The next day, rain shrouded the city of Yorving. Griffin and I landed right beside each other in the same square as last night, which the morning light revealed to be named "Cistern Square", from the signs which we now had time to read. Grace hopped down from my back, glancing at the throng of people who had gathered to hawk goods or gather water from the great central basin around the statue. This section of the city had seemed dead last night, but it was crowded with people in the day. Most of them had the look of labourers and unskilled craftsmen, reinforcing Kyrie's previous comments about the kind of people who called this ward home.

"Awfully loud out here," Rosalie murmured as she straightened her armour. Griffin had carried her here, while Ingo and Arthur remained at the castle to rest and keep healing their wounds, and Yura and Brand were busy helping Emrys prepare glyphs to break the seal on the door in the church once we went back to deal with Latighern. Splitting up seemed prudent, with nine members of our flight and multiple jobs to do, especially when the four of us didn't expect any trouble since we were just snooping around an abandoned house.

«We're going inside,» said Griffin. «It's just over there.»

They led the rest of us down the street, between rows of people making their way to and from the square. We caught more than a few odd looks from passersby, and I guessed that there probably weren't many dragons in this area of the city. I wondered how many there were overall, and whether I'd end up meeting any. What they might think of us.

The house wasn't anything special. It looked almost exactly like the ones around it, with smooth off-white painted sides and stone windowsills. There was a small balcony on the second floor, but both doors on the front, as well as all of the visible windows were covered in crude wooden boards nailed directly into the walls, leaving long cracks in the plaster. A small clay urn sat on the doorstep, trailing thin lines of smoke from holes in the lid. It was the same incense as at the cathedral. I reeled back at the sudden headache as we got close enough to really smell it. It wasn't nearly as strong, but poor Griffin almost looked like they were choking.

«What…is that smell?» they asked, turning their head away to take long breaths of the comparatively pure air behind us.

«Incense,» I answered. «Some kind I've never seen before. It's all over the Chapel Ward. Just….» I cut myself off and slunk up to the door, quickly taking the lid off the urn and blowing inside to extinguish the incense. There weren't any more than three little sticks sitting in a mountain of ash, and a quick puff of air was enough to put them out. Hot smoke poured off the ends for another moment before abating.

"Is it really that bad?" asked Rosalie. "It's strong, I'll grant you that, but the smell doesn't seem overly offensive."

«It must only affect dragons,» I said. «Or maybe just ersatz, I don't know how Brand would feel about it. It's this…pounding headache. I can't imagine why they'd want to drive dragons off. Maybe it's an accidental effect?»

"Perhaps," hummed Rosalie.

Griffin looked around at the street. «Are we going to get in trouble for breaking in?» they asked. «I mean, someone will notice the boards being missing. Eventually.»

«Which is why we're not going in the front.» I jerked my head towards a narrow alley that led between the house and the adjacent buildings, carefully manoeuvring my way into the tight space. Just as I had hoped, there was a side door, and though it had boards covering it up as well, it was distinctly out of sight from the main road. With my strength, the boards were easy to just rip right out of the wall, leaving the simple, weathered door behind them.

I set the boards down in a pile beside some of the other rubbish in the alley. I tried the handle. Locked.

Alright, time to see if I've still got it, I thought to myself as I twisted to rifle through the bags hanging from my saddle. There it is. I pulled out my old lock picking set. It was definitely not sized for the hands of a dragon, and I hadn't had any practise, but I was confident this was a simple enough lock to begin with.

I sat down, pinching the tools between my fingers and hunching over to pick at the door. The others sidled up next to me, doing their best to block the view of what I was doing from the street. Not that a couple humans and a dragon wearing armour and a saddle clustered in an alley trying to seem normal was any less suspicious, but at least it wasn't observably a crime.

I was right that the lock was simple. I cursed in my head several times as I fumbled the pick once, then twice. I was almost tempted to shift into human form, but there was no way I could be seen in the city like that. I just had to make do. Eventually, though, I found a couple grooves on the tools that I could slot my claws into that made holding them much easier, and a moment later the lock clicked, undone.

«In,» I whispered, gently swinging the door open and squeezing my way into a common room inside, with the others right on my tail. Rosalie shut the door behind us after we all filed in. I was surprised that we could all fit, but while the house obviously wasn't built with dragons in mind, it was a lot more spacious than our shack back in Vandermaine, enough so that there was just enough room for me and Griffin to walk around freely.

The room was dusty and unclean, with a few chairs angled towards a fireplace and a side table stacked with a couple religious icons and a handful of decorative glass beads and semiprecious stones. A small doorway led to a kitchen and dining area behind us, and there was a narrow staircase leading upstairs next to a shut door.

