• Weekly

  • Wednesday: Comics

  • Friday: Fiction (new Guild of Magic chapters for paid and free tier subscribers)

• Monthly

  • Tuesday: Interview/Building a readership series/behind-the-scenes-post

  • Thursday: Open thread

  • Floating: Monthly wrap-up

Today marks the finale of a short story starring everyone’s favorite morally gray mentor, Beatrice Taylor, entitled Trainee.

Part 1 | Part 2

The wine was red tonight. A bottle of Carignan from their last trip to the South of France. Beatrice had mixed memories about that vacation. On the one hand, who could be unhappy lounging on a Mediterranean beach? But on the other hand, it was the last time that she and Garrett had had sex and the result of that act was quietly sleeping in the other room.

Garrett’s glass remained full, for no sooner had he poured it than his work phone had rung. That was two hours ago and he still hadn’t returned from the bedroom. Well, whatever. If he didn’t come back soon, she was going to be forced to drink his glass, as the bottle was nearing its end.

Her marriage might not have been firing on all cylinders, but at least Kate’s progression had been going smoothly. The girl had performed admirably on the raid, although Beatrice was glad that they hadn’t actually run into the Guild, not just because that was always a bad time, but also because she could just picture Kate inadvertently getting both of them killed. Maybe some krav maga and light weapons training was in order.

Beatrice took another sip of the Carignan and closed her eyes. She thought about the latest spoils of the raid. It was a little too perfect and that worried her slightly. Was the Guild that dense to have overlooked the mattress? Were they looking for something else? After all, if the old woman had the ink, who knows what else she was hoarding in that apartment? But Beatrice couldn’t dwell on such things now. Still, a test of the ink was in order before she made any more plans.

Doreen’s letter was currently soaking in alcohol downtown, which would separate the ink from the paper. That would give Beatrice a little bit to perform some trial runs without wasting the pure ink left in the bottle. Now that she actually had a sample in hand, Kate’s research with the diary would likely bear more fruit. Speaking of fruit, Beatrice made a mental note to start lining up preparations for the fall, as her apple stash was running low. But that was a longer term project and she hoped Kate would be ready in a few months with a little more seasoning. 

The buzzing of Garrett’s phone on the coffee table brought Beatrice back to the present. Which was odd. Because Garrett was still in the other room. It vibrated again and she picked it up to bring it into the kitchen so she could get back to her brainstorming.

That ended up being a mistake. Because as she put it down on the kitchen counter, another buzz went off and Beatrice saw the string of text messages that had caused all the commotion.

“When is this call going to be over :(“

“If it keeps going any longer, how u going to come over 2night?”

“dont worry ill wait up for u :)”

Beatrice stared at the messages. She wanted to take the phone and chuck it out the window. Or smash it with a hammer. Or go over to that little tart’s apartment and shove it down her throat. Instead, she picked it up, walked slowly over to the bedroom, and opened the door.

Garrett was sitting on the bed in his boxers in front of a laptop, talking too loudly about shutting down some factory in Malaysia. He looked up at her and gave a half wave, and then when he saw the phone in her hand, his eyes went wide. Beatrice let the phone drop from her hand, and then, without another word, walked out of the apartment and escaped into the night.

The warm morning light washed over the bedroom. Well, it would have, if the one window in the room actually looked out onto something other than a brick wall. Still, a tiny ray of sunlight usually crept into the tiny “den” of Beatrice’s Bowery apartment and it was enough to rouse her from her sleep. Her reward for waking up was a pounding in her head and a dry throat. She sat up and opened her eyes, trying to remember why she was here instead of in her much larger bed uptown. 

The half-naked man beside her let out a loud snore. Oh, right. She had stormed out of the apartment, hopped in a cab downtown, and then had started texting the Quester guys in her phone to see if anyone would meet up for a drink and then some. Let Garrett deal with Jack Jack by himself for once, she had thought. If he was going to be so blatant about flouting their marriage vows, then she didn’t feel bad at beating him at his own game. From the presence of whoever this guy was, and her own half-state of undress, she surmised that she had succeeded in some part of her plan. 

Beatrice scooted down to the middle of the mattress. A set of built-in cabinets ran along the adjacent wall, with a clearance of maybe four inches from the bed. It made the tiny room feel even tinier and she had to move back onto to the bed to even open the doors. What clothes did she even still have here? The answer was one full-length black dress and one old down coat. Beatrice sighed and bent down to pick up her sweater from yesterday off of the floor, but it was nowhere to be found. She settled for the blue button down at the foot of the bed and walked to the bathroom. 

Her reflection in the mirror could have been from ten years ago - the bags under her eyes, the hangover headache, the shirt that wasn’t hers. She had been a typical wild child living it up in the city: out most nights, a new guy every other week. That was before the Quests though, before the curtain had been pulled back and Beatrice had discovered a truth about the world, a truth that would have made most people curl up into a ball on the ground and never get up. Except she was made of sterner stuff.  Working her way up from the bottom, grinding out Quest after Quest after Quest, piling up all those tokens. Sure, she had caught a few breaks along the way, the diary being one, but if anything, that had made her work even harder. 

Beatrice turned on the tap and let the rust-colored water turn clear before splashing some on her face. It didn’t do the trick, and she tried to remember if she had anything in the other room that would help get rid of the throbbing in her head. She could deal with the aftermath of last night if she could just get in the right mindse--

Three successive pounds on the front door broke her train of thought. 

Fuck. 

It was Garrett, although she didn’t know how. She’d already moved to a different apartment by the time they started dating and she never told him where she used to live. Maybe he had tailed her last night after she stormed out of the apartment. She laughed at the image of Garrett racing out of their building with a sleeping Jack Jack in a baby Bjorn, and decided it must just be the annoying old woman from across the hall complaining again.

Beatrice walked back into the bedroom, where the mystery man was still asleep, and tiptoed into the living room. The front door shook again. Too loud to be the old woman, she thought. A flick of the peephole finally revealed the perpetrator: it was Kate.

She unlocked and unlatched the door, and the pounding stopped. 

“Just a second,” said Beatrice, slowly opening it with a creak.

Kate stood in the hallway, her hair a tangled mess, her eyes bloodshot, and her mascara running down her face. The girl was visibly shaking, as if she had just been mugged. 

“Kate, what are you doing her-”

The trainee pushed past Beatrice, walked into the apartment without saying a word, and sat down on the couch just past the large wooden bookcase. Her body continued to shake, and she stared unresponsively across the room. Beatrice walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water from the tap, so she could stall a bit before confronting Kate. She hadn’t told her about this place, had she? Was she stalking her? Whatever was going on, it was one less thing she wanted to deal with now, so hopefully she could steady the girl and send her on her way. 

Beatrice set the glass of water down on the coffee table next to her pocketbook and waited for Kate to do or say something, but the girl didn’t respond. 

“Kate.”

“Kate.”

“KATE!”

She shouted the girl’s name, but that too received no response. Beatrice wanted to slap her upside the head, but she settled for throwing the glass the water all over the trainee.

The girl stirred back to life, looking down at her soaked shirt and then up at Beatrice, before finally settling on Beatrice’s pocketbook. 

It only took a split second for the thought to percolate in her head, but it was a second too long, and before Beatrice could react, Kate dove toward the bag and wrenched something free.

Once, a long time ago, Beatrice discovered that not only did her knife pierce through skin as if it were jello, but also that it had the neat ability to cause the person on the receiving end of the said piercing to turn to stone. Beatrice was as shocked as her would-be assailant was when he saw his forearm turning grey after she had slashed him in the dark alley, but she hadn’t had any occasion since to witness what the knife was truly capable of. That was, until the present moment, as Kate held the blade pointed at Beatrice, the girl’s hand shaking violently.

“More. I need more.”

Kate’s voice was barely above a whisper, which gave Beatrice some measure of reassurance.

“More what, Kate? You know, you could have just called. Now why don’t you just give me that-”

“The buffs. I need more.”

“Oh.”

“I made the last one into a powder, so it would last longer and you wouldn’t think I was an addict by asking for more so soon. Bought a mortar and pestle at Goodwill. Snorted a little bit to see what would happen and passed out. Woke up, did a little more, tried to finish a paper. Then it wore off again. But not before a thought occurred to me. I needed to inject it. So I went down to the health center, got into the exam room, and then took off with some syringes and tourniquets before the nurse came in. That did the trick. But I only had a little left, so I needed to find you.”

“Kate, again, you have my number. You didn’t need to come down here and-”

“Wasn’t expecting you’d be here. Took me all night at the city records department to find this place. Knew you wouldn’t keep the good stuff at your actual apartment. No. You keep your lives separate. Smart. So I’d like the stuff now, if you wouldn’t mind.”

On a normal day, Beatrice would have been able to handle the situation, if it were any other knife. But this particular morning, she was hungover, running on two hours sleep, and facing down the blade of a horrific weapon, and that left her with only one option.

“Ok. Fine. I’ll give you more. Just put the knife down first.”

The girl’s brow furrowed and her eyes went from Beatrice to the knife, as if she hadn’t realized that she was holding it. With a flick of her wrist, Kate rotated the knife around and presented the handle to Beatrice, who slowly wrapped her fingers around the ivory. 

Beatrice looked down at the point of the blade. It would be so easy to just push it forward, to rid herself of another failed trainee. But as quickly as the thought arose, she quashed it. Too messy, she thought. And in any event, she didn’t have a garden in which to store a statue of poor petrified Kate. No. She would have to figure out another way.

Beatrice sheathed the blade and put it back in her pocketbook, which she slung around her shoulder. No sense leaving the bag unattended again and having to repeat the whole exercise.

“Now that we’ve dealt with that little situation, just sit here and I’ll get you what you came for.”

Kate nodded and went back to staring off into space, as Beatrice got up and walked over to the towering bookcase that stood right next to the couch. Her eyes scanned the multi-colored rows of books until she found the two that she was looking for. Not that she needed to look so hard. She knew where they were by heart. 

With one hand, she grasped the spine of A Tale of Two Cities and with the other, the spine of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on the shelf above, and pulled both at the same time. A satisfying click sounded behind the bookcase, which Beatrice pushed forward to reveal the hidden second bedroom. This was no bedroom though.

The musty smell hit Beatrice’s noise as she stepped inside, and she smiled. This was where the magic happened. The far side sported a long table that ran the length of the room, which was partially covered in wax paper. The rest of the walls were lined with shelving and bookcases, holding all manner of jars, books, tools, and other oddities that Beatrice had picked up along the way. Even the windows had been sacrificed on the altar of space, although she had left a tiny sliver of one window uncovered to prevent the room from being completely cut off from the outside world. As much as she wished she could have a nice little cottage out of the city, there was something satisfying about having this hidden nook right here in the Guild’s backyard. 

Beatrice turned around to see if Kate had followed her into the room, but the girl evidently remained planted on the couch. That would make things go smoother. She had hoped one day to show Kate this room, to work side-by-side with someone who could become almost equal to her, but she knew now that her search would have to continue.

She started walking over to a bookcase on the right side of the room where she kept the full-strength buffs when something on the desk caught her eye. It was the green-tinted mason jar where Doreen’s letter was currently soaking, the second pen from the raid sitting next to it. Beatrice walked over and looked at its contents. The letter was still somewhat intact, but more importantly, a thin black film was visible at the top. A different idea now formed in her head. The perfect way to test the potency of the ink. It would solve at least one of her immediate problems, and if it failed, well...

No, she thought. She needed certainty, she needed closure. 

Her pocketbook began to vibrate. No doubt it was Garrett, trying to find out where she had gone and whether she would be coming back soon and where did they keep the diapers, and it’s not what you think, I swear, blah blah blah. She’d heard it before, but frankly she didn’t actually care anymore. She had moved on long ago from the idea that her marriage was anything but a convenient front. Still, she needed to send a message to him that she expected a certain level of discretion. Which brought her thoughts back to the ink. Her eyes lit up. Now there was a good experiment.  

