# Chapter 2: A Room of Broken Physics
The Arcane Warden's hover-car was a sterile, silent cage. Liraya sat opposite Konto, her posture ramrod straight, a stark contrast to his slumped, coiled tension. The city lights of Aethelburg smeared across the tinted windows, a river of gold and cyan flowing past the grim, rain-slicked canyons of the Undercity toward the Upper Spires. The air inside the car carried the faint, antiseptic scent of ozone and recycled air, a smell that always reminded Konto of institutional control. He hated it. He preferred the honest grime of his own neighborhood, the mingled aromas of synth-ale sizzling on street grills and damp concrete.
Liraya hadn't said a word since they'd left his office. She simply tapped a sequence of commands into her personal data slate, her movements precise and economical. The silence was a test, he knew. A way to gauge his composure, to see if the man she'd just hired for an astronomical sum was worth the risk. He let her have her silence. He was busy wrestling with the ghost her money had bought. The memory of Elara, her face pale against the stark white of a hospital pillow, was a fresh wound, and Liraya's case had just poured salt on it.
The car eased to a stop, its magnetic repulsors humming down to a low thrum. They had arrived at the Obsidian Spire, one of the most prestigious residential towers in the city. Its facade was a seamless expanse of black, rune-etched glass that seemed to drink the light from the sky. A pair of Arcane Wardens, their polished obsidian armor gleaming under the lobby's recessed lighting, stood guard at the private elevator. Their Aspect Tattoos—stylized silver scales on their necks—flared with a dim light as they scanned Liraya's credentials. They gave Konto a look of open disdain, their gazes lingering on his worn leather jacket and the faint scuff marks on his boots. He met their stares with a flat, unimpressed look of his own. He'd been judged by better men for worse reasons.
The elevator ascended with impossible smoothness, the floor indicator a blur of glowing numbers. Liraya finally broke the silence. "My father's penthouse is on the top floor. The Wardens have sealed it. Officially, they're treating it as a potential magical containment issue."
"Unofficially?" Konto asked, his voice a low rumble.
"Unofficially, they're running out the clock. The Council wants this declared an accident, a tragic but private matter. The less poking around, the better."
The elevator doors slid open onto a private foyer. The air that hit them was wrong. It was thick, heavy, and carried a charge that made the fine hairs on Konto's arms stand on end. It smelled of burnt sugar, ozone, and something else… something cloyingly sweet and deeply wrong, like flowers left to rot in a sealed jar.
Liraya keyed in a complex code on a glowing panel, and the heavy door to the penthouse hissed open. The scene inside was a masterpiece of opulent destruction. The penthouse was vast, a sprawling space of panoramic windows, minimalist furniture, and priceless art. But the eye was immediately drawn to the center of the main living area. There, the laws of physics had been politely asked to leave. A section of the polished marble floor, about ten feet in diameter, was twisted into a grotesque, upward-spiraling vortex. The marble itself had been softened, like warm clay, and sculpted into impossible, looping shapes that defied gravity and geometry. It was a wound in the world, and it was still weeping a faint, shimmering energy.
"By the Weave…" Liraya breathed, stepping carefully into the room. Her professional composure was a thin veneer over a deep-seated shock. She approached the spiral, her hand hovering just above the distorted surface. "The residual energy is off the charts. It's not Aspect Weaving. It's… something else."
Konto didn't answer. His gaze was fixed on the spiral. He could feel it, a low, thrumming vibration in his skull, a dissonant chord that resonated with a memory he'd tried to bury for a decade. He moved past Liraya, his steps slow and deliberate. The air grew colder as he neared the anomaly. He knelt, his joints protesting, and placed his bare palm flat against the cool, undisturbed marble just outside the spiral's edge.
He closed his eyes.
The world fell away. The hum of the city, the scent of Liraya's perfume, the faint sound of her breathing—it all vanished, replaced by a roaring silence. He pushed his consciousness outward, not into a mind, but into the memory of the room itself. He was a Dreamwalker. His power was to navigate the subconscious, but every place, every object, held a faint psychic echo, an emotional residue of the events that transpired within it. This room was screaming.
