The stench of sulfur and rotting roses clawed at his nostrils.
Seryn Octavius knelt in the ruins of the chapel, the hem of his black robes soaked with the blood of last night's corpse—a nameless vagrant poet who'd hummed an off-key dirge even as his throat was slit. Mechanically, Seryn ground the bone ash in his palm, letting the powder seep into the cracks of his calloused fingers. This was the ninety-ninth funeral of the month, the three-hundred-and-seventy-fourth corpse since he'd inherited his family's mantle as a *soul-ferryman*.
The crucible hummed at his feet, its bronze surface etched with raised harp patterns bleeding starlight-silver luminescence. But what boiled inside wasn't alchemical brew—it was the poet's final breath, condensed into an azure mist. Seryn knew the Reaper's tax collectors would come once the mist turned black. His duty, as the last of the Emberdirge line, was to transmute death itself into bitter tonic, a temporary reprieve from the curse gnawing at his blood.
"Time for the third catalyst," he muttered, shaking a sliver of obsidian from the pouch at his waist—a shard from the coffin that had accompanied his birth. The fragment hit the flames, and the crucible screamed like a thousand harpstrings snapping. The mist coalesced into a translucent hand that seized his wrist.
"…*Father?*" Seryn's pupils constricted. The fingers matched his memories perfectly: the twisted knuckle of a sword hand, the palm scarred by molten rock.
The specter didn't speak. It dragged his hand into the crucible's depths and scrawled two blazing runes in the boiling fog:
**FIND HER**
Agony detonated in his skull. Seryn staggered back, colliding with the bone-china offering plate behind him. Shards bit into his palm as a scent he *shouldn't recognize* assaulted him—hyacinth laced with briny depth, the unmistakable signature of Lady Eluinora. He'd burned every trace of her since her betrayal three years ago, scorching his senses numb.
The crucible flared, devouring the specter. When Seryn clawed his way upright, he found the vessel's base pooled with quicksilver liquid, its surface flecked with memories not the poet's: a moonlit shore, a woman cloaked in merfolk scales plunging a dagger into an infant's swaddle—the child's chest blooming with the Octavius harp sigil.
Iron boots shattered glass beyond the chapel. "Ferryman!" a graveled voice roared. "The Alchemists' Guild claims your crucible. Surrender the *Ashborne Core*—now!"
Seryn licked blood from his lips, fingers tightening around the vial of *Oblivion Tincture* hidden beneath his robes. The harp patterns on the crucible seared his skin—a warning of forbidden arts. He'd broken the Guild's monopoly again, but that wasn't what chilled him.
The ghostly grip had left visible burns on his wrist. And according to the Emberdirge codices, only a blood-bound soul could scar flesh through ash alchemy.
His father had died twelve years ago.