Beatrice opened the drawers in the desk until she found one that had some paper, which she brought over to the jar. Pen in hand, she carefully unfastened the lid and dipped the tip in the black liquid, swirling it around counterclockwise, before withdrawing it. She quickly went to work, dipping the pen back in the jar as needed, and soon, the note was complete. Perfect. She set it down to dry and walked over to the closet, sliding the door open to reveal a pair of mahogany armoires. It had been a long time since she had crafted this particular item, and she hoped it hadn’t lost its potency in the intervening years. Well, only one way to find out, she supposed. The bottom drawer on the right armoire held what she sought and she brought the container over to the desk to assemble her little care package for tonight. 

Beatrice emerged from the hidden room a few minutes later with a sealed envelope, and pulled the bookcase back in place. If Kate had noticed her prolonged absence, or even the hidden room, it didn’t register on the girl’s face.

“Here,” said Beatrice, handing Kate the envelope. Kate stared at the envelope with a puzzled look on her face.

“What’s this?”

“Your next task. Make sure this letter gets delivered and I’ll make sure you’re taken care of by the evening.”

The girl’s expression didn’t waiver as she considered the envelope, and Beatrice held her breath, steeling herself for another outburst. But somewhere the gods of fate and chance were smiling upon her, as Kate stuck the envelope in her pocket and walked out the door.

The girl was late. Ordinarily, Beatrice Taylor would not have cared, and this morning was no different. The baby was at her mom’s, Garrett’s little analyst had inexplicably been transferred to the West Coast office last week, and one story in the paper had particularly caught her eye.

“Kate O’Laughlin, 19, found dead facedown in dorm room,” the headline on page 14 read. Beatrice folded the paper and put it on the table, as a chipper redhead ran up the street and sat down across from her.

“Sorry I’m late! The subway was a complete disaster.”

Beatrice smiled.

“No worries. I take it you have the book?”

Next: A fork in the path appears.

You take the blue path, Beatrice’s story ends and you get chapter 1 of Guild of Magic delivered to your inbox this Friday.

You take the red path, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Did you think the ending of Trainee was nicely buttoned up for Beatrice? You only know one side of the story.

Grab the Guild of Tokens: Special Edition from my online store, which includes two additional prequel short stories starring Beatrice (Enforcer and Relic Hunter) and a prequel novella starring Kate and another character (Memoria).

And if you’re an audiobook listener, listen to the Trainee audiobook below and grab the full special edition audiobook at my online shop as well.

• Weekly

  • Wednesday: Comics

  • Friday: Fiction (new Guild of Magic chapters for paid and free tier subscribers)

• Monthly

  • Tuesday: Interview/Building a readership series/behind-the-scenes-post

  • Thursday: Open thread

  • Floating: Monthly wrap-up

Today and next Monday, you’re getting parts 2 and 3 of a short story starring everyone’s favorite morally gray mentor, Beatrice Taylor, entitled Trainee.

Part 1

The subway car was crowded. Beatrice hated riding the subway, and normally she wouldn’t be caught dead riding it during the morning rush. But that wouldn’t do for today’s errand, as Beatrice had decided to bring Kate along to get her some on-the-ground training. She also wanted to see how the girl’s skills measured up first-hand, to see how she was progressing. 

They had met up near the W. 4th Street station, and it was two transfers in before the crowds thinned enough before Beatrice felt comfortable talking shop out in public.

“Today’s raid should be simple,” she said. “We get there, buy the requested items, and get the hell out of there before we run into anyone else.”

“Why’s it called a raid?” Kate asked. The girl’s chipper demeanor had returned, and Beatrice suppressed the urge to roll her eyes before answering.

“Because it’s meant for a group. The task is harder, but the reward greater. Also the members of the Council must have all played Everquest back in the day and they think they’re being cute.”

“What’s Everquest? Some sort of match-3 puzzle?”

“Never mind. How is your research coming?”

She had sent Kate deep into the bowels of one of the NYU libraries, ostensibly for a paper for her American history class, but actually to transcribe a set of rare 18th century manuscripts. Beatrice had tried multiple times to get access to the same collection without any luck, but Kate’s request had been granted within days. It was one of the reasons she now liked using college students as her trainees: no one took them that seriously. Plus they helped push her wares without her having to hang out in Washington Square Park all day.

“Good! I’ve been indexing the Valley Forge journals. The library’s records are pretty terrible, so it’s slow going, but after that’s done I’ll cross-reference those with the entries in Rita’s diary and hopefully that should give us some insight into what-”

“Excellent progress,” Beatrice said, cutting off the girl before she could start blabbing too much about the project. She wasn’t the paranoid type, but she never liked discussing things of a sensitive nature out in public, in case this was the day that someone was actually stalking her again.

“When you’ve gotten a bit further, we can discuss in private.”

“Oh, sure,” said Kate, clearly disappointed that she wasn’t going to get the chance to impress Beatrice with her meticulous research. “By the way, I took that buff you gave me the other day to help finish the research. Got the rest done in 20 minutes, then did a bunch of my friends’ papers, then some random freshman’s problem set, and then it was only 1 AM, so I-”

“Glad you liked it. Packs a punch, doesn’t it?” Beatrice made a note to dilute the next batch she made. It wasn’t supposed to cause such a strong reaction, but maybe Beatrice had misjudged how intense Kate was.

“Definitely. Umm, say, you wouldn’t happen to have any more of those, would you?”

Red flag, red flag, thought Beatrice. The last thing she needed was her trainee to go on a bender and end up being fished out of the East River naked.

“You’re in luck,” Beatrice said, reaching into her bag and pulling out one of the “regular” buffs. “It’s my last one. Waiting for some new raw materials to make another batch, so don’t waste it.” 

She handed it to Kate who eyed it greedily before stuffing it in her own pocketbook. Beatrice regretted her generosity immediately, but the regular-strength version was only a hair better than a regular Adderall, so the girl wouldn’t get in too much trouble. At least she hoped.

The train screeched to a halt at the elevated station, and Beatrice beckoned Kate to follow her. They climbed down the stairs in silence as Beatrice checked her watch. 1:10. They were going to be late, and late meant not only a squandered opportunity but a ding to her reputation on the Raid Board. She had come close to failing a raid, once, but repressed that memory. No need for unnecessary negativity.

“Come on, it’s not much further,” she said to Kate as she quickened her pace.

“Where are we going anyway?” asked Kate, who matched her brisk strides.

“The Requester wants us to procure certain items from an estate sale,” Beatrice said.

“That’s it? Couldn’t they have gone themselves?”

“Sure, but when you’re flush with tokens, why would you stoop to such labor yourself when you can sit back in your comfy chair and let others do the dirty work for you?”

When she first received access to the Raid Board, Beatrice was beyond ecstatic. Her years of fetch Quests would finally be over, and she pictured grander Quests uncovering ancient magical objects and the like. But her enthusiasm was tempered during that first visit to the Board, when all but a few of the raids were just more elaborate fetch Quests. Plus, she hadn’t realized that the raids required more than one person. 

That was when she had begun her trainee program, and it had mostly been an unmitigated disaster thus far. The hours Beatrice spent seeding the Quest Board in search of potential partners had been too many to count, and all she had gotten for her efforts was a handful of abject failures. 

Her first attempt she could chalk up to inexperience. He was a dorky engineer, the kind that had littered her undergrad classes and who had quickly become infatuated with her to the point of obsession. Not that Beatrice was the second coming of Helen of Troy, but she had the rare combination of attractiveness and approachability that made all manner of nerd think they had a shot with her. 

After that unfortunate ending, she had made a rule: women only. But her next attempts suffered from the wrong power dynamic - they were older women who came to the Quests later in life and didn’t like taking orders from someone 20 years their junior. Most ended up going out on their own, which saved Beatrice from any real unpleasantries. Now she hoped she had identified the perfect candidate pool for future prospects, but the jury was still out on that.

“We’re here,” said Beatrice. They had stopped in front of a five-story walk-up with a rusty fire escape, the kind that littered the streets of Bed-Stuy. She hit the buzzer for 5A, and a few seconds later, the outer door clicked open.

The lobby was deserted, and so Beatrice ventured cautiously toward the stairs, stopping at the bottom.

“What are you doing?” asked Kate.

“Listening. Shhh.”

If anyone had gotten there ahead of them, they weren’t making a lot of noise. Beatrice retreated and walked towards the mailboxes at the back of the lobby, and began rummaging through her purse.

“Why aren’t we going up?” 

“Because I need to give you something first,” said Beatrice, reaching her hand into her bag. “I said that our employer probably was just using their money to hire us instead of getting their lazy ass down here, but there’s also a chance that someone else knows what’s for sale here, so we need to be adequately prepared for that probability.”

She removed the knife and unsheathed it from its leather scabbard. The smooth metal of the blade reflected the dirty fluorescent light in the vestibule, emitting a glossy sheen. She grasped the ivory handle and made a few quick stabs in the air before resheathing it.

“Here,” said Beatrice, handing the knife to Kate, whose eyes widened.

“W-what, why are you giving that to me?” It was clear from the girl’s suddenly pale face that she had never handled a weapon before, and Beatrice didn’t have to use her imagination to picture what would happen if the girl tried to use the knife. Especially that particular knife.

“You know what, on second thought, why don’t you let me hold onto that?”

Beatrice took the knife back and placed it in her pocketbook.

“If the raid goes south, just try to stay out of the way,” she offered.

“Umm, OK,” said Kate. “Aren’t we just going upstairs, buying some random item, and then leaving? It’s not like we’re breaking into the Met or something.”

“You’d be surprised at how often a mundane exercise turns into an extraordinary one, especially if the Guild decides to get involved,” said Beatrice, her eyes drifting down to the almost-faded scar under her jeans that ran the length of her right thigh. “Let’s go.”

They walked up the short flights of stairs in silence. Beatrice grasped the strap of her pocketbook tightly, as if that would help calm her nerves. It didn’t, but the amethyst ring that was normally slotted below her engagement ring would have. Except, in a bone-headed move, she had left it downtown. Not that she expected to need it today, as it would be an absurd waste to use it during such a routine task. But wearing it provided a manner of reassurance that she was now lacking. Well, what’s done was done, and the knife would have to be enough today.

The door to 5A was slightly ajar when they arrived on the final landing. Because they’re expecting us, thought Beatrice. Not because that fop Gilbert was lying in wait inside. Well, she thought, only one way to find out. 

Beatrice pushed the door open and stepped in slowly. The room was empty. No, that was a bad word. It was bare. Where the furniture had once sat, only dents on the pale green carpet remained. The walls too were barren, except for rectangle-shaped squares of white where paintings or pictures had once hung. She was too late.

“Hello,” said a soft, raspy voice behind her, causing Beatrice to nearly jump out of her skin. She lowered her hand into her pocketbook, ready to brandish the knife at whoever had spoken, and slowly turned around.

A little old man who looked like a mole rat with glasses and an ugly sweater sat in a worn, leather chair right next to the door. Why she had missed him at first glance, she wasn’t sure. But he wasn’t Gilbert and he didn’t seem very threatening, so she let go of the knife and lowered her guard slightly. 

“Hi, umm. We’re here for the estate sale?” Beatrice said. She could see Kate peering in from the hallway and waved her inside.

“What? Oh right. My sister’s things.” The old man pulled a piece of paper out of one of the pockets in his sweater and held it close to his face. “Yes, there’s an estate sale here today at 1:30. But it’s over.”

“But it’s only 1:33, sir. How is the sale already over?” asked Kate. “We didn’t see anyone leaving on our way up.” 

“Hmm?” the old man peered through the thick lenses of his glasses at Beatrice, then at Kate. “There’s two of you? You’re a looker, aren’t you?” he said, pointing at Kate. “And you’re not so bad either. Must be my lucky day.”

Kate blushed at the comment, and Beatrice grimaced. 

“Anyways, what was I saying? Oh right. Someone came this morning and offered to take the whole lot off my hands. Offered next to nothing but I took it just the same. Heh.” The old man’s chuckling gave way to a hacking cough, and Beatrice turned away in disgust.

“Serves Doreen right. Wasn’t even giving me the money. Nope. All going to some stupid charity for cats or something. She didn’t even have a cat!”

“I see,” said Beatrice. This whole outing was turning into an outright disaster and she was furious at herself for ruining her perfect raid record because she hadn’t thought of going to the estate sale before it started. It was a mistake a seasoned Quester like her should never have made.