«What are we actually looking for?» Griffin whispered.

«Some kind of "why",» I answered. «Preferably something that we can use against her. Or maybe something we can use to get her to come to her senses.»

Rosalie leaned around the door to the kitchen, glancing dubiously back and forth. "Well, do you see anything? Smell anything?"

Griffin nodded slowly. «…I do smell something. Ash. Through that door.» They gestured at the shut one next to the stairs. «And…blood. Two different kinds, upstairs.»

I smelled it too. It was old, but the house was so devoid of anything else that it still lingered in the air, wafting down the stairs in slow waves.

Grace tapped her chin. "The blood seems more important."

«It's old, and it's not like it's going anywhere,» I said. «Grace, you and I will go see what's through that door. Rosalie, Griffin, you go investigate the blood.

Griffin seemed nervous, but Rosalie resolutely stepped up to lead them upstairs, and they reluctantly followed behind. Once they were gone, I tried the handle on the door, and thankfully found this one unlocked. It swung open with a loud creaking sound to reveal a set of stairs going down, turning back on itself so we couldn't see the bottom. The passage was dark and unlit.

Grace went first, lighting the lantern at her belt. "Spooky," she murmured. "Wonder what she was burning down here."

I sniffed. «Doesn't smell like wood or coal,» I said, the air of a warning in my voice.

We crept down the wooden steps at a crawl, just in case there happened to be some kind of danger. Every step protested loudly at our weight, but none of them were in enough disrepair to break. Once we reached the turn, we could see the basement in the flickering lantern light. Most of it was normal: a small wooden box of a room with a few barrels and crates that had the lingering scents of fruits and cured meats that must have once been stored there. But unlike a normal basement, there was a massive black stain in the middle of the room, the remains of what must have been a huge fire. Some of the wood around the epicenter of the blaze was itself charred black. All the containers had been moved out of the way, closer to the walls. As we reached the bottom of the stairs, the scent of ash started to take on a different character, a horrible note like burning hair entering the air.

Then I saw the bones.

Three small, black, jagged pieces of bone were all that remained of whoever had been cremated in this spot, lying amidst a pile of ash and dust. Grace halted at the bottom of the steps, staring at the burn site.

"…Do you think this is what happened to her family?" she wondered in a whisper.

I glanced around, stepping further into the room. The ash pile wasn't especially large, and the bone fragments were few in number. «I don't think this was any more than one person,» I said. I took the chance to snatch up some of the ash when Grace wasn't looking; "funeral pyre ash" was on Linus's list, and this was an opportunity too clear to pass up. «Too small. I think they were already dead, too. If she'd killed someone this way, they would have thrashed around and left char all over the place. This is too clean.»

Grace looked towards the ceiling. "So someone died, and she cremated them down here," she summarised. "Kyrie didn't say how big her family was. Maybe—"

She was cut off by a thunk from above that made us both jump. Then…bells. My ear flicked on instinct as I tried to listen to the distant sound. It was small, a simple melody made from tiny chimes, only just audible down here. In the silence beneath this cadaver of a house, it was a haunting sound.

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"What was that?" whispered Grace.

«Music…» I murmured. Grace gave me a quizzical look, but followed when I started creeping back up the stairs, towards the source of the sound. The ground floor was pitch black when we made it back up. The minute stream of soft light that had broken through the rain clouds and filtred through the gaps in the window boards was gone, replaced by a fine mist seeping through and creeping across the floor. My heart started to race. Suddenly, it felt like we had jumped out of a normal investigation and into a ghost story. I worried for Griffin and Rosalie, for the music was coming from upstairs.

"I hear it," whispered Grace. "It sounds like a lullaby."

«It sounds like a music box,» I said. «Come on, the other two might be in danger.»

That woke her up enough to start hurrying up the stairs to the first floor, with me right behind her. The first floor was little more than a short hallway, with four open doors branching off of it, one at the end, two to the left, and one to the right. The one at the end led into a small office, with a desk and a couple bookshelves. The blood scent was coming from there. Now that I was closer, I could tell what the two types Griffin had mentioned were. One was human's blood. The other was fiendish blood. A faint trail of stains led from the office towards the door on the right.

Griffin was crouched in the doorway to that room, their head low and their eyes staring forward like a stalking cat. I leaned over to get a view of the room. It was a bedroom, with a wide bed for two and a nightstand beside it. The bed sat below a draping canopy, which covered the inside, keeping it from view, although in the lantern light, I could see the silhouette of a tiny form sitting in the centre of the bed, where the music was coming from. Beside Griffin, Rosalie was slowly moving forward towards the sound and the figure behind it.

