Demon of Knowledge - Book 1 - Mystery Pryer

[sey]

Hi there folks.

First time posting on QQ so apologies if it's not that great. A friend recomended I try posting this here instead of FF, so consider this an experiement of sots.

For context, this is a Lord of Mysteries Fic with an SI OC. He'll mostly be doing his own thing, but will eventually meet up with the main cast eventually.

Fair warning, I'll be playing a little fast and loose with the lore for certain things, as there will be crossover elements, albeit integrated to fit the setting.

Constuctive criticism is appreciated. Please enjoy.

---

Chapter 1:Scarlet Moon.​

It was the pain he felt first.

It wasn't a dull, hollow ache or a sharp stab; it felt as though every single atom in his body had suddenly been set on fire and was screaming in unison. His nerves were a grid of white-hot agony, vibrating with an intensity that should have torn a scream from his throat—if he could have drawn the breath to make one.

Indeed,while he found himself acutely aware of every part of his body, paradoxically, he found those very extremities completely unresponsive, as if his muscles had been transmuted into lumps of pure lead, without affecting his ability to feel pain.

And beneath the pain, lurking on the edge of his consciousness, a strange sense of emptiness, as if something something had reached into his very soul and scooped out everything of substance, leaving him to bleed out on the ground like a discarded carton.

'What the fuck happened?'

Such were the first conscious thoughts of Seth Collins, aspiring novelist and full-time customer-service agent as he found himself lying face-down on the floor, unable to move or even blink, forcing him to gaze blankly at a ceiling he couldn't quite focus on.

His last memory, prior to blacking out, had been mundane enough. He'd been browsing occult literature references online whilst listening to a podcast, hoping to find something that might help inspire him to shatter the writer's block that had been holding him hostage for months now.

He was dimly aware of opening a new tab on his laptop, following some link that had caught his eye, only for his vision to abruptly white-out like some asshole hit him with a flash-bang, the world seeming to tilt sharply to the side before he found himself facedown on thefloor, unable to move.

'Shit...did I have a stroke?'

Unbidden, his mind drifted back to that one winter almost a decade prior, when he'd woken up to the sudden, terrifying reality of half his face refusing to respond to his commands courtesy of a, thankfully brief, bout of stress-induced Bell's Palsy.

He'd recalled the frustration he'd been forced to endure during the recovery period, how the Doctor assured him it was simply due to stress and that if he simply took the chance to improve his lifestyle, get more exercise, cutt out the snacks, all the usual shite, he wouldn't have to worry about a repeat occurrence.

And in all fairness, Seth had done his best to comply. No, honestly, he'd taken up swimming on weekends, tried to eat healthier and burnt out his stress via hobbies. But habit is hard to break and his lifestyle had always been mostly sedentary, spending both his work-hours and free-time behind a monitor, fueled by Energy drinks & spite.

'That thumping...is that my heart? Shit...it's so slow...'

Worse,as he lay there, a prisoner in his own flesh, unable to draw breath into his desperate, burning lungs, he dimly realised that the the dull echo in his ears was slowing down, each second between thumps draining more colour from his vision as he continued to gaze into the void.

And yet, as the agonizing seconds ticked by, until it almost seemed minutes would pass between beats, the panic didn't come. Instead, a wave of profound, surprising calm washed over him, almost as if he were watching the scene happen to someone else.

He was dying...and he was surprisingly okay with it.​

'So...this is how I die...face down on the floor after Forty Years with nothing to show for it...'

Alright, maybe 'okay' wasn't the right word, but it was almost comical how chill he was about all this. Then again, he'd never been the type to lose his shit over something that couldn't be changed. When most people lashed out, whined or tried to get their way by making a scene, he'd been the type to simply shrug, go back to what he was doing and try find a workaround.

Sadly, there wasn't a work-around for Death outside of fiction or divine intervention, and last he checked God stopped making House-calls sometime after the Romans nailed his golden boy to a cross, so what the hell would losing his shit even do in this situation?

Panicking would only burn through whatever precious, residual oxygen his brain had left. There was quite literally nothing Seth could do to change the outcome, so what was the point of wasting his final moments screaming into the void?

Nah, if it really was time for him to punch out then he wasn't going out like a bitch. If the reaper truly was coming for him, he'd probably shake the fucker''s hand because at this point anything would be better than feeling this agony for all eternity.

In truth, his only real concerns was how devastated his mother was going to be when she heard the news. As much as they drove each other up the wall, the woman had always had his best interests in mind and had been the driving force behind his lifestyle changes after the Palsy scare.

'Assuming I'm not bound for the hand-basket express, I'll put in a good word for you, Mum.' he vowed, smiling internally as he recalled all the times the woman had driven him absolutely mental 'Though full disclosure, if there's any truth to coming back around again, I'll be 100% coming back a wizard, so i will.'

And so he lay there, counting down the seconds between beats as the steady rhythm slowed, taking with it the pain as the numbness seeped in from his extremities, the silence a comforting blanket, waiting to tuck him into the void...until it was ruthlessly ripped away.

...A Cornea from a Nightmare Evil Eye...​

The words did not give him the common courtesy of passing through his ears. They were simply there, birthed directly inside the meat of his brain, burning like white-hot needles against his consciousness, his mind convulsing as a second verse clawed its way through his thoughts, dripping with a terrifying, ancient weight.

...Seventy Millilitres of Evil Eye Pus...​

It was a recipe, chanted by a voice that wasn't a voice, but rather a chorus of a thousand maddening whispers overlapping until they were indistinguishable, violently vomiting their cursed knowledge into his skull, expanding his mind until he felt his sanity begin to fray atthe edges.

'What the hell is going on-?!'

His panic was understandable, if somewhat comical given his earlier acceptance of his mortality. It certainly didn't help that the information brought with it the phantom smell of bitter herbs and the sickening, oily texture of something foul coating his tongue despite his mouth remaining dry and locked shut.

...A piece of a Cursed Crystal...

...Ten Grams of Cursed Crystal byproduct...​

And yet, despite the sheer absurdity of it all, despite the terror seeping through his soul by the whispers and the sheer revulsion of the flavour assaulting his taste-buds, Seth found an urge rising within him, an all-consuming thirst and desire to consume the accursed concoction.

...Thirteen drops of Rosemary Essential Oil...​

It would appear that the universe was refusing to accept his surrender on any terms but it's own, forcibly inscribing the formula for a dangerous rebirth directly onto the canvas of his dying mind, demanding that he listen, demanding that he remember and above all else demanding that he crawl back from the edge to brew it.

...A Page of Other People's Secrets...​

And all the while the whispers grew, clawing at the inside of his skull,refusing to let him drift into the dark, the maddening chant an agonizing hook dragging through his mind, violently hauling his consciousness back from the peaceful edge of the void.

To make them stop, he had to brew and consume the potion.

To Brew The Potion...He Had To LIVE.​

'...Fuck it, déanfaimid é-!'

If the universe wanted him to live, even if it was out of spite, then he was hardly going to refuse, especially if it meant he had to deal with this cacophony of shite in his brain for all eternity. And so, despite the silent darkness calling out to him like a lover's embrace, he turned his attention to his ruined, unresponsive vessel.

'Breathe!' he screamed inside his head, using the weight of the voices to visualise the thought surging down his spine, like an electric shock focussed on his chest, or at least, the area that felt like his chest, repeating it ad nauseum as he stubbornly tried to force the frozen muscles in his diaphragm to drop 'Breath you fat fuck!'

After what felt like an eternity, the chorus growing ever louder, his lips parted with a sickening wet rattle as his his lungs forcefully expanded, filling with air that tasted like dust, copper and bloody vomit.

It was the sweetest breath he had ever taken.