“It sounds like she was very difficult to get along with,” said Kate. “My mom was like that, always complaining about this thing or that thing. She probably set the record for angry letters to the editor in our town paper.”

Beatrice glared at her. What was she doing? Trying to make the old man even more annoyed?

“Oh yes. That was Doreen to a T. She had a talent for it though. Always seemed to get what she wanted. Like getting me to schlep up here from Baltimore to take care of her stuff. At my age. As if I had all the time and money in the world. Which I don’t. But then I got that letter and, bam, suddenly I’m on the next bus.”

Beatrice’s face lit up and she turned to look at Kate, who smiled. The girl was full of surprises, apparently.

“Do you happen to have that letter still?” asked Kate. 

The old man nodded.

“As a matter of fact, I do. It’s in my bag over there in the kitchen. Be a dear and bring it over, would you?”

The girl dashed over to the kitchen and returned with a folded piece of paper.

“Mind if I take a look at that?” said Beatrice. 

“Knock yourself out,” said the old man.

Beatrice unfolded the crinkly yellow paper. The text was barely legible but her eyes were for some reason drawn to the words, which were written in deep black ink.

“Morton,

I’m dying. Get up here and take care of my stuff after I go.

-Doreen”

Beatrice ran a finger over the words. The ink felt almost like finger paint, like she could scrape it right off the paper with the right tools.

“Your sister wasn’t much for words, was she?”

Morton shook his head.

“Nope. Can’t say I’m sad she’s gone, she was as rotten as a person could be, but part of me misses her phone calls.”

“When they came and took out her stuff earlier, did you happen to see the pens or the ink she used to write this?” 

Beatrice held the letter in front of Morton, whose eyes suddenly became fixed to the paper, as if he were in a daze, and she quickly withdrew it from his sight.

“No. They took everything. Well, except the bed. Couldn’t get it out the door for some reason. And this chair obviously. I wasn’t about to let them pull it out from under me. Not sure if they’re coming back, but I hope they don’t. I need somewhere to sleep tonight and this chair is qui-”

Beatrice sprinted to the little bedroom, hoping beyond hope that the Guild had not been as thorough as it appeared. The windowless room was as empty as the other one, save for a queen mattress on a box spring. It took up more than half the room and featured all manner of stain and discoloration, but at this particular moment, Beatrice couldn’t care less, as she flipped up the mattress in one fluid motion to reveal...

Nothing. 

Except the top of the box spring. She flipped that up too and was rewarded with a view of the parquet floor underneath. No secret stash, not even an empty box or a note saying “Haha, beat you to it.” She had failed. For a second time.

Beatrice let go of the box spring and sat on top of it, the dirty mattress now leaning against her back. This should have been a simple raid, an easy win. But no. The Guild had bested her again. She felt all the fury and rage build up inside her - this failed raid, Garrett’s latest dalliance, her chronic lack of sleep. What was the point of all of this? Was she going to have to keep grinding forever, the Guild forever taunting her from slightly out of reach? 

“Hey. Look at that.”

Kate walked into the room and Beatrice quickly brought her hand up to her eyes to wipe away the tears. She couldn’t let her trainee see her this emotional over a stupid raid. 

“What?” asked Beatrice.

“There’s a bulge in the box spring. Right next to you.”

Beatrice looked to her left. Sure enough, there it was. How had she missed it? She ran her hand over the protruding fabric and could feel the outline of several small objects. A quick slice with the ivory handle of the knife sheared the fabric of the box spring, and she pulled it back to reveal a ziploc bag resting on top of a wooden slat. A ziploc bag containing two fountain pens and a small bottle of ink. She took the bottle out of the bag and shook it next to her ear. The sloshing of liquid inside filled her heart with a joy almost equal to hearing Jack Jack’s wailing cry in the hospital that first time.

“Is that it then?” asked Kate.

Beatrice nodded. 

“Yes. We’ve found it. Well, you did. Thank you.”

Beatrice suddenly stood up and gave Kate a heavy hug. The girl seemed taken aback by the gesture, and her arms hung in the air for a few moments behind Beatrice’s back before she returned the embrace.

“You’re welcome. I didn’t really do anything though.”

She released Kate from the hug and they turned away from each other. An awkward silence pervaded the room, as if a barrier between the mentor and trainee had been broken. Beatrice should have been angry at her lack of discipline, but the unexpected bounty that they had discovered had salvaged an utter disaster, and not only that, there was an an extra pen and plenty of ink for her own use.

“You did though. Anyway, let’s book it out of here before the Guild realizes what they’ve missed.”

“Sure. But what’s the Guild?”

Beatrice’s thoughts again drifted to that moonless night in the Park.

“You don’t want to know.”

Next: Beatrice’s foundation begins to crumble. Read it below. And if you’re an audiobook listener, you can listen to the entire story for free below:

Subscribe now

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens: Trainee

Editor’s Note: As discussed in the June 2022 open thread, I am doing a bit of a reorganization of the posting schedule now that we have come to the end of Guild of Tokens. To sum it up, here is the general monthly schedule going forward (and please see the open thread for more details…

Read more

4 years ago · Jon Auerbach

The girl was late. 

Ordinarily, Beatrice Taylor would not have cared. 

She wasn’t a stickler for people following her Quests to a T, and could deal with a bit of improvisation if the Quester got the job done. 

“Results-oriented” would be on her resume if she still had a normal job. 

But this morning was different. 

This morning, her usual sitter texted her at 6:15 saying that she had been up half the night sick. 

And, the last-minute replacement looked more suited for changing tires than changing a diaper. 

Beatrice sighed and took another sip of her coffee. She watched the throngs of people on Bleecker Street pass by and she envied the carefree mornings they were probably enjoying. She wished she could return to those days, when all she had to worry about was where she was going to meet her friends for brunch or when Garrett was finally going to propose. But that had been a lifetime ago, before the baby, before Garrett had started sleeping with his analyst, and before she had discovered the Quests.

“I’m so sorry I’m late!” A chipper brunette wearing a pink backpack sprinted up to Beatrice’s table in front of the coffee shop, and took the empty seat across from her. 

“It’s fine. I take it you have the book?” Beatrice studied her latest trainee, who had clearly run the last few blocks, as her face was flush and her breathing heavy. Good, she thought. She liked it when her trainees were afraid of displeasing her. 

The jury was still out on Kate, a sophomore at NYU from Nebraska. The girl fit the new profile perfectly: enthusiastic, hard-working, a desire to please, and most importantly, no strong attachments to family. 

“Yep!” Kate dumped her backpack on the table and began rifling through it, finally withdrawing a leather-bound book.

“Excellent. How is the old professor? Still a disgusting lecher? I hope he didn’t leer at you too much. You’re just his type.”

Kate’s eyes widened. 

“Wait, how did you know that he had… Oh. This was just a test. Again.”

Beatrice smiled. At least this one was perceptive.

“Of course. You think you’re ready for the big time already? Did you read the book?”

“I did. Was up all night. Then tried to take a quick cat nap but slept through my alarm. That’s why I was la-”

“Then you know that this wasn’t something I would leave to the likes of you if I didn’t already know I could get it back.”

The trainee’s face turned sour, her achievement quickly undermined by a few choice words. But Beatrice preferred it this way. Last time she had let a trainee get a big head, things had gotten ugly, and with a baby to take care of, Beatrice didn’t really have the time anymore to keep starting from the beginning.

“Oh don’t be so sensitive. You did well regardless. Here’s your reward.”

Beatrice set the stack of iron tokens on the table and took the book. Kate stared at the tokens for several seconds before finally grabbing them and stuffing them in her backpack. 

“Thanks.”

The girl’s earlier perkiness had faded in short order. Kids these days. They wanted a pat on the back, a trophy, and to be enthusiastically congratulated for doing what was expected of them. Kate should be grateful that she was even getting this chance to be her trainee. Did the girl know how hard Beatrice had worked to get to where she was? Of course not. But she had to play with the hand she was dealt, even if it meant a little extra coddling here and there.

“And because you were up all night, here’s something extra.”

Beatrice withdrew a small green square wrapped in plastic from her pocketbook and slid it across the table.

“What’s this?”

“A little something to help you next time you need to finish a paper. It lasts only a couple of hours, so don’t waste it, but it’s one of my better buffs, if I do say so myself.”

The girl stared at her blankly.

“You don’t know what a buff is?”

Kate shook her head.

“OK, fine. Think of it as a magic version of the Adderall you’ve been dealing in your dorm for me. Which it is.”

“Oh. OH. Wow, thanks!”

“You’re welcome. Don’t waste it though. I don’t hand those out to everyone for free you know.” 

“I won’t. So, what’s my next assignment? Do you have the next volume of the diary? I have so many questions!”

“Easy there, tiger. I’ll be in touch. Go get some sleep. You’re beginning to sound like a chipmunk.”

The girl nodded, grabbed her stuff, and left the coffee shop. If there was one thing Beatrice had impressed upon her trainees, it was that she didn’t much care for small talk. She wasn’t there to be their friend or their mother. Speaking of, little Jack Jack would be waking up soon. Beatrice sighed again, finished the last dregs of her coffee and headed back uptown to her “normal” life.

The apartment was finally quiet and the wine was flowing. Tonight’s selection was a pinot grigio that Garrett had brought back from his trip to Rome last year. Beatrice was relaxing on the couch in the middle of her second glass and Garrett, as usual, was late. But she didn’t particularly care. It gave her time to catch up on how her latest batches of Questers were faring.

She logged on to the Quest Board and flipped over to the inbox, expecting to see a bunch of messages asking where the Questers could pick up their tokens. But it was empty. She frowned. Maybe she had just been unlucky. It happened from time to time. She would post her standard set of Quests and the luck of the draw would bring her an utterly incompetent set of noobs who shouldn’t have even been told about the Quests in the first place. It was so frustrating, but also necessary, if Beatrice wanted to keep her pipeline fresh, to have a replacement for Kate far enough along if the need arose.

Maybe it was the wine, but tonight she was in no mood to let these idiot Questers continue on for weeks attempting to complete the simplest of tasks. She opened another page on the Board, clicked on her active Quests, and cancelled them all. Then she brought up the new Quest page and reposted the same ones she had just cancelled.

“I need a handful of blueberries, a tillandsia, an orange popsicle, and three pounds of 80/20 ground beef from Chelsea Market. Leave in the windowsill of 194 W. 9th Street. Thanks! Reward: One wood”

This was the standard opener, a modification of the first Quest she had ever done. None of the items alone or in combination did anything, she had later discovered, but it was a good exercise in attention to detail. She couldn’t count how many times she had received the wrong mix of beef or a flower that was not a tillasandia. Also, the building on W. 9th Street had been abandoned for many years, so it was a good drop location. 

“One Central Park pigeon. Preferably dead. Well, actually, definitely dead. Reward: one iron.”

Pigeons and rats were the bread and butter of a good alchemist. The spleen of a freshly killed pigeon was an excellent source of prima materia and you could never have too much of that. Beatrice made a mental reminder to check her stock of preservatives at the downtown apartment. There was nothing worse than going through the laborious (and messy) process of extracting organs only to find that there was nothing to keep them in, and any off putting smell would most certainly result in the old lady across the fifth floor landing calling the super, or worse, the police.

“Three leaves from a khat plant. Dried. Reward: Eight wood.”

Those outside the Questing world knew that chewing khat leaves produced an Adderall-like high. Amateurs. Those within the Questing world, at least the ones that Beatrice had come across, did not have the creativity to come up with any new transmutations. So that had let her and her chemical engineering degree run rampant, combining all manner of ordinary matter with prima materia to get fantastical results, giving her a nice slice of the market. 

Two markets, actually. One version of her offerings she diluted down and sold to regular college kids and 20-somethings as black market hangover cures, Adderall substitutes, and other mind-enhancing offerings. It brought in a steady stream of real money that gave Beatrice a degree of independence and also let her rent the downtown apartment with Garrett none the wiser. 

The other version she sold to Questers for tokens. It was a much better method of accumulating wealth than what she used to do, when she herself was a newbie Quester. Sure, she liked going on raids and piecing together what the Questing 1% were up to, but she worried that her continued success would make her a target eventually, and she wasn’t ready to go toe-to-toe with the Guild or the Council. Yet.