The echo hit him not as a vision, but as a raw, sensory overload.
*First, there was peace. The deep, satisfied peace of a man who had just won a great victory. Councilman Valerius was here, sitting in a high-backed chair, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. He was smiling. The dream was a pleasant one, a memory of a summer estate, the sun on his face, the laughter of a child.*
*Then, the cold came. It started as a chill in the dream, a sudden shadow blotting out the sun. The laughter died. The warm air grew frigid. Valerius's smile faltered, confusion turning to dawning fear. Something was in the dream with him.*
*Konto felt it too. A presence. It was vast and hungry, a thing of shifting shadows and too many limbs. It had no shape he could comprehend, only a function: to consume. It moved through the dream like a shark through a dark ocean, its passage leaving ripples of pure terror.*
*Valerius tried to wake up. Konto could feel the man's frantic struggle, the psychic equivalent of thrashing against a locked door. But the door wouldn't open. The creature held him fast, anchoring him to the nightmare. It was feeding now, not on his fears, but on the very substance of his mind. His memories, his personality, his consciousness—it was all being unraveled, thread by thread, and devoured.*
*The pain was excruciating, a psychic feedback loop that made Konto's own head feel like it was splitting open. He could hear Valerius's mental screams, silent and absolute. He could feel the man's identity dissolving, his sense of self collapsing into a black, hungry void.*
*The creature's presence began to bleed through. The dream was no longer a contained space. Its reality was leaking into the waking world. The laws of physics were becoming suggestions. The floor began to soften, to warp under the pressure of an impossible geometry. The air itself grew thick with the creature's psychic exhalation—the scent of burnt sugar and rotting flowers.*
*Konto was a spectator to a psychic cannibalism. He watched as the last spark of Councilman Valerius was extinguished, leaving behind an empty, dreaming shell. The creature, sated, began to recede, but not before leaving its mark, a permanent scar on the fabric of the room. The spiral in the floor was its parting gift, a monument to its feast.*
Konto's hand flew to his temple, his breath catching in a ragged gasp. The echo of the nightmare was fading, but not the feeling it left behind—the cold, hungry void, the sense of a mind being unmade from the inside out. He staggered back from the warped section of the floor, his face pale and sheened with a cold sweat. The penthouse swam back into focus, the sharp lines of the furniture a stark contrast to the chaotic memory still churning in his mind.
Liraya took a step toward him, her analytical composure finally cracking, replaced by genuine concern. "Konto? What did you see?"
He didn't answer her. His eyes were wide, unfocused, seeing not the opulent penthouse but another room, another time. A cramped apartment in the Undercity, the smell of rain and cheap noodles, and a woman with a laugh like wind chimes, her eyes wide with the same terror he had just felt. He saw her reach for him, her mouth forming his name, as a shadow fell over them both.
He sank to his knees, the expensive suit pants creasing on the marble floor. The weight of a decade of guilt and failure crashed down on him. He had failed her. He had run. And now, the same monster was back.
A single, broken whisper escaped his lips, a name laced with a decade of grief and a self-loathing so profound it was a physical taste in his mouth.
"Elara."
The name hung in the silent, impossible room, a confession and a cry of pain all at once. Liraya froze, her hand halfway to his shoulder. The name meant nothing to her, but the way he said it—like a prayer from a damned soul—sent a true, deep chill through her that had nothing to do with the residual magic in the air. She realized, in that instant, that she had hired a man haunted by the very same monster she was asking him to hunt. This wasn't just a job for him. It was a ghost, and she had just handed it a key to his past.
She watched him, kneeling on the floor of her father's tomb, and for the first time since this all began, she felt a sliver of fear—not for the city, not for the conspiracy, but for the broken man she had just bound to her cause.
Konto's breathing was harsh, ragged. He forced the memory down, shoving Elara's face back into the locked box in his mind where she lived with all his other failures. He pushed himself to his feet, his legs unsteady. He wouldn't break. Not here. Not in front of her.