With that first, shuddering gasp he turned his attention to his heart, the once reliable engine laying cold and dormant like a stone in hischest. With a surge of will, he imagined a spectral hand reaching out to gently grasp it, squeezing the muscle through sheer, desperate intent once....twice...

...Tha-thump...​

A gasp escaped his lips as he felt his heart kickstart like he'd been kicked in the ribs by a mule, his back arching off the floor as a wave of pure agony flooded his senses, each renewed beat sending a sudden, violent rush of stagnant blood surging through his veins like liquid fire.

That sharp, white hot agony that had been blessedly on the verge of fading into the dark returned as the oxygen from that first, precious gasp of air was delivered straight to his dormant nerve endings via veigns that were being forced back open with every beat.

His eyes cracked open, his vision blurry and bloodshot, unable to make out anything in the dark save for his twitching fingers, the joints popping like dry twigs as they clawed desperately at the hardwood floor like skittering spiders.

To no-one's surprise, the eldritch choir from the darkness hadn't been silenced by his return to the world of the living, though thankfully for his sanity it had seemingly regressed to mere whispers at the base of his skull, lurking behind his eyes with the persistence of an eye-floater, but manageable, for now.

And so he lay there, face down on the floor, his cheek pressed against something that smelled of bloody bile and shame, simply focussing on the mundane task of breathing while the malfunctioning piston that was his heart continued to pump cold, stagnant blood through vessels that had already begun to settle.

By every law of medicine and nature he was a corpse. His skin was the gray of a winter dawn & his muscles locked in the early grip ofrigour mortis. But his mind, sparked by the maddening friction of the whispered recipe, refused to let the system shut down.

Hissing with exertion, he pushed past the pain of his failing nervous system to dig his bloody fingernails into the floorboards. His limbs didn't obey fluidly, moving in jarring, erratic twitches, like a puppet being yanked by coarse twine.

Planting one palm flat on the floor, he took a breath to brace himself before dragging his upper body forward, a hiss of agony escaping his teeth as his spine popped with the dry, terrifying sound of snapping kindling as he forced his left knee to bend and slide forward.

The gravity of the room felt immense, a physical weight trying to press him back into the ground where a dead man belonged. His thighs trembled violently, the dead muscle fibres tearing under the sudden, unnatural strain as he heaved his torso upward, leaning his weight against what felt like a bed-frame.

For a long, agonizing moment, he just hung there, his lungs drawing in ragged, whistling breaths that served only to clear the dust from his throat. His vision washed out into fields of static, the world tilting violently as his oxygen starved brain was forced to fire up again.

'Stand up you bastard.' he commanded, a harsh rattle escaping his throat as he gripped the bed-frame for support, driving his heel into the floor and slowly inching himself off his knees until they locked into place with a sickening click, allowing him to stand unsupported.

And so he stood there, swaying like a newborn calf in a gale, his hands hanging limp at his sides, blue-tinged and trembling. He was a monument of pure defiance, a dead man standing on his own two feet, glaring through bloodshot eyes at his surroundings.

'...Where the actual fuck am I?'

His confusion was understandable, as the room he found himself in was not the small, comfortable bedroom he'd been sitting in what felt like mere moments prior. There was no sign of his laptop, his gaming setup, his closet full of comfortable clothes nor the custom mattress he'd obtained to deal with his aching back.

Instead, he found himself standing in a small, cramped, dust filled attic room, lit by the stray beams of crimson light filtering through the thin curtains over a cracked window. The bed-frame he'd been leaning against for leverage was a rusted relic with a miserable, tattered mattress that stank of sweat, piss and booze.

Between the bed and the only door was a cabinet and a small chest of drawers. To the side of the cabinet stood a dressing mirror with two cracks and a pipe extending up the wall, connected to a strange mechanical device with exposed gears and bearings in several places.

An old, cast-iron coal stove sat in the rightmost corner of the room near a desk covered with discarded papers and what looked to be an ancient monster of a typewriter, the kind that had keys you actually had to push if you wanted to type anything rather than the sleek, modern remakes you could buy off the internet.

In short, the only thing this hovel had in common with Seth's bedroom was the fact they both had hardwood floors, though his was in decidedly better condition, smooth and clean whereas the one he currently stood upon was old and coarse, littered with papers, glass bottles and a puddle of dried black vomit he'd been lying in.

"That can't be healthy..." he rasped in disgust, only to freeze, his claw-like hand snapping clumsily to his throat at the sound of a strangers voice emerging from his chapped lips, the motion causing him to temporarily lose his balance, stumbling towards what appeared to be a basin by the window.

"Fuck-!" he swore aloud, his uneven stride rattling the floorboards as he barely managed to grab the counter the basin rested on to keep from falling, leaning desperately against it until the wave of vertigo settled, his deadweight causing the water in the basin to ripple.

"Keep it together Seth..." he ground out in a stranger's voice, taking a few deep breaths to steady his nerves before bringing his gaze up tofinally look out the window, only to feel the pit drop out of his stomach and the breath catch in his throat at the sight of the massive crimson moon hanging high in the night sky.

"What the actual fuck..." he croaked, any concerns about his voice lost as he gazed out at the the unfamiliar surroundings where the Irish countryside should have been, the scarlet light of the moon washing over cobblestone streets and towering town-houses like something out of a Victorian period drama.

"Oh fuck me sideways..." he whispered, the hammering of his heart the only other sound in the room as he stared out the window "I'm not in Yharnam am I? Christ Almighty please tell me I'm not after being dropped into Yharnam."

The only response he received was a single bead of cold sweat dropping from his cheek to the basin below, the sound causing him to look down only to find himself locking gazes with the haunted, bloodshot eyes of the stranger reflected on the water's surface.

Now it should be noted Seth was never what you might call vain by any stretch of the imagination. If anything he'd long since embraced that between his weight, premature baldness and general lack of faith in humanity, he was about as unattractive as you could possibly get to pretty much anyone without highly specific tastes.

However, even he was forced to admit that, to the truly desperate and possibly blind members of the fairer sex, he probably would have been seen as an absolute catch compared to the man staring back at him from the murky water of the basin.

For starters, the poor bastard looked like he'd endured a prolonged, waking nightmare, his face impossibly gaunt, his skin a sallow, translucent parchment tightly stretched over a sharp, angular skull. Long, matted strands of dark, messy hair fell wildly around his face, sticking to the cold sweat on his forehead.

The eyes were the worst part however, bloodshot and sunken deep into their sockets, framed by heavy, purplish-black shadows that looked like permanent bruises. His cheeks were hollowed out, carving deep, dark valleys beneath his high cheekbones, making him look like someone who hadn't eaten a proper meal in weeks.

'Or perhaps,' a darker part of his mind whispered in a voice he barely recognised as his own, a chill settling in his bones that had nothing to do with the air of the room, 'someone who had been slowly starving to death in a dark room'.

Therewas a profound, haunted emptiness in that reflection, a visage scarred not by violence, but by a deep, systematic erosion of life. And yet, as he stared into those unfamiliar, deadened eyes, a spark of recognition seemed to ignite within them.

"That's...me...?"

No, that wasn't right. He was Seth Collins, 40-years old, born in Magherafelt, County Tyrone...and yet, as he continued to gaze into those broken, haunted eyes, he found himself 'remembering' a different life altogether, one that belonged to him...or rather, to 27-Year-old Hervé Keats.

...A Cornea from a Nightmare Evil Eye...​

"FUCK!" Seth roared, gripping his head as the occult whispers, which had been present but blessedly silent until now, suddenly ramped up their intensity, cutting off the deluge of Keats' memories by forcing the recipe back to the forefront of his mind "Ah, fuck this altogether!"