The last Quest went live just as the door to the apartment opened, and Beatrice quickly closed her laptop and turned to greet Garrett. It was 10:45.

“Honey, you’re home,” she said, mustering a phony smile. “I was beginning to think you were spending the night in the office again.” Garrett dropped his briefcase unceremoniously by the front door and walked into the living room. 

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, giving her a quick peck on the cheek and taking a seat on the couch next to her. “This new deal is killing us. Hopefully it’ll calm down after we close.”

She looked at her husband. His red hair was slightly out of place, his shirt was wrinkled, and his eyes were bloodshot. The rigors of the private equity grind, she thought. Or maybe the aftermath of a quickie at his analyst’s apartment in DUMBO. Beatrice preferred not to know. 

She had her secrets too, her own past transgressions that she had never owned up to. And it wasn’t like she was trying to snoop around, but Garrett had stopped trying to hide what he was doing a while ago. Plus, his analyst was a step up from herself looks wise and ten years younger to boot. If he was going to cheat, and Beatrice long ago accepted that he was, then she would have preferred that his dalliances were with girls who were on the same level as her.

“But then you’ll just move on to the next deal,” she said. Beatrice knew that in addition to the cheating, this was what she had signed up for when she agreed to marry Garrett, even though it had taken him seven years to actually pop the question. These late nights bought her a big apartment on Madison Avenue with a view of the Park, a week in the south of France, and the freedom of not having to have a day job. Sure, she had her tutoring business to keep up appearances before she had Jack Jack. She would work with a couple of rich kids once or twice a month, blow the money on cabs and coffee, and spend the rest of her time devoted to the Quests. 

“Anyway, I hope you don’t mind, I cracked open the bottle early, wasn’t sure if you were even making it home tonight. Want some?”

Garrett shook his head.

“Not tonight, B. I need to get some sleep. Have a 7 AM call with Taipei.” He got up from the couch and walked down the hall into their bedroom, leaving Beatrice alone again with the wine and her thoughts.

Next: Beatrice and Kate go raiding. Read Part 2 below and, if you’re an audiobook listener, you can listen to the entire story for free below:

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Trainee

Editor’s Note: As discussed in the June 2022 open thread, I am doing a bit of a reorganization of the posting schedule now that we have come to the end of Guild of Tokens. To sum it up, here is the general monthly schedule going forward (and please see the open thread for more details…

Read more

4 years ago · Jon Auerbach

Subscribe now

I’ll post each of the below questions as a separate thread in the comments, and feel free to reply to whichever question(s) you want!

1. Did you read the book as chapters were released, binge them all at once, read them in batches, or something in between?

2. If you could reread the book from the perspective of another character in the story, who do you think would be an interesting alternate protagonist and why?

3. What did you think of the Rita Van Asch epigraphs?

4. Did you like how the information of the different types of alchemy was doled out slowly over the course of the book or would you have preferred that Jen found out everything right up front?

5. How did you feel about the ending? Were you satisfied or frustrated? Do you think it was the right time or place to end the story? Was there more you felt you wanted to know?

6. What plots/places/themes would you like to see Jen tackle in future books?

I hit publish on Guild of Tokens chapter 1 about 6 months ago, starting a new serial experiment that would see the entirety of book 1 of my epic urban fantasy series released for free.

Now that we’ve reached the end of this first chapter of ARC Worlds and the NYC Questing World series, I wanted to take a moment to debrief, get your input on the next phase of the newsletter, and share a big announcement!

Debrief

Guild of Tokens clocks in at 49 numbered chapters, 2 interludes, a prologue, and an epilogue. All told, I released two chapters a week for almost every week in the six-month span, save for holiday breaks and a mid-point break. That’s a pretty consistent clip, but I wondered at times how many people were reading each chapter on release, how many people were saving batches of chapter to binge-read, or maybe some combination of the two. Substack’s statistics and metrics have improved since I launched in the fall, but they don’t offer the level of granularity of Google Analytics.

If you fall into any of these camps (or your own camp), let me know in the comments! And if you’ve finished the book and have been dying to share your thoughts with someone, this Friday I will be launching the first-ever ARC Worlds book club session, where we’ll discuss book 1, easter eggs, and more!

Leave a comment

In addition to the twice-weekly chapters of Guild of Tokens, I released weekly chapters of Guild of Magic for paid subscribers, a monthly open thread, a monthly links/adventure game nostalgia feature, an interview feature, the first part of a series on building a readership, and several art reveals/process posts.

At times, the 3-times-a-week chapter releases sapped my energy (and maybe your attention) to the detriment of non-fiction content. With that era of the newsletter behind us, I plan to re-double my efforts on non-fiction content side, as well as finally launch the third section of the newsletter that will be devoted to comics!

I’ve been writing the first issue of a comics series over the past several months and will giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the series from all angles, as well as writing about comics I’m reading and highlighting other indie comic creators.

Finally, since ARC Worlds launched, our subscriber base has grown from zero to just over 250 this past week, through a combination of existing monthly newsletter subscribers, Kickstarter backers, BookFunnel group promotion sign-ups, Substack network sign-ups, and word of mouth.

I’m thankful for each of you for coming along this journey with me and am excited to grow this newsletter over the rest of the year and beyond! Now that all chapters of Guild of Tokens are live, it’s the perfect time to tell a friend to jump on board!

So please spread the word and consider becoming a paid Guild member to help support the newsletter and bring more stories, content, and art to the world of the NYC Questing Guild!

Share ARC Worlds

Subscribe now

The BIG announcement(s)

And now, the moment you have all been waiting for!

I’m excited to reveal the cover for book 2 in the NYC Questing Guild series, Guild of Magic, with a guest post over on blog-friend-of-the-series, FanFiAddict!

In addition to the cover reveal, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the cover, illustrated by Felix Ortiz and designed by Shawn T. King, and can sign up to be notified when the Guild of Magic Kickstarter campaign goes live this summer! Make sure you do, because for the first time ever, I’ll be offering an early backer reward that will only be available during the first 48 hours of the campaign!

What are you waiting for? Go there now and I’ll see you Friday with the first-ever ARC Worlds book club!

Guild of Magic cover reveal

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45 | Chapter 46 | Chapter 47 | Chapter 48 | Chapter 49

The south tower of the Guild’s headquarters was situated such that Dalia de Wyck could just see the tops of the trees beginning to bloom at the edge of Central Park. Although her apartment further south provided a much more expansive view, there was something more satisfying about the view here. Perhaps it was because that while hundreds, if not thousands, of people could say that they had apartments that abutted Central Park, only Dalia could say that she overlooked the park from an actual fortress. 

The tower’s windows, along with the rest of the windows of the building, were coated with sheets of a particularly remarkable material. It had all the benefits of a two-way mirror, allowing Dalia to look out onto the street below and points westward, while blocking all passersby from peering into the seemingly abandoned Madison Avenue Armory.

The Guild’s previous headquarters, an unassuming brownstone on East 68th Street, had outgrown its suitability after a developer bought up the rest of the block and tore everything down in the late 1950s. The Armory too had almost been torn down completely, but the Guild had managed to whip up a number of frenzied protests, which was enough to sway the Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the remaining portion of the building as a landmark in October 1966. The Guild moved in later that month and had been there ever since.

Dalia walked away from the window and over to the magnificent wooden desk on the other side of the room, and sat down in the cushioned chair. Two identical wooden boxes rested on the middle of the desk’s top surface, one of them empty and one of them full. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the two vessels together, but that was by design. 

A design that had worked too well, unfortunately, resulting in layers of setbacks that only now Dalia had just managed to undo. 

Well, almost. 

The door to the study opened and Gilbert walked in.

“We have a problem,” he said.

“What? One of our new recruits had a fake token? I could have told you that without having to call roll. But you insisted that-”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. The fake, it was laced with alkahest. Would have blown up the north tower and everyone in it if I hadn’t screened it first.”

“Oh,” she said. “That is a problem. And yet, you waited until the morning to come tell me? I assume you have the bitch stashed somewhere so we can interrogate her?”

“Not exactly. She fled almost immediately.”

“Of course,” said Dalia. “Do you think that was one of her designs?”

“Beatrice? She’s quite capable, but not of something like this. No, I think it’s more likely the handiwork of-”

“Will you take off that ridiculous glamour?” said Dalia. “You know I can’t stand looking at him.”

“Fine, fine,” said Gilbert, who pulled the stone out from underneath his shirt and squeezed it.

The visage of Gilbert crackled like the static on an old television set, and Ty stood in his place, dressed in a blue blazer and grey slacks.

“Happy now, Mother?” said her daughter.

“Yes. And honestly, I think it’s nearly time to retire those glamours. The other one ended up doing a number on Doug, it would seem.”

“That and you made me keep him confined to the Mooney House basement for several years,” said Ty.

“Enough. It’s over now. Next time you plan on taking on such an ambitious project, take a day or 30 and really think it all the way through.”

“Deal,” said Ty, whose eyes drifted to the silver ring on her desk. “Is that…”

“Yes, it is. From 1815 if I’m not mistaken. But the diary will know for sure.”

Dalia rose from the chair and scanned the volumes on the third shelf of the massive bookcase behind the desk, before finding the one she was searching for. She placed the book down on the desk and opened to an empty page about two-thirds of the way through. The ring began to wobble before shooting forward onto the page. After a few seconds, it dissolved slowly into a circle of silver liquid, and then began rearranging itself into neatly-written words that filled the sheet. 

Dalia lowered her head toward the page and sank into the past. 

“Mother?” said Ty, when she re-emerged from the memory and slowly sat back up, her head pounding. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. It’s just … I’d forgotten how it feels. It’s a strange experience, reading about what I did back then. It’s almost like Rita was a completely different person, that these just are the missives of a woman long dead. But the memory in that ring, that is as raw as if it happened to me yesterday. And it was something I really didn’t want to relive ever again.” 

Dalia opened the lid of the box that had been locked for so long, before tilting it on its side, and watched as hundreds of silver rings spilled onto the desk.

“Incredible,” said Ty. “It’s all there. The Compendium.”

“Not quite,” said Dalia. There remains the matter of the physical book itself.” 

“I’m sure Beatrice has it. She did have the one entry you left unhidden.” 

“I agree,” said Dalia. “But luckily our newest Guild member is perfectly positioned to help us recover it from her former partner. And once we do, it is only a matter of time before the full might of the Guild resonates across the continent.”

“Wait, how did you know she didn’t take the money and run?”

“I didn’t,” said Dalia, smiling. “But there’s enough of Larissa in her daughter that I was confident that she wouldn’t run from her birthright. Even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

To be continued in book 2, Guild of Magic.

Next: Discuss the book below in the ARC Worlds Book Club!

ARC Worlds

ARC Worlds Book Club - Guild of Tokens

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 6 comments · Jon Auerbach

If you’ve enjoyed reading Guild of Tokens and want to support my work, you can pick up a copy of the Guild of Tokens Special Edition from my online shop, which includes 3 prequel short stories and a novella. Or consider subscribing to ARC Worlds and read Guild of Magic before anyone else.

Get your copy of Guild of Tokens

Subscribe now

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45 | Chapter 46 | Chapter 47 | Chapter 48

We stared at each other with matching looks of bewilderment on our faces as Beatrice produced an identical token from her pocket. 

“What … how is that possible?” I said. 

“Where did you get that locket?” Beatrice asked. 

“It was my mom’s. She gave it to me on my 11th birthday and I’ve worn it ever since she died. Where did you get that token?”

“Where you thought it was. The 19th-century townhouse on Pearl Street, with the triangle carved into the stone wall. The token was buried underneath.”

“Ah,” I said. 

So much had happened since yesterday that I didn’t feel like patting myself on the back for finding where the token from Rita’s memory had been hidden. How it had made its way to that townhouse from deposit box number 42 was a mystery I didn’t feel like solving. Besides, it was Frankie who we had to thank for finding it, and now because of Doug, we never would be able to.

My eyes drifted toward her unmoving body on the floor and I suppressed a sob. I could blame Doug for killing her and blame the Guild for sending us after her in the first place, and wipe my hands of everything. I could justify my absolution with that twisted pretzel logic and pretend that I had done nothing wrong. But that would be the first step onto the path that Beatrice had taken long ago, and as much as we had bonded over the weeks, I didn’t want to end up like her.