«What's happening?» I asked Griffin silently. «Are you okay?»

«Something fell out of the nightstand,» they said, not breaking their stare away from the bed. «Then this…shadow snatched it up and into the bed. And then music came out.»

Grace shoved past me to get a good view of the room. "Rosa…!" she hissed.

Rosalie glanced back. She put a finger over her mouth in a silent shushing motion, before taking one last step and slowly pulling the canopy of the bed aside.

Of all the things I had expected to see sitting on the bed, a cat was not one of them. In fairness, this was certainly not a cat. It looked like one in ways, with its orange tabby coat, little white paws and big ears. But its mouth was a little too wide, its body was a little too long, its eyes had just a little too much sparkle of intelligence to them. Then, it opened a second set of eyes, set into its head just above the first. There wasn't any way normal anatomy could accommodate this thing's face, and yet it stared at all of us with a knowing grin. A tiny wooden music box sat at its feet, the lid open as it gently played its music.

«It's a spirit!» said Griffin.

«Like a conjuror's pet?» I asked, unsure if they meant magical spirits or if they were trying to insinuate the creature was a ghost. When they nodded, I added, «Who summoned it then?»

Just as I opened that question to the room, the thing's mouth opened, and amidst a nest of sharp, needle-like teeth, a voice spoke to us. "Battered, broken, bloodied, burned," it said, its voice a breathy whisper like the shuffle of trees in a cold breeze. "The survivors left, for blood they yearn. A plague, a curse, a vile stain, here one life and one hope were slain. Now all that remains of her sickened kin, are wrathful monsters who wear their skin."

A sharp wind blew against the front of the house, seemingly from nowhere. I watched as the boards that covered up that window rotted before my eyes and cracked with the force of the gale until they shattered, blowing the window open. The cat picked up the music box by the lid and hopped from the bed to the windowsill.

"Come, thou wilt, and see her guilt," it ordered, before jumping down to the street below.

Rosalie rushed over to the window, poking her head out as she frantically looked around. "It's leaving without us," she warned. "Are we going to follow?"

I glanced at Grace, unsure of how dangerous a spirit was. For all my experience, I had never in my life interacted with a spirit before. But she merely shrugged, deferring the decision back to me.

«…Yes,» I said. I hurriedly backed out of the room, moving towards the stairs. «What we might learn is worth the risk. And I want to know what it's doing with that music box, if it was originally in the nightstand.»

The others were right behind me as we ran out of the house. Last night had put nervousness in me about my decisions, and I hoped that the spirit wasn't leading us into an ambush or something. The thought crossed my mind that Latighern had summoned it, and was deceiving us somehow. But there were four of us, and we were vigilant for any potential trap. So it should be fine.

The streets were thick with mist that hadn't been there before we entered the house. They still seemed to be as crowded as before, but when we walked forward, following the sound of that music box, there was always a way forward between the people that disappeared into the fog to either side of us, parting like a path through a forest. The spirit wasn't running, and we caught up to it quickly with our longer strides. It didn't acknowledge our sudden appearance, and kept walking south.

Its path took us through the winding streets of the Bellflower Quarter, and eventually the path broadened considerably. From the flights we'd taken over the city the past couple days, I recognised the western bridge, a vast span that connected the Bellflower Quarter to the Chapel Ward. The fog thinned the scent of incense wafting from ahead, but it reached my nose all the same, stirring up a wretched headache by the time we reached the other side of the bridge.

«We need to figure out something to do about that incense,» I muttered.

"A ward against fiends, the smoke is said to make," the spirit said, somehow speaking completely clearly without dropping the music box from its mouth. "Yet it poisons dragons' minds as well, with a hideous headache."

That answer lodged itself in my mind. Another connection between dragons and fiends. Hopefully the spirit was using the term "poison" poetically; I didn't want to go back to the clinic again so soon.

It stepped off the main road shortly after arriving in the ward, heading west through the comparatively empty streets of this ward until it stopped at an iron fence surrounding a pit in the ground. A staircase just beyond the spiked gate led down the side of a building set into the lower wall to the ground.

"Be slow, be furtive, be silent," the spirit warned, sitting at the side of the gate. "She is quick to become violent."

I heard mumbling from up ahead, just too far away to make out. «You three stay here,» I said. «I'll go.»

"Alone?" whispered Grace.

«You'll be right here. I'll be safe, I promise.» Grace didn't seem comfortable with that, but we might not have time to waste. I crouched down, not bothering with the gate. I had been in this body long enough to know I could jump it with just a little help from my wings. My chest just brushed against the spikes on top as I cleared it easily.