Apparently the universe didn't much care for his little walk down memory lane, which was actually perfect as he'd been so drawn in by Hervé's memories he'd almost forgotten who he was supposed to be, or who he used to be as it were.

The room spun in a greasy, sickening wheel of yellow candlelight and coalsmoke as he gripped the edge of the washbasin for dear life with his free hand, his knuckles turning a stark, waxen white and his throat burning with the phantom taste of iron and vomit.

"Hervé Keats is dead..." he declared, as if by saying it aloud he could ground himself against the tidal wave of foreign memories that had roared into his consciousness, nearly tearing his sense of self to ribbons, the moment he'd locked gazes with the dead man's reflection "He died and I moved in."

Yet despite his attempts at affirming his identity, Seth simply couldn't bring himself to separate his forty-years of life from Hervé's twenty-seven, the names and faces of people he had never met, places he had never seen, blurring together with the familiar memories of home.

'I need to get my thoughts in order.' he realised, forcing himself to tear his eyes away from Hervé's haunting, sorrowful gaze in the basin, turning his attention to the desk in the corner, the floorboards groaning as he forced his right foot forward on legs that felt like wet clay.

About two-thirds of the way there his knees buckled, forcing him to stumble and slam his shoulder into the peeling wallpaper to keep himself from pitching forward. A sharp lance of physical pain shot through his arm, though it only served to further ground him in the present.

"Move."he hissed, glaring at the Typewriter as he staggered forward, leaning against the wall as support, Hervé's shaky legs finally giving out as Seth lurched across the few remaining steps to the desk, collapsing heavily into a creaking wooden chair with an impact that rattled his teeth.

The desk before him was littered with the frantic detritus of a desperate man, the dark grain of the wood mottled with ink stains and haphazardly scattered papers covered in a looping hand he dimly 'recognised' as Hervé's, bearing words that took him a second to translate as Loen Script, the national language of the Loen Kingdom.

Ignoring the mechanical beast that was Hervé's type-writer, he instead reached out with a trembling hand for a pair of cheap spectacles, pulling them on and sighing in relief as his vision, which had been blurry as all hell this entire time, cleared somewhat, though it did little for his headache.

Now able to see clearer, he turned his attention to the rest of the desk, one hand snagging a relatively clean sheet of rough parchment, while the other located a tarnished fountain pen and inkwell, the kind that had fallen out of use save for try-hard hobbyists once the ball point pen was invented.

"Beggars can't be choosers." he reasoned, placing the gathered items before him, only to grimace as the moment he made to put pen to paper, his mind seemed to roil, causing his grip on the instrument to falter, the nib scratching a sharp, jagged line across the paper before hecould even ink it.

"Calm the fuck down." he hissed, closing his eyes & gripping his wrist to block out the vertigo. He needed to anchor his thoughts. He needed to separate himself from the ghost of Hervé Keats, to try and figure out precisely what fresh hell he'd woken up to...and how, if possible, he was to get home.

And so, after taking one last breath to steady his nerves, Seth Collins opened Hervé Keats' eyes, dipped the dead-man's pen into the ink well and forced their uncooperative fingers to write by the scarlet liightof an alien moon.

My name is Seth Collins...​

---

First chapter and Seth is already thrown into the deep end. Let's see how well he does.

Irish Translation - déanfaimid é: Let's do it!
(He's basically saying 'Fuck it, we ball!')

 

[dazzle_dork]

to the truly desperate and possibly blind members of the fairer sex, he probably would have been seen as an absolute catch compared to the man staring back at him from the murky water of the basin

Click to shrink...

Not becoming more attractive after rebirth? You just commited cardinal sin my man. ROB police is coming for you.

Definitely more interested, there hasn't been a good lotm fanfic for so long, I will say since COI release. Watched!

 

[sey]

Not becoming more attractive after rebirth? You just commited cardinal sin my man. ROB police is coming for you.

Definitely more interested, there hasn't been a good lotm fanfic for so long, I will say since COI release. Watched!

Click to shrink...

He only looks like that because of circumstances prior to the transmigration. He's actually pretty good looking, just not 'bishounen' levels.

 

[sey]

Chapter 2: Transmigrator.​

For the next several hours, the scratch of the steel nib against parchment was the only anchor holding Seth Collins to sanity, the crimson rays of the Red Moon bleeding through the grimy window pane casting an eerie, blood-like hue over his trembling hands.

By the time his grip finally steadied, the inkwell had run low and the oppressive scarlet light had faded, replaced instead by the pale, watery gold of the morning sun as it peaked over the jagged, soot-stained rooftops like it was almost hesitant to show its face.

'Given what Hervé knew about this place, I wouldn't be surprised'. Seth mused as he finally, blessedly, finished writing out his thoughts and set the pen aside. His right hand was completely numb, his fingers stained a deep charcoal black.

Before him lay three sheets of coarse parchment, filled with a chaotic mix of English, elegant Intis cursive and blocky Loenese script, a result of the moments his focus had waned due to exhaustion, all written in a neat, frantic cursive he begrudgingly attributed to Hervé, as his own handwriting was hardly worth noting.

To anyone else, it would've looked like the ravings of a madman, but to Seth it was a lifeline he'd used to try and separate his thoughts, to try and retain a grasp on his identity without being overwhelmed by the memories of a dead man.

He was Seth Collins, forty years old, born and raised in Ireland and damn proud of it. He'd held many a job he hated and far too few he cared for, though none had brought him as much joy and grief as his writing career, something he'd always aspired to from the moment he first picked up The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Ironically enough, his writing style had lent itself more towards the occult side of fiction, drawing from local Irish folk-tales and legends to try and bring attention to his homeland's rich culture, a niche in a trade that was dominated by Arthurian fables and renditions of Greek or Norse Mythology.

While he'd had some modest success, enough to live comfortably though not extravagantly, he'd never really broken into the big leagues. Still,whenever he wasn't swamped with work or during that tumultuous period between jobs, he would inevitably put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard rather, and hash out something new.

Indeed, his last memories of Earth had been spent doing research for his most recent novel, browsing obscure occult literature and folklore on his laptop, surrounded by the scent of old paper and the sound of some history podcast on his headphones.

His immediate memories after that were of the void, that cold, chilling silence that threatened to drag him into oblivion, before the eldritch choir, which even now continued to whisper in his brain, forced him to haul his soul back from the brink and into the body of 27-year-old Hervé Keats.

At some point during his writing, he'd noted how this all seemed not unlike those 'Isekai' Novels where the Protagonist found themselves transmigrated into a new body at the moment of death, though whether that death involved the Protagonist or the original owner of their new meat-suit depended on the writer.

Given the situation he found himself in, it was likely his death and Hervé 's had simply coincided at the same time and barring a Freaky Friday situation, the younger man had seemingly lacked the mental fortitude to haul his soul back from the brink like Seth had.

'That,or whatever the hell shoved me into this body didn't offer him thesame olive branch' Seth reasoned grimly, staring briefly down at Hervé's thin, sallow wrists through the dead-man's spectacles before turning his attention back to his notes.

Hervé Keats, twenty-seven years old, born in Trier, the capital of the Intis Republic on the Northern Continent to Renaldo, a progressive novelist whose forward-thinking writings often challenged traditional social boundaries and Regine, a staunchly devout adherent of theChurch of the Eternal Blazing Sun.

With a background like that, it should come as no surprise that Hervé's childhood had been a minefield of striking intellectual and spiritual contrasts, his upbringing shaped by the unique intersection of his father's radical literary idealism and his mother's unwavering spiritual devotion.

Indeed, the only thing the Keats could apparently truly agree on was their unconditional love for their only son, though sadly Hervé's relationship with Régine was somewhat strained due to her strict theological upbringing clashing with the boy's innocent idolisation of Renaldo for the stories he crafted.