I looked down at the token that had been hanging around my neck for half of my life and thought of my mom. Was the locket just some old piece of jewelry she had lying around or did she know what was hidden inside? I didn’t want to think about what that meant. 

The token, like the Medoblad, gave off an otherworldly shine. Unlike its wooden, iron, and bronze cousins, this one lacked the number one etched in the center. Instead, there was a beakless bird that looked like a cross between a pigeon and a hawk.

“What is this on the token? A dodo bird missing its beak?”

“No,” said Beatrice. “It’s an alerion.”

“A what?”

“A mythical bird. Only two were said to exist at a time. Every 60 years, they lay two eggs, and then when the eggs hatch, the parent alerions down themselves. It’s the Guild’s sigil. Don’t ask me why.”

“Oh,” I said. “So now what? Are we actually just going to walk into Dalia’s office, plop the tokens down on her fancy table, and demand to join the Guild?”

“I don’t know,” said Beatrice. “Maybe?”

“Or maybe we should take that box and these tokens and get as far away from the Guild as we can,” I offered.

“First things first. Let’s just get out of here. We’ll come back for Frankie later.”

Beatrice reattached the knob to the front door and opened it slowly. But before she could step through, she was knocked backward by a man wearing a blue blazer. 

It was Gilbert.

Beatrice retreated to the middle of the room and I stood next to her, clutching the Medoblad.

“Beatrice,” he said cooly, his eyes surveying the room until they reached Frankie’s body. “What happened here? Where’s-”

“Doug?” said Beatrice. “Dead. Thankfully. Frankie too.”

“I see,” the real Gilbert said. “How…”

“Doug, with that,” I pointed to the spilled command ink that had seeped into the wooden floor. “Right after she opened the box.”

“So you did have it,” he said. 

“No, your crazed lackey took it, after he trapped us in the cave and left us to die,” said Beatrice. “Why are you here? Come to finish what Doug failed to do? Because if you are, then I’m-”

Gilbert held up his hand.

“No, I’m not. I came to sue for peace. And to stop Doug. But it seems like you handled that on your own.”

“Sue for peace? You’re the ones who keep coming after me,” said Beatrice.

“That was Doug,” said Gilbert. “I gave him the glamour to use when he was out in public. Seeing as how he was supposed to be dead, which I seem to recall was your doing.”

“Yes,” Beatrice said. “Except you saved him for some reason. Thanks for doing that, by the way.”

“Enough,” I said. “We never asked to be involved in any of this. But we’re not just going to walk away now and pretend like nothing has happened. I’m afraid you’re going to be stuck with us.”

“How do you figure?” said Gilbert.

“Because,” I said, holding my gold token aloft while Beatrice did the same. “We’re joining the Guild.”

“John, Ms. Jacobs’s just walked in,” said our HR manager Margaret to a speakerphone in the middle of the conference room table. She beckoned me to sit at the chair across from her and then turned her attention back to the phone.

“Ah, good. Sorry we have to do this over the phone Jen, but I got called away to London last minute. Anyway, I know you were supposed to have your annual review next week, but something’s come up, so I wanted to do this now.”

“Umm, OK,” I said into the phone while trying to avoid Margaret’s blank face.

“Now you’ve done great work for us in the past, and this year-”

“Look, is this about the run-through? Because I emailed the team afterward to say I was sorry for running out. But I did fix the bug and-”

“What?” interrupted John. “Oh. No, no. That was some inspired thinking. Really saved the day.”

“Then what? The other devs are mad I was out sick last week?”

“No, it’s not that either. If you’ll just let me explain, then this will go more smoothly.”

“OK,” I said. The last thing I wanted to do was sit through a lecture from Hammond about God knows what, especially with tonight’s summons looming.

A week had passed since that morning on the island and my life had almost returned to normal. Well, my new normal as a Guild recruit. Gilbert had stared at our tokens for what had seemed like 10 minutes before nodding.

“This is … unexpected,” he had said. “But that’s why we have bylaws. You’ll be hearing from us soon.”

And then, before we could do anything, he had grabbed the box and escaped back through the front door. We had foolishly given chase through the portal, but luckily Gilbert hadn’t pulled off the knob on the other end, and so we had emerged into the Chrysler Building office a few moments later to find him gone. 

“-took them a while to sort through everything, but when Anthony and Greg laid it all for me, I made the decision immediately.”

“What?” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Does the night of March 26, 2018 ring a bell?” Hammond said, a note of irritation in his voice. 

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Should it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Because on that night, our logs reported a massive power outage. Every computer in the office except one went out at the exact same time, only to be rebooted a few minutes later.”

My eyes went wide. It was the night I had first discovered the Quest Board. 

“And the only employee at the office that night was-”

“Me,” I said. “But, nothing happened. I mean, I didn’t-”

“Erase anything? No, fortunately not. But you did install a backdoor into your workstation during the outage and who knows how much of our code you’ve purloined.”

“A backdoor? What the hell are you talking about it? I didn’t-

“I’m sorry, Jen, but you’re fired.”

“What’s wrong with you?” said Beatrice, as we got off the subway at 51st Street just after 1 a.m. “You haven’t said a word all night.”

“I got fired,” I said, the glamour’s weight feeling heavier than usual.

“Oh? What for?”

“For loading the Quest Board onto my computer at work.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yes, but the company thinks I committed corporate espionage or something. I just can’t believe-”

“Let it go, Jen. Or Jade, I guess. Are you really planning on wearing that thing for the rest of your life?”

“No, it’s just that, Gilbert, he only knows me as Jade. I’d like to keep it that way for as long as I can. This is the Guild we’re talking about.”

We crossed under the familiar trellis into the pocket park, which was predictably deserted. But the gurgle of the waterfall at the back broke the relative quiet of the night, and we sat down at one of the tables near the freshly-packed dirt that was awaiting a spring planting.

“True,” said Beatrice. “But we are about to be members of said Guild, so that should provide us with a measure of protection.”

“After all we’ve been through, do you really believe that?”

“Not for a second. But we don’t have a choice. I’m not just going to hand these tokens over to Dalia and hope she leaves us alone.”

The park suddenly went quiet and I looked up at the waterfall to find it had stopped. I stood up from the table and walked through the dirt surrounding the now-still collecting pool, and nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw a dark figure walk out from the ivy wall that lined the back of the park.

“Hello, ladies,” said Gilbert. 

“Gilbert,” said Beatrice. 

“Why are we here?” I asked. “This doesn’t look like the Guild Hall. Even Dalia’s conference room would have been preferable.” 

“We are here because there are some preliminary matters to attend to before you can be sworn in as the newest members of the Guild.”

“And what are those?” said Beatrice, glaring at Gilbert. “We have the gold tokens. We know that they confer Guild membership. What else is there? You going to dunk us in this pool here to see if we’re witches?”

“Not quite,” said Gilbert, who pulled a small vial from his pocket. “Under the Guild bylaws, the holder of a gold token is entitled to one of the 12 Guild seats. The seats usually operate in a hereditary manner, the gold token passed down from parent to child and so on. There have been a few occasions where hard-up families have sold their seats, but that hasn’t happened in a century.”

“Fascinating,” said Beatrice, rolling her eyes, and I nudged her with my elbow. 

“Anyway,” said Gilbert, ignoring Beatrice’s comment, “you two have presented the requisite tokens for membership, but there remains the issue that 11 of the 12 seats are currently spoken for. And earlier this evening, we called a full meeting of the Guild, at which 11 tokens were presented.”

“What are you saying?” I said.

“Either you are engaging in some extreme sleight of hand with one of our members, or one of your tokens is a fake.”

Before we could say anything to object, Gilbert unstoppered the vial and dumped half the contents into the pool. The surface of the water flashed bright red three times before returning to its normal opaqueness and Beatrice and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do.

“What … what was that?” asked Beatrice, clenching her fists, and I saw the outer edges of plastic wrapping.

“That,” said Gilbert, “will tell us which of your tokens is true. Now, Beatrice, if you wouldn’t mind, toss your token into the pool.”

“Fine,” she said, producing it from her pocket and flicking it into the air. 

The token hit the water with a plop and sunk to the bottom. I looked at her and she shrugged her shoulders, and we waited for something momentous to happen. 

After a few moments, I saw it: a faint glow at the bottom of the pool. It grew brighter by the second, but the light that radiated from the token wasn’t gold. It was green.

Then everything exploded. 

The blast knocked me backward onto the dirt and a few seconds later I was hit with a frigid wall of water. Ignoring the ringing in my ears, I wiped the mud from my face and slowly sat up and looked over to see if Beatrice was all right.

Except, she was gone. 

“Huh,” said Gilbert, who was seemingly unharmed. “Wasn’t expecting that. Well, I was. Just not that forceful.” 

He walked over and extended his hand to me, and I reluctantly took it, his clammy palm sending a shiver up my arm.

“Seems like your friend made off clean and left you here to take the fall,” he said, coldly. 

“I … no. She didn’t kno-”

“You don’t have to answer for her. Not unless your token also tries to blow me up. Shall we?”

Somehow, there was still water remaining in the pool and we walked to the edge together, where Gilbert emptied the remainder of the vial. The water flashed red three times again and he gestured for me to surrender my token just as Beatrice had done. I silently complied and held my breath.

Nothing happened. 

No glow, no exploding tsunami of water, not even a gurgle from the pool.

“OK, yours is good,” said Gilbert, nonchalantly. “You can retrieve it.”

“What? I don’t understand. What was that liquid?”

“That? Just a little something to weed out fakes. Yours didn’t react, so it’s the real deal.”

“Oh,” I said, stepping over the lip of the retaining wall around the pool and into the cold water. The token gleamed up at me, like a coin in a wishing well, and I thrust my hand into the pool and quickly pulled it out. 

“So, now what? Is there some sort of ceremony or something?”

Gilbert raised an eyebrow.

“Something like that. But are you sure you want to go through with this? Once you join the Guild, there is literally no turning back. It’s for life. Now, if you were willing to part with the token, I could offer you a handsome sum of money.”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. 

“Define handsome.”

“Enough money that you wouldn’t have to work another day in your life if you didn’t want to. You’d of course also have to agree to let us wipe your memory of the past year. But the money would more than make up for that, I think.”

“I see.”

The offer was tempting, for sure. I was unemployed, my oldest friends literally didn’t remember me, my newest friend was now probably in permanent hiding, and my life had been threatened more times in the past year than I cared to think about. Gilbert was literally offering me a fresh start, the chance to chart whatever course I wanted. 

But all the money in the world, I suspected, wouldn’t buy me peace of mind, even if I couldn’t remember the truth about magic or what Beatrice and I had been through. And what about Beatrice? Could I really just leave her to fend for herself? Walk away from everything and go sip scotch on a beach somewhere for the rest of my life? 

I clutched the gold token in one hand and my mom’s now-empty locket with the other. 

“Keep your money,” I said. “I’m in.”

Next: The end. Read it below:

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Epilogue

Chapter 49 recap: Jen’s life takes an epic turn. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45 | Chapter 46 | Chapter 47

My hand should have been bleeding. 

Not from the broken pieces of ivory that had already fallen to the floor. 

But from the twin blade that had been hidden beneath the handle.

Its edge was sharp, that much I could feel. But the healing blade of the Medoblad, the reverse of the curse, it wouldn’t harm me.

Doug looked at me with a mixture of awe and fear, but I didn’t care about him. All I cared about was one thing and one thing only.

I stood next to Frankie, and then, careful not to cut myself with the other end, slid the blade effortlessly into the same spot where I had unleashed the curse on her. What the healing serum had failed to do, the Medoblad was accomplishing in spades, and I watched as the stone fled from her body. When I finally saw Frankie’s feet begin to twitch, I knew that the cure was complete and pulled the blade free. As I did, Doug’s command in my head ceased and I turned to face him, but then I felt something grab me from behind.

“What have you done?” said Frankie, whose hand was now wrapped around my wrist. 

“I … we saved you,” I said, nearly dropping the blade to the ground. 

