging them to believe he wasn’t a shifter, Skinter walked away.
After that, a handsome bounty hit the boards. Alive only—they wanted to see his true form before they strung him up. Trouble was, no one knew what that “true form” looked like. The bounty went unclaimed, and Skinter roamed free.
Once I confirmed the tale of his escape, I bought a Waygate ride to Travendale and started working the rumor mills—eavesdropping, paying for whispers, weighing every story against the others until the false threads frayed. The closer I drew to Hathroon, the more the stories aligned.
The most recent one went like this:
Skinter had been cornered near an auction yard. Lawmen closed in. He panicked, touching people as he ran and shifting skins like a man flipping through masks. When that failed, he ducked into a horse pen, slapped a stallion’s flank, and turned himself into its double.
It might’ve worked if he’d been born a horse. But he wasn’t. The herd knew the difference. One lashed out and shattered his bones with a kick. I figured that was why he shifted back—a horse crippled by another horse earned no sympathy, but a man buckled by a hoof drew every eye.
Didn’t matter. The sudden appearance of a bleeding man where a horse had been a heartbeat earlier spooked the herd. Thirty animals panicked, bucking and bolting. The stampede nearly flattened him.
When the dust cleared, a healer found him broken and bloodied. The lawmen glanced at the ruin in the dirt, decided he was some farmhand unlucky enough to be in the wrong place, and moved on. The healer—kind, dutiful—had him carried to her cabin and spent the night pouring herself into stitching him back together with her craft.
Skinter woke to find her asleep on the floor, worn out from saving his life.
His thanks?
He slit her throat, chewed down a leg of salted meat, and walked out.
Before leaving, he scrawled a note accusing her of failing him during the stampede—as if bringing him back to life wasn’t enough. Her daughter later said a small sack of star sapphires was missing too.
Throat-cutting was bad enough. Pettiness made it worse.
The murder rattled the town like thunder under floorboards. Fear and outrage spread, quick and hot. That was when his trail reached me.
Not long after, word came out of Hathroon: some fool was flashing star sapphires in a poker game. High-stakes only. No one else in three counties had reason to toss stones like that, so I knew who it had to be.
By the time I tracked him there, he’d already lost the gems—careless as a drunk spilling ale. He didn’t mind. The sapphires were bait to get him into the game he really wanted. Skinter was always playing for a different stake than the one on the table.
Didn’t matter. I had him pegged now. The hunt was tightening.
A gust of wind slammed through the Low Downe’s warped windows, snuffing out half the light in the room. The remaining lanterns sputtered as if they were afraid of the dark. Patrons cursed, mugs thumped, and fists banged on wood as if noise could cow the storm.
The lone barmaid went about relighting them, striking matches like each one had personally insulted her—a woman who’d had enough nights like this to know there’d be more.
When she passed the kitchen door, a smaller shape leaned out from the heat and clatter beyond it. Not a man. Too slight for that. Too careful. A young voice murmured something I couldn’t catch, and a heel of bread changed hands.
Son, brother, sweetheart—hard to tell. Whoever he was, she took it without a word, but the hard rhythm of her steps softened for three whole paces afterward.
I pulled my Sight away.
Not because I’m noble. Because some things are harder to sit with than murderers. A person having somewhere to belong, for example.
Across the room, a cluster of roughnecks jeered and pounded their table, mocking the gale. At their center sat Skinter.
For a heartbeat, the flies I rode were ripped from the air. My vision snapped to black. Blind again.
I didn’t panic. I was born this way. Darkness is just another kind of patience. Still, instinct pushed, and I reached.
Sight answered before I finished the thought. Roaches beneath the warped floorboards stirred, and I slipped behind their eyes. Creepers, I called them. Bugs, rats, birds—it didn’t matter. If they had eyes, I could borrow them. Anything more human than that was closed to me.
The map that opened wasn’t sight, not really. Ley Threads ran through everything—bodies, tables, even the air itself. Fractals of motion and pulses humming with mood and intent. People burned in shifting auras, the weave betraying them.
The man who rescued me, Hurman, had once tried to explain—called one shimmer “warm gold,” another “yellow,” the fever-heat of a drunk man “red.” To me, they were flavors of power. I’d never seen a color in my life, but I could feel the differences: truth, lies, calm, hunger. The world was thread and current, and I could trace both straight to the heart of a man.
Because it came through eyes most people never noticed, the magic was nearly impossible to detect. It hid so neatly inside the ordinary that even skilled mages missed it.
That was part of what I loved about this world—Urth was like my Earth, only supercharged with sorcery.
At a side table, Skinter lounged with his pack pretending to be sheep. They were playing Yak-shee—dice and numbers, the same bones as a game I’d known back in my own world. His men tried to look like harmless wanderers, but they wore their nerves like bad costumes: shoulders tight, threads jittering around their eyes, glances ticking toward the windows every few breaths.
Word was they had their eyes on a shipment—copper and silver set to roll in before dawn, bound for the bank across the street. Tonight, they were only burning time, playing, drinking, swearing at one another under their breath. But I’d seen enough crews to know when a job was brewing.
Skinter played the part of boredom, dice rolling lazily between his fingers, posture loose. But predators know predators. Underneath, he was coiled. Waiting.
The creepers gave me most of the room—roaches under the floorboards, moths near the lanterns, even a pair of fat flies circling the dregs of spilled ale. It wasn’t perfect Sight, but it didn’t need to be.
Better still, no one paid me a lick of mind. I’d left my trenchcoat outside, wedged beneath the Low Downe between two floor joists. Too much black leather, too many straps, and too many useful pockets for the helpless-blind-drunk act. Without it, I was just a blind man at the bar—another piece of tavern furniture. Invisible.
Once, that would’ve bothered me. Now I used it so often I’d almost made a profession of being overlooked.
Almost.
The trick was not admitting there were nights when being invisible felt less like cover and more like the truth.
That’s when the door opened.