Sadly,as was often the case with 'progressive' minds, not everyone shared Hervé's appreciation for Renaldo's genius. Indeed, were pride not a sin Régine would almost certainly have felt intense satisfaction at the number of times Renaldo's writings were either banned or consigned to bonfires.

However, as one might expect from a man who could tolerate living under thesame roof as Régine, Renaldo was a stubborn cunt who refused to be silenced or censored, continuing to publish treatise filled with not-so-subtle critiques on the corruption in the aristocratic legal system and overreaching influence of the Church.

Needless to say, given the dogmatic overzealousness of the organisations in question, this obvious provocation eventually rustled the jimmies of the wrong people, a Notary of the Inquisition formally designating Renaldo's latest serial, a thinly veiled critique of the Orthodox Hierarchy, as'Heretical Corruption'.

To make matters worse, intentional or not, Renaldo's writings had inadvertently exposed a corruption scandal tying local church tithes to military contracts. This made him a liability in the eyes of the Intis Republic's Bureau 8, and unlike the church, the secret servicedidn't just stop at burning books; they eliminated liabilities.

Within forty-eight hours, Renaldo's entire literary circle vanished and all copies of his writings, even those that had nothing to do with theincident, were swiftly consigned to the bonfires by white-robedPurifiers, while in the background someone orchestrated a web offalse treason charges to entrap the novelist.

Hervé had only been a child back then, so his memories of their escape from Triers were a frantic blur of shattered illusions and hysterical tears as they fled into the night like vagrants with agents of both the church and state on their heels.

Fortunately, one of Renaldo's few remaining allies had managed to smuggle the Keats down the Srenzo River to the Port City of Tilisi, where they managed to pawn enough of their meagre belongings to buy passage on a vessel bound for the heavily contested waters of Midseashire.

The voyage across the turbulent waters was a gruelling test of endurance, filled with the constant terror that an Intis ironclad would intercept them. But weeks later, the ship finally dropped anchor at the damp, salt-crusted dock of Doolin Village, a fishing village on the isle of Lemrick in waters controlled by the Loen Kingdom.

And this was where the first of many red flags had sprung up for Seth, as thefirst time he'd tried to delve into Hervé's memories of Doolin, the mental backlash left him slumped over the desk in a cold sweat, waiting for the head-splitting migraine to recede into a dull, throbbing ache.

He could remember Hervé's childhood memories in Triers with no issue, every tall-tale Renaldo ever told his son and every theological lecture Regine tried to shove down his throat. And he could remember the man's later years as a student in Backlund University and his gradual decline to an alcoholic mess.

But the moment his thoughts drifted to the mist-shrouded coast of the Isle of Lemrick, his brain hit a concrete roadblock, a deliberate, conscious act by the late Hervé Keats in response to an event so traumatic he'd erected a wall within his own mind to keep from reliving it.

Whatever said event was, Seth honestly couldn't say, the memories a chaotic blur of sounds, fog and the scent of blood. The only thing he knew with absolute certainty was that Renaldo had lost his life to something that defied the laws of nature and witnessing it had instilled a life-long phobia of the supernatural in Hervé .

Which transitioned quite nicely into the second red flag Seth had stumbledacross in this mess. Specifically, the fact that not only was the supernatural real in this world, it was prevalent enough there was even a specific term for people, and things other than people, who dealt with it on a daily basis: Beyonders.

A catch-all term for any sentient being that wielded mystical abilities tied to one of the Twenty-Two Pathways defined by the local Tarot, acquired either through the consumption of carefully brewed potions or by being bestowed a Boon from a more powerful entity.

Needless to say, given the sheer threat they posed to the status quo, as even low-level Beyonders possessed enhanced durability and constitution compared to ordinary citizens, the authorities of all four Kingdomstook great pains to regulate their existence and the means ofacquiring said powers from the general public.

However, since even the most unhinged zealot understood the best way to confirm the existence of a secret was to deny it, the Orthodox Churches typically permitted the casual dissemination of information pertaining to arts they deemed 'safe', such as Divination or smaller Rituals tied to their respective Deities.

Of course, if someone just so happened to stumble across a Beyonder incident, whether it be as a hapless witness or because their curiosity bordered on feline, then depending on who caught them they could expect to be quietly relocated, drafted into service as anofficial Beyonder, or simply made to disappear.

---

'I really was fucking Isekai'd.' Seth scoffed, shaking his head inexasperation at the confirmation, only to immediately scowl at once again referring to Hervé's body as his own, something that was growing increasingly more concerning as time went on 'And it looks like whoever's behind it gave me a 'cheat'.'

He was, of course, referring to the recipe that was even now repeating on loop within the deepest recesses of his mind, the back of his (HERVÉ'S!) throat burning with a phantom desire to consume the infernal brew despite having never even laid eyes on it.

His first thought was that perchance Hervé had memorised the formula sometime prior to his premature death, but even setting aside the mental blue-screen of the 'Doolin Incident', it was clear Hervé had wanted nothing to do with the supernatural.

Indeed, one need only look at the man's past cases, both during his brief stint as a Barrister and his more recent endeavours as a Private Investigator to see a worrying series of events where Hervé would refuse to take on any lucrative cases if there was even a chance it involved the occult.

The man had spent most of his adult life running away from the dark, so there was no way in hell he'd have memorised a Beyonder potion before his death, which meant the only logical explanation Seth was currently craving what sounded like Satan's own smoothie was that whatever asshole entity shoved him into Hervé's corpse had uploaded the recipe into his brain and set it on loop.

It certainly didn't help that the moment Seth lost focus, the moment he let his mind wander for even a second, the damned whispers would rise up from the back of his skull, bringing with them that burning thirst that he somehow instinctively knew would not be quenched by any mortal drink.

This presented a problem, because Seth was not particularly inclined to follow the orders of some faceless entity that didn't even have the common courtesy to ask if he wanted to be Isekai'd in the first place, the answer of which would've been a resounding 'fuck off.'

Make no mistake, he'd probably have jumped on the Isekai bandwagon backwhen he was young, stupid and his only responsibilities were to finish his homework and keep his grades up. But as a tax-paying adult his priorities had shifted considerably, as had his views on being sent to a new world to start over from zero.

People often tended to forget that Transmigrators often started off with nothing. Sure, plenty of them lucked out and wound up in the bodies of nobles or at least possessed a cheat skill or knowledge that would allow them to rapidly climb the social ladder.

Seth Collins was an introverted novelist specialising in occult literature and Hervé Keats a disgraced, alcoholic former barrister who had been forced to become a private investigator just to afford the cheap spirits he used to drown out the ones that followed him from Doolin.

Truly a match made in heaven, the only thing the two remotely had in common were their date of birth, October 31st​, which was an oddity in and of itself simply by virtue of the fact the Loen Kingdom, and indeed all the Kingdoms on the Northern Continent, used the same Georgian calendar even if it went by a different name.

'Focus'.Seth grunted, squashing down the whispers once again as he turned hisattention to the bottom of the parchment, where several lines hadbeen dedicated to the accursed recipe that was even now dancingbehind his eyeballs like the world's most persistent eye-floater.

Sequence9 – Mystery Pryer

A Cornea and 70ml of Pus from a Nightmare Evil Eye.
A piece of Cursed Crystal and 10g of byproducts.
A sheet of paper containing other people's secrets.
13 drops of Rosemary Essential oil.​

'Sounds delicious.' Seth scoffed, his stomach roiling at the idea ofconsuming such a thing even as the back of his throat burned in anticipation like a man who'd stumbled across an oasis in the desert. Or an alcoholic on the verge of the shakes in Hervé'scase.

He sat there in silence, staring down at the words on the parchmentwhich seemed to shift and flow between English, Loen and Intis script, as well as a few other languages, like Seth's own native Irish, before his very eyes.