She withdrew her grip and then slowly took in her surroundings, while Doug stood silently at the front of the house, and her eyes went wide when she finally saw him.

“How? He’s the one who kidnapped me in the first place!”

“He’s from the Guild,” said Beatrice. “Thought he was doing his boss a favor by opening that box. But he’s not too smart, that one.”

“Shut up!” said Doug. “I’m going to-”

“He just wants what’s inside the box,” I interjected. “You’re the Guild’s Keeper, aren’t you? You can open it and then we can all leave.” 

Frankie shook her head slowly.

“No, you have it all backward.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“I’m not the Guild’s Keeper. Far from it. For 200 years, my family has kept the cave and that box hidden from the Guild. Until someone found out that I had taken up the charge.”

I brought my hand to the glamour stone and felt Jade fade away, and it took a few seconds for the glimmer of recognition to appear on her face.

“YOU!” Frankie shouted. “The girl from the gym, the one who tore off the bandage on my tattoo, you…”

“Didn’t know what we had done,” I said. “We thought it was just another Raid. We didn’t realize what we were doing. And then Dalia said that the box was Guild property so-”

“You ignorant fools!” 

“Why did you tell us where the last gold token was then?” said Beatrice, producing a small golden coin from her pocket. “When we healed you the other day, you told us where to find it.”

“That token was lo-”

“Enough!” said Doug. “I don’t care about any of this. You,” he pointed at Frankie, “are going to open that box and I’m finally going to get my hands on that Relic.”

“Over my dead body,” said Frankie calmly. “I may have failed my family but I won’t allow you to open the box. That key will die with me here and now and you’ll never be able to-”

“I was expecting you to say that,” said Doug. “But fortunately, our friends here have provided me with a convenient method of getting what I want out of you.”

We stood helplessly as Doug crossed the house in an instant and Frankie could do nothing as he held up a second note written in black ink in front of her eyes. Before she could react, the command had already taken effect.

“I’m going to open the box for you,” Frankie said in a monotone voice. She slowly walked forward a few steps to where Doug had placed it and picked it up, sending the ink vial and pen falling to the ground as she did.

Frankie lifted the box aloft with her palms and closed her eyes. Her body began to twitch and her lips began to tremble as violent spasms rippled through her limbs, but somehow she kept a hold of it. It was like I was watching an exorcism from a horror movie with Doug as the priest. The tremors continued to wash over Frankie until finally, her eyes reopened, and her pupils were surrounded by a silver aura.

“Ephphatha,” she said and the box complied. A gust of air burst forth from the opened lid, spreading to every corner of the house, and I felt a strange sensation around my neck as the glamour suddenly reactivated. 

“And now I’m going to die,” Frankie said in the same monotone as she collapsed onto the ground, the box tumbling from her hands.

“Well done,” said Doug. “Well done. And now the Relic is mine, and Gilbert and Dalia and the Guild will-”

“What did you do to her?” Beatrice said, anger rising in her voice.

“What you must have known the ink was capable of,” he replied.

“No!” I shouted. “I healed her. I saved her. And you-”

“Told her to open the box and die,” said Doug, smirking. “She would have died anyway soon enough. Being a Keeper extracts a great toll on your body. I just sped up the process a bit.”

He nudged Frankie in the ribs, as if double-checking that his command had taken effect, before picking up the now-unlocked box and retreating to the door.

I rushed to Frankie’s side, my fingers frantically searching for a pulse in her neck, but the only thing I felt was the coldness of her skin. Without thinking, I plunged the healing end of the Medoblad into Frankie’s shoulder over and over again, each jab becoming more frantic, as I waited for the blade’s magic to restart Frankie’s heart. 

“Give it a rest,” said Doug. “You should be more worried about yourself. Can’t decide whether you would be more useful to me alive or dead, but I suppose I’ll have time to figure that out once I kill Trinity back there.”

Doug laughed and I looked back at Beatrice, who had barely blinked at the taunt. 

“He kept me holed up in the Guild Hall for far too long, so I’ve had a lot of time to consider how I was going to do it, if I ever got the chance.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Gilbert,” said Doug. “He’s had a special interest in you, T, for a long time. Was stalking you even while I was doing the same. So fortunately for me, he showed up in the atrium that night shortly after you left me there to die. He gave me the antidote and asked if I wanted to learn under a real mentor. Of course I said yes, but didn’t realize until much later what I’d signed up for. It was only in the past few years that he let me out on my own. But only while wearing this.”

Doug held up the glamour stone around his neck. It was green, like mine, but lacked Jade’s luster.

“I wonder what it would feel like to wear that one,” he said, pointing at my neck. I glanced down and saw a sight I’d never seen before: my mother’s locket, ajar. 

I looked back up at Doug, only to see him vanish again and reappear at Beatrice’s side, holding her chin with his fingers, as if he was a lion surveying his prey. 

“In case you were wondering, it’s going to be slow and painful and I’m going to enjoy every single minute of it,” Doug whispered in her ear, but Beatrice remained preternaturally still. 

“Where’s that arrogant spirit I know so well?” said Doug as he released his grip on Beatrice and shook his head. “I thought you would put up more of a fight, but now that you’ve finally met your match, you’re nothing but a scared little girl. Figures.”

Doug turned around and walked over to the wooden box, and I saw Beatrice clench her fists tightly. I searched for some sort of signal in her eyes, but she just stood there, staring at Doug, as he bent down to pick up his treasure. He slowly opened the lid, his face erupting into a vicious smile. But the glee was only temporary.

“No,” he said, closing the lid and opening it again. “This isn’t right. It’s not-” 

The purple blur hit Doug at full speed, pinning him against the wall and sending the wooden box careening across the room. When the dust settled, I saw Beatrice with her arms locked around him, her body completely surrounded by the purple aura. 

“Hurry,” said Beatrice. “Don’t … know … how much longer … I can hold him.”

Doug struggled to break free from her grasp, but Beatrice’s strength was equal to his own, and I stood there, frozen with fear. 

“Jen!” Beatrice yelled. “What the hell are you waiting for? Do it!”

I looked at her and suddenly I was back in the lighthouse again, a raging inferno all around me, two lives hanging in the balance. 

Except I was no longer the morally righteous, foolishly naive woman I had been. The Quests and the Guild had seen to that. And Beatrice. And Doug. And even Duncan. They had all shaped me into a different sort of instrument. One that had no reservation of doing whatever it took to survive. 

I pulled the blade free from Frankie’s shoulder in one long arc before reversing my grip. It should have been slick with her blood, but the metal was perfectly pristine, shining brightly somehow in the dim room. I pressed the edge into my palm as I closed my fingers around it, took a deep breath, and then charged at the man and the woman who had upended my life. 

It all happened in an instant. 

Beatrice spun Doug around and then released him, his forward momentum impaling him on the outstretched blade. The recognition of his impending demise slowly dawned on his face as he looked down to see the Medoblad plunged into his stomach. Gray stone erupted from the wound and Doug frantically tried to pull the blade free, but the alchemy was quicker, and his hands stopped short only a few inches from the Medoblad. The rest of him followed suit, until he was nothing but an angry, snarling statue. 

“Pull it out,” said Beatrice, her body still flickering with power. 

I complied, only to watch in horror as she smashed her palms through Doug from behind, his body shattering into a hundred pieces.

“Why did you do that?” I yelled. “It was over. We beat him. We didn’t need to-”

“Yes, we did,” said Beatrice, brushing the stone fragments from her hands. “I made the mistake of leaving him alive last time, I won’t do it again.”

“But-”

“It’s done, Jen. Nothing to do now but move forward. In the box in the back, there’s another vial of the vitality serum. Quickly now, before…”

The ring’s power vanished in an instant and Beatrice fell forward, but I caught her with my free arm, and we toppled to the ground. I slid out from under her, careful not to let the Medoblad touch her, and flipped her over onto her back. The serum I found in a box with several jars of preserved rats and pigeons, and I quickly grabbed the vial and raced back to the unconscious Beatrice. Propping her head up on my legs, I removed the wax stopper and poured the brownish-gray liquid into her mouth.

Beatrice gritted her teeth as the serum began its savage work restoring her body. After a few minutes, she finally opened her eyes and stared straight up at me, a look of shock on her face.

“Jen,” she whispered. “Your locket.”

“I know,” I said. “Somehow, it opened during the commotion.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s … look inside.”

I pulled the front open all the way to find a shiny golden circle with a small bird-like creature etched in the middle nestled in the interior of the locket. My fingers pried it free easily and when I looked down at my palm, I was holding a gold token.

Next: The Guild comes calling. Read it below:

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 49

Chapter 48 recap: Jen and Beatrice face their final foe. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45 | Chapter 46

I blinked and Gilbert was gone.

Another man stood in his place. He was younger, by at least a score, but he had the same gaunt look in his face that Gilbert had worn. 

I looked back at Beatrice and she had turned white as a ghost.

“No,” she said. “It can’t … you’re dead.”

“Yes, well, the thing about killing someone,” said the man who had been Gilbert, “as I’ve learned recently, is that you need to make sure it actually takes. But now that you’re here, we can-”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” I said. “But who the fuck are you?”

“Tell her, Beatrice,” said the man. “Tell her what you did.”

“His name is Doug, and he was my first trainee.”

The name rang in my head and I recalled my confrontation at the bar, when I had accused her of killing Kate.  

“And…” 

Doug gestured for her to continue.

“And I killed him. You. At least I thought I did.”

“You would have, if someone hadn’t intervened to reverse what your lipstick had done.”

“Who?” asked Beatrice, who was now visibly shaking.

“Maybe I’ll tell you, after we sort out our business here. Or as I watch the life slowly drain out of you.”

“I don’t fucking think so,” said Beatrice and she charged past me, the Medoblad leading the way.

But Doug was faster, gracefully shifting his torso out of the path of the knife and in the same movement extending his elbow outward to hit Beatrice squarely in the gut. She staggered backward from the blow and fell to the ground, the Medoblad slipping free from her hand and landing at my feet. 

I picked up the Relic and pointed it at Doug, but it felt like I was threatening him with a tree branch. Beatrice grunted and pushed herself up from the floor, clutching her stomach, while the soft glow of the amethyst stone in her ring began to spread up her arm.

“Don’t,” said Doug. “Wouldn’t want you to waste any of more of her strength.”

The purple light vanished in an instant and we stood in silence at the mercy of the man who had cheated death. 

“Now, let’s get to it, shall we?”

A crooked grin permeated Doug’s face as he stooped down slowly to pick up the wooden box, all trace of his earlier calisthenics gone. Had he actually anticipated Beatrice’s attack or was it a stroke of pure luck? 

He placed the box back down a foot or so from Frankie, and then dug something out of his pants pocket. 

A small vial of black ink.

“Where … where did you get that?” Beatrice asked, her voice trembling. 

“Where do you think?” Doug snapped at her. “From Polly. After you refused to help her find a cure for her dad’s condition, who do you think she turned to? She was only too eager to provide what we ne-”

“What happened to Steve?” I interrupted.  “Last time I saw him…”

“He was barely holding it together,” said Doug. “And that was before the scar’s venom began to spread. Now, he probably has a few weeks left. Too bad Phineas sold his last vial of golden serum to some redhead. Oh wait, that was you.”

The words landed with the same force as his blow to Beatrice’s stomach and I felt my insides clench together. 

“I was … we were trying to heal Frankie.”

“And I see you succeeded! But don’t worry, you’ll get the opportunity to try again, right now in fact.”

Doug reached into his pocket again and produced a pen and some paper, which he placed on top of the wooden box, before unstoppering the vial. His hands worked furiously and within a few seconds, he had filled the reservoir and reassembled the pen. 

“How are you doing that?” asked Beatrice. 

“Doing what? Moving so fast? You should know. After all, it’s your buffs.”

“Mine don’t work like that. It’s all or nothing.”

Doug looked at her and shook his head. 

“They didn’t when we bought them from Phineas. But I’ve had a long time to study them and make improvements, despite your refusal to share your prima materia source, and so now they do. Funny how so many of your decisions are coming back to bite you in the ass, it’s really quite amazing.” 

“Shut. Up,” said Beatrice. “I’d do it all again, including killing you. But the Guild will probably do that for me, once they find out what you did.”