"It's a dream-eater," he said, his voice raw, stripped of its usual cynical armor. "A psychic parasite. It doesn't just kill you. It erases you."
Liraya's eyes widened. She had read of such things, in forbidden texts, in the apocryphal records of the early Magisterium. They were myths, boogeymen used to scare novice Weavers. "That's impossible. The Somnolent Corruption… it takes years of dabbling. It doesn't manifest like this."
"This one does," Konto snapped, gesturing at the spiral. "It's strong. Organized. And it was helped." He turned his back on the anomaly, needing to look at something normal, something that obeyed the laws of the universe. He focused on a sleek, chrome-and-glass bar against the far wall. "Your father didn't just have a nightmare. He was sedated. Deeply. Something to keep him from waking up, to trap him in the dream-state long enough for this thing to finish its meal."
Liraya's analytical mind seized on the new information, her composure snapping back into place like a well-oiled mechanism. "A sedative…" She crossed the room to the bar, her movements now purposeful. She pulled a thin, silver-chased case from her jacket. From it, she produced a series of delicate crystal vials and a complex, multi-lensed scanner that looked like a jeweler's loupe. "If there was a chemical agent, there will be a trace."
She began her work, her movements precise and economical. She scanned the rim of a crystal tumbler, the surface of the bar, the ice bucket. The scanner hummed softly, projecting a faint, holographic spectrum into the air between them. Konto watched her, using the mundane task to anchor himself back in reality. He focused on the details: the way the light caught the sharp angles of her cheekbones, the faint glow of the Aspect Tattoos on her hands—intricate, geometric patterns in gold ink that flared as she channeled a tiny sliver of power into the scanner.
"Got it," she said, her voice tight with triumph. She held up the scanner, displaying a complex molecular structure. "It's a synthetic alkaloid. Extremely rare. It's called Oneiros-B. It suppresses the brain's natural waking response, essentially locking the user in REM sleep. It's also highly illegal. The kind of thing you'd only find on the Night Market, or in a very specific, very black-ops lab."
Konto felt a grim sense of satisfaction. A physical clue. Something tangible. "So we have a method. A creature that eats dreams, and a drug that holds the door open for it."
"And a motive," Liraya added, her gaze drifting toward the panoramic window that overlooked the city. "My father was on several key subcommittees. He was a swing vote on the Ley Line Regulation Act. If he died, his replacement would be appointed by the Council Chairman, Moros."
"Moros," Konto repeated the name. The Arch-Mage. A man who hadn't left his tower in twenty years, a figure of near-mythical power and repute. "You think he's involved?"
"I think he benefits," Liraya said, her voice low. "And in Aethelburg, benefit is motive enough." She turned back to him, her expression unreadable. "You said a name. Elara."
Konto's jaw tightened. "My partner. Ten years ago. We took a job. A simple extraction. We ran into the same thing. The same… signature." He couldn't bring himself to say 'dream-eater' again. "She didn't make it out. She's been in a coma ever since."
The confession hung in the air between them, raw and heavy. It changed everything. He was no longer just a hired gun. He was a man seeking revenge, or redemption, or perhaps just a way to finally lay a ghost to rest.
Liraya's expression softened, the hard edges of her grief and ambition blurring for a moment. "I'm sorry," she said. And for the first time, it sounded like she meant it. "I didn't know."
"Of course you didn't," Konto said, his voice regaining a fraction of its familiar edge. "It's not on my resume." He walked over to the spiral again, his gaze tracing its impossible curves. "This changes the deal. My fee is still the same. But now, we do this my way. No more Council protocols. No more official channels. We go to the Night Market. We find out who is making Oneiros-B. And we find out how to kill one of these things."
Liraya met his gaze, her own eyes now burning with a new, shared fire. The professional distance between them had been incinerated, replaced by the grim solidarity of two people standing on the edge of the same abyss.
"Agreed," she said. "When do we start?"
Konto looked from the twisted reality of the floor to the woman whose father had been consumed by it. He thought of Elara, lying in her sterile bed, her mind a prison. The ghost was no longer in the past. It was here. It was now.
"Tonight," he said. "We start tonight."