I crept down the stairs, stepping as lightly as I was able. As I got closer, I could make out what this little yard was. It was a graveyard. An old and possibly abandoned one at that. Squared tombstones stuck haphazardly out of the gentle mounds in the large patch of grass. A fountain stood at one end, still spilling a slow trickle of water into the wide basin. And in the far corner, a figure wearing black minister's vestments knelt, hunched over a cluster of four graves. I crouched against the opposite wall, tilting my head and angling my ears to listen to what sounded like a prayer.

"…because you know that I don't have a choice," Latighern said, her voice fervent yet soft. "Isaac…what would you think of me if you could see what I've become? Do you think me a monster, or do you see the selflessness that guides my heart?" She chuckled humourlessly. "Oh, I suppose you would simply think me a mother. I'm sorry that I failed to be one for you."

She took a shaky breath. I knew that she was our enemy, but I still felt wrong eavesdropping on this prayer. It seemed personal. Like something I shouldn't be infringing on, even if it was to stop a murderer.

"But the damned still require ministry," she continued. "They must hold true, through the curse and into the light that burns it away. Saints. I need your guidance. I need you to show the 'doctors' that stalk the shadows, and the foreign hunters that come seeking a bounty, and the knights who kill those they swear to protect, I need you to show them. I need them to see who it is they slaughter. I need you to keep me on the selfless path. I need you to keep me from letting this…accursed rage take me. I need to keep my reasons close to heart. These pleas, I offer with my full sincerity, as a lowly minister with struggles born of this material world."

She abruptly stood, letting out a long sigh as she stared at the sky. I slunk forward, stepping behind a standing obelisk in the hopes of staying obscured. She didn't seem to have her cleaver with her, but I wasn't prepared for a fight at all.

"Please forgive me, Isaac," she whispered. "I must go. They'll need feeding again soon."

She stepped away. As she turned around, I tried to look away, but her eyes caught mine at the last second. Our gazes locked. I stared at her for a long time, waiting for her to strike. She must have been doing the same. I could. She wasn't armed. I could end this now, pounce and slice her throat, and then we'd be done with this. But I couldn't.

Her look of anticipation turned into one of exhaustion. There was anger in her tired, tired eyes, but she didn't act on it. "This is a sacred place, dragon," she said. "I won't spill your blood here. All I will do is offer a small piece of guidance." She took a step closer and I reflexively let out a low growl. She stopped at the warning. "We kill monsters as they threaten our borders and our yeomen. We slay bandits and marauders for the same, and jail the burglars and robbers that haunt our cities. But the fiends…they are innocents, robbed of their right minds by a malign curse. To kill them wantonly is to perpetrate a massacre of ordinary folk. Please…keep that in your heart."

She stared a moment longer as though waiting for a response, but I didn't have one to give, not one that would satisfy or calm her. So she furiously wiped a tear from her eye, and turned away. "And please, don't think you can tempt me with Darius's old favourites," she added. "The melody only brings pain to mind now." She hurried away, entering the door that sat beneath the staircase and disappearing into the bowels of the city.

I lingered for a moment, watching the door, like it would burst open to reveal Latighern ready with her cleaver at any moment, but it did not. With the graveyard silent again, I walked back up the stairs, returning to the remaining three through the loud, squeaky iron gate this time.

"We heard her talking," said Grace. "Are you okay?"

«I'm fine,» I murmured. «Where's the spirit?»

"It's right…" Grace started. She trailed off as she pointed to where the music came from. The box sat alone on the ground, the not-cat nowhere to be seen. As it sang the end of the tune one last time, the box finally went silent.

Grace fumbled her gesture, looking around in the mist that was being quickly replaced by the rain that had come down earlier. "Well, it was right there," she said. "I guess it left after it showed us what it wanted to show us." She looked back to me expectantly. "Well? What did you learn."

«She was praying,» I began. «To the saints, and to her…I think her child. The one member of her family that's actually dead. The rest, I think, are the fiends down in the church. I don't know how she managed to keep them from killing her every time she visits, but I think the murders are her…feeding them. And she asked us not to kill them.»

Griffin shifted, suddenly looking extremely guilty. «So…what are we going to do?»

I stepped forward, gingerly picking up the tiny music box. «She's mad. If there's any of her family left in those monsters, then it'd be a mercy to put them out of their misery. And either way, she's still killing people. So we'll deal with her however we need to.» I tucked the music box away in my bags. «And now, I have a new plan.»

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