“No, they won’t, not after you open this box for me.”

“And how are we going to do that?” I said. “You said it yourself, Frankie holds the key and she’s not exactly in an unlocking mood at the moment.”

“Truth be told, I had thought that your nighttime excursion to Inwood would have provided the answer, “ said Doug. “The great and all-knowing Rita van Asch surely would know how to cure a Relic’s curse! But then Trinity here threw a firecracker at me and you got away.”

“I wish I had known it was you that night,” said Beatrice. “I would have finished the job.”

“And I would have killed you then and we wouldn’t be having this lovely chat now. Which I’m going to pause for a moment so that you can read this.”

I glanced down at the box and the piece of paper was gone, and only the uncapped pen remained. When had he written something with the ink? I looked back up at Doug only for the paper to suddenly appear in right in front of my eyes. 

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” the words said and as I read them, the command suddenly floated above the paper like I was watching a 3D movie and hit me square in the face. 

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” Doug’s voice whispered in my head and I flinched. The words repeated again, except louder and more forceful, and my hands began to shake. This was worse than Beatrice’s original command to me to put on the ring. That had been easy to comply with. But this, this was asking me to do the impossible. 

From behind me, I heard Beatrice shout something, but Doug closed the gap between them in a flash and doubled her over with another elbow to the gut. But I couldn’t worry about her right now. I needed to reverse the curse on Frankie, like the voice said. 

I closed my eyes and an avatar of Doug appeared in my mind. He was translucent, like a ghost, but his will was absolute. 

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” he said. 

I nodded and suddenly I was in a vast library, with shelves of books reaching to the ceiling. 

The me in my head ran to and fro, fetching volumes from different shelves and arranging them on a big center table made of ornate wood. The books each opened on their own accord, and when they did, voices spilled out from them.

“Regardless, if you actually possessed the Blad, like you claim, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with,” said Dalia at our meeting yesterday.

“Its restorative properties were soon demonstrated to be almost unparalleled, capable even of reversing the effects of Relics now lost to us,” said me, reading Rita’s entry from the Compendium.

“Half of its needles are venomous and half are curative,” said the old man with the half-moon spectacles named Phineas. 

“… we’re dealing with a knife, so not sure how that helps us,” said Beatrice at the coffee shop a few weeks ago.

The voices swirled above the table, and I imagined them as pieces of a puzzle that wouldn’t stay still long enough so I could grab them. And the bits and pieces of my memories were so disparate that I didn’t see how they fit together at all. We didn’t have the beak of a dodo bird, I had used up all but a few drops of the healing serum, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what Beatrice was talking about.

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” said Doug again and I so wanted to stab him with the Medoblad, if only to expel him from my mind. The blade suddenly appeared in my hand and the memory of that horrid night flew down from a shelf and set itself on the table with the rest. I grasped the imaginary Medoblad and walked toward Doug’s apparition, but he uttered the words again and my mental self was forced back to the table.

Dalia’s voice sounded again and that gnawing feeling from earlier returned. Why did she think the Medoblad was so important to curing Frankie? What was I missing?

I squeezed the Medoblad’s ivory handle harder as my frustration and fury rose to a boiling point and it disappeared into a puff of smoke, the now-unsupported blade floating in mid-air for just a second before falling to the ground. But that didn’t satiate my anger and I unleashed it further on the table, toppling the massive wooden beast on its side and sending all the books to the ground. 

But Doug was unfazed and as the words of the command formed again on his lips again, I let out a guttural cry. 

It was then that I heard it. 

Beatrice’s voice, from one of the books. I had listened to it moments ago, but not all of it. 

“The Medusa legend doesn’t really touch on reversing the curse.”

I froze as the rest of her words spilled forth.

“Even killing her didn’t undo it. The best I found was a mention of two veins in her neck: blood from one would curse you and blood from the other would purify you.”

Two veins, two golden needles, two opposing forces: one to curse you and one to heal you.

The library scene dissolved as I opened my eyes, and I saw that the real Medoblad was still in my hand, the ivory handle intact. 

I would soon change that.

Beatrice was slumped on the ground, and I walked over to her and propped her up against the wall.

“What are you doing?” Doug asked.  

“What you told me to,” I snapped at him before turning my attention to Beatrice. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was heavy, and I wasn’t sure if she was still conscious. 

“Hey. Hey! Snap out of it. I need some of the strength from your ring.”

Beatrice’s head rolled back and I was afraid that the ring and Doug’s attacks had already taken too much of a toll on her. But then I remembered that barely empty vial of gold that I had tucked away in a box, and I hurried to the back of the house to retrieve it. Two drops of the shimmering liquid still remained at the bottom and I unstoppered the glass quickly before pulling open Beatrice’s mouth and letting the serum trickle free.

The alchemy took only seconds to work and Beatrice slowly opened her eyes and looked at me. 

“Activate the ring,” I said, grasping her right hand.

“No … I … why?”

“Please.”

She nodded and shut her eyes. The purple glow was dim but I felt the tiniest bit of raw strength travel from her hand to mine. I stood slowly, careful not to let our hands fall away, and stared at Doug.

“Reverse the curse on Frankie,” I said as I shattered the handle of the Medoblad.

Next: The final showdown. Read it below.

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 48

Chapter 46 recap: Jen and Beatrice race against time to stop the Guild, but find out they are too late. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 …

Read more

4 years ago · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45

“Watch where you’re going,” Eva said, a scowl on her face.

“S-sorry,” I said again. 

Eva considered me for a few seconds as I held my breath, wondering if she could see through the glamour somehow. But then she just shook her head and led the man further into the car. I retreated to the other end but peered through the crowd, trying to get a glimpse of the man in the blue blazer, but the train was packed with rush-hour commuters. Finally, after three more stops, the mass of people had diminished and my jaw dropped at what I saw.

The old man on Eva’s arm was none other than her dad, Steve. It had only been a year since I met him that night in the church basement, but he looked as if he had aged 20. His hair was grayed at the roots, his eyes were sunken, and he sat with a pronounced hunch.

I turned away quickly and located the man with the blue blazer on the opposite bench. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the three of them were here on the same train, in the same subway car, sitting a few feet away from each other. And I had a sinking feeling that this clandestine meet-up had something to do with me. 

At 14th Street, the car emptied further before a new glut of people spilled inward, and I was jostled away from my spying post. When I recalibrated myself, I saw that the man was now sitting next to Eva, his eyes staring down at the floor. I brought my phone out for more reconnaissance only to see a text from Beatrice. 

“its him,” it read and I felt my pulse quicken.

“Hes sitting next to polly on subway. With her dad. Im in pursuit,” I wrote back, but the message bounced.

I looked back at the man I now knew was Gilbert and I felt a chill ripple through me. It was as Beatrice had described him. Were it not for the trendy blue blazer he wore, there wouldn’t be anything remarkable about him. But I had heard what he was capable of, how he had stalked, tracked, and tried to murder Beatrice for reasons that were still unclear to me. Not to mention attacking us a few weeks ago. If Polly was in league with him now, then we were truly screwed. 

The train reached the next station and I quickly sent my message again and put my phone away before I could see if it went through. The same chaos of exit and entry repeated itself, and when things settled down again, I saw Gilbert’s hand extending down under the subway bench. He still didn’t meet Eva’s gaze and neither did she look at him, but then she mouthed something softly and he nodded.

It took me a minute to realize what she had said, and when I did, it felt as if my stomach had fallen into a gaping hole.

I steeled my nerves and waited for the next stop. When the doors finally opened, I pushed through the incoming crowds, my phone in hand, and frantically texted Beatrice.

“Weve been betrayed.”

“We’re fucked,” said Beatrice when I met her half an hour later on a park bench in Washington Square Park. The morning rush was at its tail end, but it was still early for the NYU students, who had just emerged from their dorms and were crisscrossing the park on their way to class.

“You said that last week,” I replied. 

“Was it only last week? God, it seems like it was months ago. But it doesn’t make it any less true. And just when I thought we had the upper hand on them.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You mean…”

“Yes,” said Beatrice, half-smiling. “I found it. The gold token that Rita hid in that bank deposit box all those years ago.”

“You mean we found it,” I corrected. “If it weren’t for my brai-”

“I wasn’t trying to take credit, Jen. Calm down.”

“Sorry,” I said. “It was a long night.”

“Same here.”

“So now what? Please tell me you took the door knob to the island out of the office.”

Beatrice shook her head no.

“Maybe we can head them off,” I said. “Gilbert didn’t get off the train when I did. It might take him a while to go back uptown. We could sti-”

“Walk right into the Guild’s trap? No. But we can get the drop on them if we hurry.” 

“How?”

“Follow me,” she said.

We walked across the park with a quick gait and we were soon in front of the Washington Square Arch. I started to continue through the center but Beatrice veered to the left and I followed. She stopped in front of the western pier of the Arch and I saw it: a small door set in the middle, like something out of Alice in Wonderland.

Beatrice reached into her pocketbook, pulled out a key ring, and approached the door. It had two locks and a deadbolt, which she first removed from the door as easily as if it were attached with plastic tape. Next, she inserted a key into the top lock and turned it, before removing it and placing the key ring back in her bag. Finally, she reached under her sweater and pulled out something that hung around her neck. 

It was another key. But unlike the first one, its color was a familiar dark brown with white streaks.

“What … what is that?” I asked as Beatrice grinned.

“This,” she said, inserting the key into the lower lock and turning, “is our back door.”

Beatrice removed the key and nudged the door open. A familiar black expanse peeked through the crack. 

“Let’s go,” she said. “Before someone sees us.”

“I don’t … how?”

“No time, just trust me.”

Beatrice slid into the space between and was gone. I glanced back and forth to see if anyone had noticed our trespass, but the city’s anonymity had fallen over us like the morning fog, and I knew I could delay no longer. The darkness beckoned me from the doorway and I greeted it as if it were an old friend. 

The journey was over in an instant but something felt different as I emerged into the dimly lit room with the wooden floor. 

It wasn’t just that the glamour had activated again during transit and that Jade’s freckled hands had replaced my own. 

No, it was the sharp pounding in my head and the fact that Beatrice was not already in the island headquarters to greet me.

And that I had apparently forgotten to turn off our lone lamp before I had left Frankie two days ago. 

And that Frankie’s stone figure was propped up against the wall, free of the tarp.  

And that there was a familiar man standing near the open front door, a wooden box at his feet that hadn’t been in the house before.

Towers of unpacked supplies and books were still stacked throughout the house, allowing me to observe the intruder. 

It was Gilbert. 

But he wasn’t wearing the blue blazer or slacks he had been sporting an hour ago on the subway. Instead, he was dressed in a gray t-shirt and worn blue jeans. And his hair, it was no longer perfectly coiffed and slick, but dirty and unkempt. Finally, his face was sunken and wrinkled, as if he had somehow aged 10 years. 

My next step on the creaking floor betrayed my presence and I reluctantly walked out from behind the boxes to see a startled Gilbert nearly fall backward into the door.

“What … what are you doing here?” I asked.

“Waiting for someone else,” said Gilbert, collecting himself. “And you are?”

“Jade,” I said, my stomach tying itself into a myriad series of knots.

“Jade, Jade, why does that name ring a bell?” he said, stroking his chin. “Oh, yes. JadePhoenix42. But you look nothing like you did that night. Why is that, I wonder?” 

Gilbert suddenly reached back to grab the vervorium knob on the front door. My eyes followed his and I saw it: a little chunk missing. No doubt the knob on the other side had a similar piece removed. 

“I wonder what would happen if I took this off while she was mid-transit? Would she just get stuck in there forever? Let’s find out, shall we?”

He pushed the door shut and jerked the knob free from the rim and I faked a gasp.

“Clever of her, to repurpose the vervorium knobs to put her stash out of reach,” Gilbert said. “I read about them in the Guild archives. Do you know where they hid the other door to the lighthouse? At the top of Belvedere Castle in Central Park. How much more cliched can you get?”

“So it was you who trapped us there. Dalia said-”

“Dalia doesn’t know anything,” he snapped. “Well, that’s not quite true. She knows a great deal. But not about me. He made certain of that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, I’m sure you don’t. You’re still a baby in all of this. But you hitched your cart to the wrong horse. You all should have died that night in the cave, but somehow you escaped. Which was actually quite beneficial.”