Hervé Keats had spent his entire adult life running from the supernatural, but that didn't mean he was ignorant of it, and in the smog-choked, Victorian sprawl of Backlund, choosing to become a Beyonder was a terrifyingly double-edged sword that should never be taken lightly.

On the one hand, Backlund was a meat grinder for the poor and destitute.The air alone, thick with yellow industrial smog and coal dust, was a slow death sentence and that wasn't even factoring in the serial killers, hidden cults, and cruel workhouses owned by callous nobles.

By becoming a Beyonder, Seth would not only obtain the raw power, enhanced senses and mystical might to not only survive those foggy streets and claw his way out of the gutter, but with enough luck he might even find a means of returning home.

On the other hand, the cons weighed like a lead coffin. The moment he consumed that potion, he would step onto a path of creeping madness. He would have to constantly battle the threat of losing control and mutating into a rampaging monster out of Lovecraft's worst nightmares.

Worse, Backlund was the heart of the Loen Kingdom, fiercely policed by the Nighthawks of the Church of the Evernight Goddess and the Mandated Punishers of the Church of the Lord of Storms. As an unaffiliated 'Wild Beyonder', catching their eye could see him shackled to their whims, locked in a subterranean cell or executed on the spot.

It certainly didn't help that the Mystery Pryer pathway was heavily associated with the Moses Ascetic Order, a once respectable organisation that had fallen to corruption following the supposed manifestation of their 'God', the Hidden Sage, the supposed embodiment of knowledge itself.

Not that any of that would matter if Seth couldn't get his hands on the ingredients necessary to brew his potion, and it was here that Hervé's fractured memories once again brought with them a cold dose of reality, as setting aside the mundane items like the rosemary oil, Beyonder ingredients did not come cheap.

And if the state of Hervé's dismal, dimly-lit room wasn't enough of an indication, the man had been completely destitute, what little money he earned between his cases and his part time writing for a local tabloid had either gone to his rent, of which he was two weeks behind, his family back in Doolin or down his throat.

As things stood, the landlord, a boorish man by the name of Briggs, was already threatening to have Hervé hauled off to the debtor's prison if he didn't see coin by the end of the week, so Seth really didn'thave the luxury of splurging on reagents.

With a sigh, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on the scarred wood of the desk in order to take a silent, grim inventory of Herve's meagre worldly possessions laid out before him, starting with the monstrous, Underwood-style typewriter.

It was a sturdy, mechanical beast of iron and keys, but it was heavily used. The 'E' key stuck and the ribbon was frayed to a thread. If he dragged it down to the pawnshop on the corner of the wharf, the greasy broker would offer him a pittance, not even enough to buy the rosemary oil, let alone the main ingredients.

It naturally went without saying that Herve's scattered writings weren't worth much either. For all his aspirations and admiration of Renaldo, the man had lacked his father's literary talent. At the very best they could serve as kindling for the stove or emergency toilet paper if push came to shove.

That left only one other thing of value, Seth's hand moving slowly, almost hesitantly, to the vest pocket of Keat's threadbare coat, his fingers closing almost reverently around cold, engraved metal, the delicate chain clinking softly in the quiet room as he drew it into the light.

It was his father's…no, Renaldo Keats' silver pocket watch. A beautiful piece of Intis craftsmanship, the casing etched with a fading motif of a wild hound running through briars. The glass was scratched, but the internal ticking was steady, a rhythmic tick that felt like the only stable heartbeat in the room.

If he sold this, he might, just might, secure the funds to buy the Beyonder ingredients from a shadowy apothecary in the undergroundmarket, but the moment the thought solidified in Seth's mind, a violent, visceral wave of revulsion crashed through his chest.

Seth had never met Renaldo, he'd never sat on the man's knee andvmarvelled at the lump of silver that would one day be his. But thevresidual memories and emotional imprints of Hervé Keats flared up with the heat of a furnace the moment Seth dared to even think of selling his father's watch.

To Hervé, this watch was the final anchor to a time before the visions, before the spirits and before the bottle. As pathetic and desperate as he had become in life, the man would have gladly marched down to a back-alley surgeon and bartered both of his kidneys on a blood-stained table before he ever let a pawnbroker lay a finger on that silver casing.

'No.' Seth vowed, his brows furrowing, knuckles whitening as he gripped the watch tightly against his chest, as if daring the world to try and pry it from his cold dead fingers 'Not the watch. Never the watch. I'd sooner starve in the fog-!'

He caught himself, a cold sweat breaking out on his forehead as thesheer absurdity of his thoughts registered. What truly alarmed him, however, was how natural that thought felt to him. He wasn't just observing Hervé's stubbornness; he was actively feeling it.

'Stubborn bastard.' He scoffed with a hint of pride that for the life of himhe couldn't explain, as it appeared the nature of the transmigration ran deeper than he thought if a dead man's ghost was able to voice in on his financial ethics with such passion.

With a sigh, Seth leant back in his chair, his eyes glancing back down at the formula on the parchment, the ever-shifting words a siren song backed by the infernal whispers in his mind.

He was a broke, detoxing alcoholic with a mind full of forbidden mysticism and a body that felt like a hollowed-out husk. Theonly way to move forward was to consume a potion he couldn't affordthe cheapest ingredient for. Hell, he lacked the proper vessel to even brew the damn thing in the first place.

The watch was off the table and the typewriter wouldn't cover a fraction of the cost. Atthis point, if he couldn't buy the ingredients with coin, he would have to find another currency, and as luck would have it, as a Private Investigator, Herve Keats happened to specialise in aspecific, profoundly volatile brand of currency valued by back-alley con-men and haughty High Lords alike: Information.

To be more precise, Blackmail, Seth allowing a slow, calculating smile to trace his chapped lips as he turned his attention to the final item resting on the desk, a little black notebook, heavily annotated but filled to the brim with results of several years of the dead man's meticulous findings.

Herve may have been terrified of the supernatural, but he was brilliant at observing the mundane, depraved sins of Backlund's high society, both during his time as a Barrister and his more recent stint as an Investigator, and he had detailed all of them in notebooks like this one.

As he leant back in his chair, allowing the dead man's memories towash over him like a dark, muddy river, Seth was able to pick out afew of the juicier highlights without having to so much as touch the cover of the tome and couldn't help but scoff at the predictability of it all.

A minor Member of Parliament funnelling contracts to a shell company in his lover'sname, a Baron's son that visited certain opium dens in the Wharf District. In Backlund, a single well-placed letter to any of these figures could yield dozens, if not hundreds, of gold pounds.

It was the perfect solution to his financial ruin. With that kind ofcapital, he wouldn't just be able to pay off his debts, he could comfortably afford to buy out an underground apothecary's entirestock of Beyonder ingredients and still have cash to spare to quietly disappear to escape the consequences.

Yet, as a transmigrator who understood the lethal undercurrents of this world, Seth's smile quickly faded into a grim grimace. Blackmail in Backlund was a high-stakes gamble with a razor-thin margin for error. If he targeted the wrong person or miscalculated his approach, he wouldn't get a purse of gold, he would get a slit throat.

Worse, if he happened to target a Beyonder, or someone who happened to be secretly involved with the city's hidden cults, shaking them down fo rmoney could land him in the crosshairs of a high-sequence monster.

Seth opened his eyes and stared at the typewriter, fingers twitching against his thighs. He needed to be surgical about this. He needed topick a target wealthy enough to pay immediately, cowardly enough to avoid the police, and entirely disconnected from the Beyonder world.

And as it just so happened, he didn't need to look far to find one, as Herve had already done all the legwork before Seth had ever come into his life.

---

Chapter 2, and some of you may have already noticed a crossover element I used for world-building purposes.

Let me know if you spotted it in a reply!

 

[sey]

I'm honestly surprised to see so many people have read this. if you have any advice or suggestions, feel free to post them in a comment.

---

Chapter 3: Bigamist.​

By all accounts, among those who call Backlund their home, Mr. Charles Nutter stood as a figure of rigid, unyielding severity. As the local representative of the august Earl Castlemallard, he possessed a reputation of iron rectitude, though it was a cold, legalistic sort of virtue.

To his peers, Nutter was a man of iron will and sharp angles, possessed of a saturnine disposition, grim, fiercely reticent and entirely lacking in the easy, conversational graces that define the rest of society, often viewed with a mixture of profound respect and cautious dread by those under his stewardship.

You might wonder then, why such a man as Charles Nutter would deign to associate with the likes of Hervé Keats, especially given the older man's rumoured opinion of foreigners, namely that he was perfectly fine with them provided they remained in their own country.

But, as the old saying goes, needs must, and as it turned out Charles Nutter had found himself with a rather pressing need to resolve a delicate situation that required a man of Hervé's specific set of skills and above all else, absolute discretion.

To make sense of it all, you merely had to turn your attention to Nutter's private life, for despite his infamous public face, those few who were granted the privilege of glimpsing him within the confines of his own walls swore he was entirely transformed in the presence of his beloved wife.

Sally Nutter was a gentle, anxious soul, the very antithesis of her husband's dark brooding nature, and yet in her company, the fierce land agent softened. Their marriage was whispered to be a quiet sanctuary of mutual devotion, Charles shielded her with a predatory fierceness and Sally in turn managed his bitter eccentricities with patient tenderness.

For years, they had lived in a state of comfortable, insulated peace, entirely content in their domestic idyll. Then, like a pestilence carried on a sudden wind, a ghost from Charles' past came back to haunt him in the form of Mary Matchwell.

Hervé had, surprisingly, heard of Matchwell on the grapevine. A calculating con artist and fortune-teller, possessed of a sinister, striking beauty and an ambition that lacked any discernible bottom. However, as she didn't appear to be a Beyonder, he'd wisely kept an eye on her, and it seemed that caution was bearing fruit now.

As Nutter recounted the tale, Matchwell had not merely burst into their lives with a loud clamour; rather she had expertly wormed her way into their affairs with the sickening precision of a practiced parasite, placing herself into Sally's orbit by manufacturing a chance meeting near the cathedral steps after an afternoon service.

Praying upon Sally Nutter's deeply pious & charitable nature, Matchwell had easily disarmed her natural anxieties by presenting herself as a widow struggling to navigate the cruel bureaucracy of the city's property laws, offering her services to unveil the future and read the hidden signs of the spirit world in exchange for charity.

Sally, thoroughly moved by the woman's elegant manners and tragic plight, foolishly took the viper by the hand and personally invited Matchwell into their home, entirely eager to introduce this cultured, unfortunate soul to her husband so he might offer his expertise.

And Charles Nutter, usually so guarded and suspicious of strangers, found his defences entirely bypassed as he could not turn away a guest his adoring wife had personally brought to his hearth, nor could he deny Sally the joy of playing the benefactor, even if the sight of Matchwell stirred some uncomfortable memories.

And so Matchwell sat at the Nutter's parlour table, sipping their tea, studying the layout of their house and learning the exact rhythms of their daily lives. She spent a week subtly gathering the intelligence she needed, seamlessly embedding herself into their domestic confidence until she held all the threads of their vulnerability in her hands.

Once her footing was absolute, the mask of the pious widow was violently ripped away. Without warning, Matchwell brought forth a claim of prior marriage, publicly declaring before the local magistrates to be Charles Nutter's true and lawful wife, wedded in a distant northern prentice-town years prior.

When pressed on the matter, Nutter had confirmed to Hervé that he had indeed married Matchwell in a moment of youthful ardour, though she went by a different surname back then, having been drawn to her fiery disposition and passion, only to swiftly dissolve the union once he learnt of her true nature and the fact she was still legally married to one Archibald Duncan at the time.

Sadly, in his haste to escape the foolishness of his youth by putting as much distance between himself and the harridan as possible, the young Charles Nutter had entirely neglected to secure any official documentation proving his claims & had understandably forgotten the enter sordid affair until Mary darkened his doorway years later.

Now, with Matchwell threatening to take him to court for bigamy and expel a distraught Sally from the property, Nutter found himself scrambling to both counter her in court whilst gathering the evidence needed to clear his good name, which is precisely where Hervé Keats came into the picture.

While a man of Nutter's standing could certainly afford to hire an investigator of better standing, Isengard Stanton being the gold standard, Matchwell's timing had frozen most of his assets while the court investigated the validity of her claims, leaving him with what little coin he kept at home.

And while Hervé may have been an Intis immigrant that had fallen on hardtimes, his prior reputation as an upstanding Barrister placed him at the top of the desperate Nutter's few remaining options, the man offering a promissory note for a Hundred Gold Pounds to track down the documentation needed to prove his innocence.

Hervé, naturally, had taken the job without a moment's hesitation, not only because a hundred pounds was a veritable fortune that could easily turn his life around, but because despite how low he'd fallen, he was, at his core, a good man who remembered what justice felt like.

While he had never known Charles Nutter personally, due to their differing social status and the man's own dislike for foreigners, he knew the man by reputation as an honest, if severe, servant of Earl Castlemallard and by word of mouth as a loving, devoted husband.

And so, with the promise of a Hundred Pound windfall at his back, Hervé Keats put aside the bottle and spent the next two weeks hauling his tired feet down the narrow back alleys of Backlund, battling the violent tremors of alcohol withdrawal and the ghostly whispers that called out from the shadows.

While he had fallen from grace, he had retained contact with many of his old legal connections, invoking dusty favours to gain access to the secure archives of Backlund's municipal courts and parish registries in search of the very paperwork needed to vindicate Charles Nutter's innocence.

What he instead discovered within those dusty tomes, however, was a masterpiece of predatory malice, for while digging deeper into the ink-stained ledgers he learned that Mary Matchwell hadn't just committed bigamy against Nutter, but a string of other husbands, including Archibald Duncan, all fleeced, all ruined and all abandoned in short order.

Despite the horror building in his chest, as something like this reeked of the arcane, Keats had painstakingly obtained copies of the documents before setting out to track down the survivors across the smog-choked metropolis, hoping they might be convinced to testify against Mary in court.

Some were hiding in the slums of the East End, while Archibald Duncan himself was rotting in the local Debtor's Prison, his spirit crushed under the weight of the debts Matchwell had run up in his name before leaving him to take the fall.

Driven by a volatile mix of desperation, spite, and the sudden hope of vengeance, every single one of those living husbands had willingly put pen to paper and signed the legal testimonies that would cast Matchwell into a penal colony for life if she somehow managed to avoid the noose.

With the ultimate legal shield resting safely in his satchel, an elated Hervé hadn't waited for the morning, instead dragging his exhausted frame through the iron gates of the Nutter estate, arriving sometime in the evening ready to claim his well-deserved hundred pounds.

He'd marched up the stone steps, raised his hand and rapped his knuckles sharply against the heavy oak door. However, rather than swinging open to reveal a polite housemaid, it cracked open a mere three inches, blocked by the broad shoulder of a man wearing the tarnished brass buttons of a Backlund municipal court Bailiff.

For as it turned out, at some point during the two weeks Keats was running around the east end trying to clear his name of Bigamy, Charles Nutter had apparently been arrested as the prime suspect of the assault and attempted murder of Dr. Barnaby Sturk, a respected Army Surgeon.

Word on the grapevine would later reveal that Nutter was spotted in Backlund Park, standing over the prone form of Sturk in the wee hours of the morning, having supposedly clubbed the Surgeon over the head, which made absolutely no sense to anyone who knew the man.

A rigid legalist, for all his grim countenance Nutter was not by nature a violent man. Even when Matchwell had threatened his good name and driven Sally to hysterics, she hadn't been able to claim he raised a hand against her when he drove her from his home.

Instead, despite her attempts to garner sympathy, the testimonies of his staff showed the man's first response was to tend to his distraught wife, spiriting her off to their private chambers before calling a constableto have Matchwell removed from the property while he sent a runner to get in contact with his solicitor.

And even if he were the kind of man to lash out in a moment of heated passion, Charles Nutter was nothing if not a man of routine and at no point in his life had he ever deigned to go for a casual stroll around Backlund Park in the wee hours of the morning where the likelihood of being accosted rose considerably.

Of course, none of that mattered to the stern-faced Bailiff that currently barred the way to the Nutter Estate, refusing to even entertain the notion of contacting Mrs Nutter to verify Hervé's identity, ordering him to leave and go about his business elsewhere lest he be dragged off.

It was in that moment, as Hervé was trying to figure out a way to get past the long arm of the law, that a sound drifted from behind the Bailiff through the crack in the door, a familiar sound he'd heard too often in the seedy bars that would take his coin, but should have no place here.

If the rumours or true and Charles Nutter had been arrested for murder, as ludicrous as that sounded, then by all rights the house should be filled with the lamentations of his beloved Sally, so why was Hervé hearing the cheeky sound of a fiddle and the raucous laughter of a party in full swing?

It seemed the Bailiff had caught the sound as well, as his features, what little Keats could make out through the crack in the doorway, had turned decidedly wooden, his silhouette shifting behind the dooras he reached for his truncheon, prompting the detective to feign compliance and retreat.

The moment he heard thr door slam shut behind him, however, he immediately, doubled back, slinking along the side of the building, stepping tenderly over the flowerbeds until he reached the tall, arched windows of the parlour, shading his eyes against the glass to peer through the lace curtains into the warm, gas-lit interior.

The scene inside the grand, oak-panelled room was utterly grotesque, for draped over a chaise lounge like a conquering Queen sat Mary Matchwell, her satin skirts sprawled carelessly over the armrest, her dark eyes filled with a wicked, triumphal malice and a mocking smirk on her striking lips,

As Hervé looked on, she raised a crystal goblet that was doubtless filled with the finest imported wine from Nutter's collection in atoast, before throwing her head back and emptying the contents down her throat with the ease of a veteran deckhand consuming grog.

Sitting directly opposite her was David O'Reagan, a ghost from Hervé's past that he would have been quite happy to never see again, the man's notoriously rumpled waistcoat unbuttoned and his round, fleshy face flushed a violent crimson from the alcohol.

While O'Reagan liked to present himself as a respectable pillar of the law, and to be fair, he knew his business well, those who knew him best referred to him as a thorough scoundrel who had only ever taken a case where he could expect a profit and not a one of those cases had ever been honest.

It was this, combined with his general cowardly demeanour, fleeing from confrontation the moment he was on the back-foot and his complete lack of shame or principle, that earned him the epithet 'Dirty Davy', a badge he wore with the pride of a true scoundrel unless he could successfully sue the speaker for slander.

He was sitting at Nutter's mahogany writing desk, his muddy boots propped shamelessly on the polished wood. As Hervé looked on, he saw the parasite lean forward to whisper energetically to his chief clerk, a facetious, thoroughly boozy individual who was currently attempting to balance a silver candlestick on his chin, to Matchwell's immense amusement.

The table behind them was a chaotic mess of half-eaten roasted meats, overturned glasses and scattered legal documents no doubt ransacked from Nutter's private files. In the corner of the parlour, completely ignored by the carousing trio but providing the frantic soundtrack to their malice sat another familiar face.

Unlike O'Reagan, whom had been a contemporary of Hervé's during his time as a Barrister, Larry Cleary was someone he'd been forced to rub elbows with following his fall from grace, a ragged, blind fiddler with a face as ugly as it was cunning, possessed of the nimblest fingers that ever held a bow.

Those fingers were now causing his bow to fly across the strings in a manic, discordant jig, his boot thumping rhythmically against Nutter's expensive carpet, his pitted face set in a cunning grin while his sightless eyes twitched rolled with the Devil's merriment.

Having seen enough, Hervé had backed away from the window the moment the door to the parlour opened to admit the Bailif, retreating into the safety of the afternoon smog before someone spied him and called foul, his stomach roiling with despair and helpless fury.

The sheer, terrifying speed of the trap was breathtaking, O'Reagan having likely learned of Nutter's arrest and immediately gotten one of his own people assigned to guard the property, allowing the vultures to move in whilst keeping anyone that could have opposed them out.

Clutching his leather satchel tightly, Hervé had found himself completely outplayed. He had pushed his body to the limit in thepursuit of justice, and perhaps even salvation, only to be presented with a vision of sin right at the finish line, as if the world itself were mocking his efforts.

For even if he presented this evidence to the courts, clearing Charles Nutter of bigamy wouldn't save him from the hangman's noose. And if Nutter hung Sally Nutter would be left with nothing, as his assets would've been seized by the crown, meaning he wouldn't even be paid for his good deed.

And to make matters worse, the shadows were whispering again, his exhaustion, combined with the sheer heartbreak of the situation, having finally worn down his focus to the point he could no longer block them out on his own.

And so, broken and dispirited, Hervé Keats had retreated to a nearby bar and by the time the gas lamps began to hiss against the suffocating weight of the midnight fog, he had used what few silvers he had left to drown out the shadows and the memory of the bailiff's sneer in threeseparate glasses of raw, unwatered gin.

Tossed out with the rest of the rabble, he'd staggered through the narrow, slick alleyways, his boots slipping on wet cobbles and rotting refuse until he finally reached his cramped, damp lodgings on the fringes of the district, stumbling past the irate Landlord Mr. Briggs with promises of payment later.

Bolting the door behind him, as he was drunk, not stupid, he'd stumbled into the pitch black, freezing room, too tired to strike a match, his limbs heavy as lead, his vision swimming with the manic, phantom rhythm of the blind fiddler's jig.

Shrugging off his satchel containing the ironclad bigamy records of Mary Matchwell and the signed statements of her victims, he'd paused ever so briefly, to stare at it, the image of Dirty Davy, Larry Cleary and that boozy clerk carousing in Nutter's parlor alongside the witch burned behind his eyelids.

"Tomorrow," he'd vowed into the darkness, the words leaving his throat in a slurred, hollow rasp as he reached out for the edge of his thin mattress, intending to collapse and sleep off the poison "I'll head straight to the magistrates... tomorrow..."

He'd never even made it to his bed, instead collapsing to the floor, gasping and choking as his lungs suddenly seized, locked in a vice of sudden, paralysing agony, his last memory the sight of the splintered floor boards of his bedroom rushing up to meet his face along with the haunting image of his mother, Régine, screaming at him from the void.

---

June 28th - Hervé Keats' Apartment...

"Christ on a cross..." Seth breathed, staring down at the tail-end of the final entry on the last of the three sheets of parchment he'd been using to write out Hervé's final moments, his face as grim as a wet Sunday, a chill having settled deep into his bones that had absolutely nothing to do with the cracked window.

A part of him couldn't help but notice the whole thing read like one of those Victorian Noir dramas—some disgraced detective trying to do right by an innocent man while battling his own inner demons. But no matter how much you tried to tidy it up and give it a bit of gloss, the brutal truth remained: Hervé Keats had died entirely on his own, shivering in the dark.

Now, Seth liked to think he was a reasonably clever man, but given the state of things, the timing, and above all else, the bloody setting, it didn't take a genius to figure out that Hervé's death wasn't just a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the drink and the gear.

No, to Seth's mind, it was as plain as day. Hervé, despite taking every single precaution under the sun to keep himself a million miles away from the supernatural, had been done in by a Beyonder. It made Seth's own situation a damn sight more dangerous, mind you, and not a bit less baffling.

As he'd noted before, Hervé had a pathological dread of the supernatural. The poor bastard was so haunted by the ghosts of his past that he let them dictate his whole bloody future.

Still, it was because of that very fear that he'd made it his business to learn the million and one ways Beyonders could slip into proper society, just so he'd never be caught on the hop.

Because of that, as easy as it would be to start throwing accusations left, right, and centre, Seth could say for a factual certainty that—barring the Bailiff, maybe—neither Mary Matchwell nor a single one of the revellers Hervé had spotted at the Nutter estate the night before was a Beyonder.

And as for the Bailiff? Well, seeing what a spineless coward O'Reagan actually was, it was highly unlikely the man was some rogue 'Wild' Beyonder whose services the rat had bought through some shady business. A man like that would spend his whole miserable life looking over his shoulder, terrified of getting a bullet or a curse in the back for overstepping his station.

But on the absolute off-chance he was wrong, and the Bailiff actually was a Beyonder with a Path that let him drop a man from a distance, he still wouldn't have been able to lay a finger on Hervé. Not with the way Beyonder powers actually worked.

For starters, while O'Reagan or his Clerk could easily spot Hervé in a crowd, and Cleary's sharp ears could probably pick his voice out of a roaring pub, the Bailiff only knew Hervé from a single brief run-in on the steps that afternoon. The man wouldn't know him from Adam.

Sure, Hervé hadn't even managed to introduce himself before getting turned away. The Bailiff wouldn't even know the name 'Hervé Keats'—he'd likely just written him off as some annoying interloper who'd gone and interrupted his merrymaking.

Add to that the fact that Hervé had been dead careful not to leave a single scrap of evidence behind—not a thread of clothing, a strand of hair, or a single drop of blood—and even if the Bailiff was a Beyonder, he wouldn't have been able to put a remote curse on the detective any better than the average man on the street.

No, as far as the Bailiff was concerned, Hervé Keats wasn't a threat to Mary Matchwell's little plans and wasn't worth the bother of chasing down. Now, if they'd somehow found out what was inside his satchel, that'd be a different story altogether. But even then, it'd be far handier to just slit his throat in a dark alley and be done with it.

Morbid as that thought was, the plain fact was that even Beyonders knew better than to go using their powers for casual murder in a place like Backlund. Doing that sort of thing was a surefire way to draw the eye of the Church of Evernight's Nighthawks, or the Mandated Punishers of the Lord of Storms.

'Probably both of them if you were sloppy about it', a dark part of him mused. Yet, even if Matchwell's lot lacked the means, the wit, or the sheer, brainless stupidity to risk bringing the law down on their heads, Hervé's death still felt completely wrong.

It was too sudden. Too clinical. Granted, an alcoholic's body could give out at any moment—Seth had lost many a good friend and relative to the drink despite the best efforts of clan and kin, and Hervé was hardly the picture of health when he croaked—but the sheer timing of the thing had Seth glaring at the shadows.

Then there was the business of Régine's ghost to consider. While Hervé's relationship with his mother had gone right down the swallie after Renaldo died—thanks in part to her losing her wits and marrying again so quickly—Hervé had never wished the woman any ill. Hell, he'd fled all the way to Backlund University just to escape the ghosts of Doolin.

In fact, regular letters from his new stepfather had confirmed that Régine was still as full of life as ever, if not more so, now that Hervé wasn't around to remind her of Renaldo. Hervé had taken that as all the excuse he needed to stay the hell away from Doolin for good.

Why then, in the name of God, had Hervé's very last memory been his mother's screaming face reaching out to drag him into the dark? Was it just pure guilt over the accident that killed Renaldo? Or had something happened out on the Isle of Lemrick seventeen years later that had caused mother and son to join the man in the next world?

Whatever the truth was, Seth wasn't going to get any answers by sitting here staring at the papers on his desk, his finger idly tracing the edges of the ink-stained parchment. To get to the bottom of a supernatural mess like this in Backlund, he needed real power. He needed a pathway.

He needed to become a Beyonder.​

Unfortunately, in the Loen Kingdom, mysticism was a dear, tightly guarded currency kept well away from the likes of the general public. Beyonder ingredients—the very makings of a Sequence Potion—cost a small fortune in Gold Pounds on the black market.

Now, the path to those funds was clear enough, surely, but it was going to be an agonizingly complicated bit of business. To get himself paid, Seth would have to do more than just honour Hervé's final contract and clear Charles Nutter's good name from Mary Matchwell's fraudulent bigamy charge.

No, he'd have to untangle the whole high-society frame-up entirely, if only to save the poor devil from the hangman's noose.

"Ceimar Cheim," he sighed to himself, rising from the creaking chair with a grimace. His back gave a right loud pop from sitting so long, prompting him to take a brief moment to stretch his limbs before stepping over to the basin in the corner.

He tipped the last of the pitcher of stagnant, ice-cold water into it, when a sudden flash of light caught his eye. It was a mirror, dusty and cracked, hanging on the wall just above the basin.

Seth had likely missed it entirely, what with being so preoccupied with his rebirth, and Hervé having taken off his spectacles before bed. In the pitch black, the man wouldn't have spotted a barn door, let alone a looking glass.

For a moment, he found himself staring silently into the haunting, bloodshot eyes of Hervé Keats. The dead man's reflection stared right back at him, grim as you like. The hollow cheeks and the bruised circles beneath his eyes, combined with that pale, ghostly complexion, did nothing but firm his resolve.

"I'll find out what really stopped your heart, Hervé," he vowed, his voice little more than a whisper, though he knew well enough the dead man couldn't hear him. Still, the fellow had spent his whole life running from ghosts—and who was to say he wouldn't stick around to haunt his own corpse? "But I can't do a single hand's turn about it as a mere mortal."

And so, having said his piece, he set about trying to get cleaned up for the day. He stripped off Hervé's shirt, which reeked to high heaven of booze and sweat, before cupping his hands to scoop up the freezing liquid from the basin.

He plunged his face into it time and again, savouring the pure rush of the chill against his skin. He did this a good few times, making certain to get around his neck and under his oxters with a coarse rag to shift the lingering remnants of sweat.

That done, he squinted into the mirror, making a failed attempt to smooth down Hervé's mane of matted hair so he might look somewhat presentable. In the end, though, he was forced to throw his hat at it, as despite his best efforts, he still looked exactly like a disgraced, broken-down ex-barrister who had spent the entire night drowning his sorrows in some seedy South Borough dive.

"Well," he chuckled, resigning himself to looking thoroughly hungover as he adjusted the collar of his fresh shirt—the only other one Hervé owned, as luck would have it, tossing the man's threadbare, soot-stained woollen coat over his shoulders to shield himself from the bitter Backlund damp. "At least I won't have to put on an act."

And with that grand thought, Seth Collins grabbed the battered leather satchel carrying the ammunition needed to pull the rug right out from under Mary Matchwell's house of cards. He took one last steadying breath, unbolted the door of Hervé's humble abode, and stepped out to face the music.

---

For those curious, the situation & characters mentioned here are based off 'The House by the Churchyard' by Irish author Joseph Sheridan le Fanu. Give it a read if you have the chance, though I'll warn you, it's a wordy novel.

Translations: "Ceimar Cheim." - Step-by-step, essentially he's saying 'One Step at a Time' in Irish.

Feel free to comment with suggestions and advice.