“Wh-what are you talking about?”

If Gilbert heard the slight creak of the floor behind me, it didn’t register on his face, and I wondered how long Beatrice would remain in hiding. 

“I thought Frankie only carried the location of this box,” he said, tapping it with his foot. “It never occurred to me that she would hold the key to it as well. So I was relieved when I found out that you all had escaped, so I could extract the key and claim the Relic inside for myself.” 

Gilbert picked up the box from the floor and I recognized it immediately: the box from the cave, the one we had been accused of stealing.  

“But you had unexpectedly turned poor Frankie to stone. And so the key was lost to me yet again. Until now. Come out, I know you’re there.”

I turned around to see Beatrice appear from behind the boxes, the Medoblad drawn at her side.

“You,” said Beatrice, her voice dripping with venom and disgust. “What happened to our truce? I knew I should have gone after you when I had the chance. That you weren’t going to leave me alone. That-”

“I never had a truce with you,” said Gilbert, who was suddenly clutching a small stone on a chain around his neck. “Trinity.”

Next: Showdown. Read it below.

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 47

Chapter 46 recap: Jen and Beatrice race against time to stop the Guild, but find out they are too late. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 …

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44

“Will you turn that stupid thing off?” Beatrice scowled at me as we walked into a coffee shop in Times Square and found the lone empty table near the back. 

“What?” I said. “How do you expect me to change back when there’s all these peo-”

“We’re in the middle of a crowded hellhole within another crowded hellhole. No one is giving us a second glance.”

“Fine,” I said, rubbing the stone with one hand as I attempted to cover my head with the other.  I felt the glamour melt away once again. “It was your idea in the first place to wear it.”

“And your point is?”

“I don’t why you’re so-”

“Can we just sit here for a minute without launching into another therapy session?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go get us some coffee.”

I returned a few minutes later with two steaming cups of sludge doused with too much cream and sugar and set them down on the table. Beatrice eyed them with suspicion before taking a sip and nearly spitting it back out.

“What did you put in here?” she asked, her features recoiling. “It tastes like burnt trash.”

I took a sampling myself and had nearly the same reaction. “With just a hint of tart. It must be because of that whiskey she gave us. Should have stuck with water.”

“What we should have stuck with was the original plan, which was silence. Instead, you let her take almost everything of Rita’s that we have.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You brought the page from the 1777 diary like I asked?”

“Yes,” said Beatrice. “And kept it stowed in my pocket, also like you asked. But I don’t see the . . . oh. Very clever. This page has the memory ink, which used to be the ring, which is still linked to both the other ring and the memory ink in the other diary, both of which Dalia now has on her person.”

I smiled. 

“But insane,” she continued. “So now we’re just going to follow Dalia around and hope something fruitful comes about? You’re not exactly James Bond. What if she spots us?”

“She won’t. Because thanks to you, she still has no idea what I look like. And she won’t spot you, because you’re not coming with me.”

“This just keeps getting better and better. Since you seem to have everything figured out to a T, what shall I do, oh wise one?”

“You’re going to go find that gold token.”

It was 3 a.m. and the lone waitress in the 24-hour diner on Madison Avenue where I was camped out was reluctantly refilling my mug with decaf coffee for the umpteenth time. I gave her a sheepish smile and promised her a big tip come morning and she walked away, muttering to herself. The coffee tasted like charred toast but it was oddly soothing in a weird sort of way. As I lifted the cup up to my mouth, I felt the familiar gentle pull of the parchment paper on my arm. 

It had been a little too easy to trail Dalia with my makeshift compass. She had emerged from the hulking office building sometime around 5 and into a black sedan. This I had known when the diary page had started gently trying to pull itself free from under my sleeve. Fortunately, I had been waiting next to a bikeshare stand and quickly grabbed a red-painted bike and began my pursuit up Sixth Avenue. 

Her car eventually stopped outside a tony boutique and I hung back a block as I saw Dalia open the door and walk into the store. Several minutes later, she had exited carrying several small bags and the car had resumed its journey northward until it turned west and stopped in front of an even tonier apartment building, just a stone’s throw from the Met. 

So began three hours of circling the building, waiting to see if Dalia would show herself again and lead me to someplace interesting. But by 10, I was beginning to suspect that she had called it in for the night and I had debated whether to continue my surveillance or go home and come back at 6.

I had chosen the former.

The foot traffic on the surrounding streets had petered out around midnight, which is when I had taken refuge in the diner. My dinner with Duncan and even the run-through had seemed like a lifetime ago and I had so far resisted the urge to open my work email, where no doubt news of my firing had been delivered. Maybe Duncan had mercifully ended our relationship electronically too and then I wouldn’t have to deal with that part of my life at all.

This had all seemed like a great idea when I was in the throes of the buffs. My mind had neatly laid everything out in front of me and it had all made so much sense then. But now, as I reread what I had written, the words felt like they had been the product of someone else entirely and I was just following orders. 

The whole exercise just seemed to be long on cleverness and desperation, but short on usefulness. If I picked up Dalia’s trail again tomorrow morning, then what? She was going to lead me right to the cure to the stone curse? And I wasn’t optimistic at Beatrice’s chances of finding the gold token based only on my drug-induced hunch. 

Something from the meeting also still gnawed at me. Why was Dalia so insistent that we didn’t have the Medoblad? I set my brain to the puzzle, but found that it was in no mood for any further mental exertion, so I leaned my head back against the booth to rest just for a second.

And then it was morning and my arm began to twitch. 

I jumped up from the booth, threw a bunch of uncounted bills on the table, and ran out the door into the pouring rain. The cold wind whipped through me, and I ran up the block to take refuge under an awning and gather my bearings. The bike dock was opposite me on the east side of Madison, so I dashed across traffic and quickly mounted my two-wheeled steed. Back on Dalia’s block, I spotted the black car from yesterday and the chase was on again.

The rain beat down on me as I furiously tried to keep up with the sedan’s crisscrossing path downtown. Finally, it turned west onto 51st Street and pulled into a parking garage mid-block. I stowed the bike and continued on foot, watching from afar as Dalia walked up the ramp from the garage with a big red umbrella. The tension on my arm threatened to cut off my circulation, but I trailed after her nevertheless. 

She veered off the sidewalk and walked under a wooden trellis, which led to one of the most peculiar things I had seen during my years living in Manhattan. Up a short flight of stairs was a gorgeous little pocket park, with rows of trees and potted plants creating a veritable forest in the middle of midtown. At the back was an enormous waterfall cascading down a wall of stone, which looked ominous in the rain. My arm beckoned me further but I retreated back out and across the street, lest Dalia spot me.

I spent the next 20 minutes battling both the rain and the cheap umbrella I had purchased from one of the street vendors that always magically appeared as soon as the first drops began to fall. Finally, my arm jerked forward again. I waited for Dalia’s red umbrella to appear from the park, but then my arm shifted in the opposite direction and then back again as a man with slicked-back hair in a blue blazer holding a green umbrella in one hand and carrying one of Dalia’s bags in the other crossed under the trellis and began walking west.

Was this the famed Gilbert that had dogged our steps for so long? I quickly snapped a picture and sent it to Beatrice to confirm while my arm continued its schizophrenic movement. It was then that I realized what was happening: Dalia had split up the items she had taken from us. 

I glanced across to the park and a foolish thought entered my head. That foolish thought became action as I crossed the street and entered the park. It was practically empty, the rain likely driving everyone indoors, but of Dalia and her red umbrella, I saw no sign. The tension on my paper compass faded to a dull twitch the further I went into the park and I doubled-back to the street. How had I missed her? 

The man in the blue blazer, meanwhile, had not gotten very far, so I gave chase. He descended into the subway at Lexington and down the long escalator to the E/M platform. As I slowly followed behind him, two trains entered the station, one heading to Queens and one heading downtown. I tried to break through the barricade of the unmoving people in front of me, but they held firm, even as we stepped onto the platform. 

As throngs of commuters jostled against me in their rush to get to either train, the glamour stone sprung free from under my shirt, along with my mother’s locket, and I foolishly grabbed both of them with my bare hand, only to feel the ripple of Jade wash over me. But I didn’t have time to worry about the consequences of my public transformation, as the doors-closing chimes rang in stereo. I held my arm out in front of me, felt it drift to the right, and quickly pushed myself into the train car and into a woman with blonde hair, who had entered a step ahead of me.

“So sorry,” I said to the woman, who was locked arm-in-arm with an older man with a very pronounced slouch, but when she turned around, I froze dead in my tracks, as Eva’s green eyes met mine.

Next: A betrayal. Read it below.

Subscribe now

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 46

Chapter 45 recap: Jen follows Dalia and in doing so, runs into someone unexpected. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43

“Y-you!” I stammered before Beatrice nudged me in the ribs. 

“Shhh,” she said as she set the box down on the table and waited for Dalia de Wyck to respond. 

“Hmm,” said Dalia, who was holding a crystal tumbler with some sort of brown liquid at the bottom. “Why are there only two of you?”

“I’m sorry,” said Beatrice. “Are we in the right place?”

Dalia took a sip from the glass before taking a seat in the head chair.

“Can’t hear you so well. This table is ridiculously large. I’m not sure why I ever bought it. Can you come up here and take a seat?”

I looked at Beatrice for her lead, but she just shrugged her shoulders slightly and picked up the box. The far side of the room sported a large flatscreen television mounted on the wall, an old-fashioned bar cart, and two more doors, which would complicate any escape route that way, and I doubted that the elevator the floor above us would answer our call.

So we walked the length of the table slowly and my thoughts raced in 40 different directions, none of them helpful, until we reached the second and third chairs away from Dalia and sat.

“Much better,” she said. Her black hair streaked with strands of silver and brown, which fell down past her shoulders. She was wearing a bright red dress that had the same intricate embroidery as the dress from the Met lecture. Up close, I could see that it depicted a magnificent tree.

“Now, before we go any further, you,” she turned her eyes at me, “seem to have an idea of who I am, but I think some formal introductions are in order. I am Dalia de Wyck, creative director of Thera DeWitt, but more importantly for our purposes, the 13th chairman of the Guild.”

“Wait, you’re the head of the Guild?” I said, incredulously. 

Dalia smiled.

“You were expecting a wrinkled old geezer with a monocle? Or a maybe a slightly younger but taller man who dyes his hair gray to look more distinguished?”

“Well, no,” I replied, “but-”

“You must be the famed Beatrice Taylor née Stallard,” said Dalia, turning her attention away from me. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Mostly good. Although it’s my understanding that you were the one responsible for the demise of Winston.”

“That’s because you sent him to kill me,” she said calmly. “And I didn’t mean to kill him.”

Dalia raised an eyebrow.

“Oh? Well, in any event, you’re mistaken. I didn’t send him after you. That was all Gilbert’s doing. I only heard about it afterward. We generally stay out of the murder business, whereas you seem quite drawn to it.”

Another jab landed and I wondered when the dam would break and Beatrice would unleash her fury. But instead, Dalia shifted her focus back to me.

“And you, well, I’m afraid I don’t really know who you are, other than Ms. Taylor’s latest trainee.”

“I’m Jade Peters,” I said, gripping the leather armrests with my fingernails. “And I’m no trainee.”

“If you say so,” said Dalia. “But that leaves one person missing. Where is Francesca?”

“She’s somewhere safe,” said Beatrice. 

“I see,” said Dalia. “But where are my manners? Would you ladies care for a drink?” She gestured to the bar cart in the corner, which held crystal decanters of various shapes. 

“No th-” I began before Beatrice cut me off.

“Thank you. We’ll have whatever you’re drinking.”

“A fine choice,” said Dalia, finishing her glass off. “Although I can assure you that the other bottles are not poisoned either.” 

She stood up from the table and returned with a decanter full of the same brown liquid that had been in her glass moments ago, along with two tumblers. Those Dalia filled, along with her own with what I assumed was whiskey and we each grabbed one with trepidation.

“To a fruitful discussion,” said Dalia, raising her glass, which I now saw had a small bird etched into one of its facets. I pantomimed her gesture, as did Beatrice, and then took a sip of the liquor. It felt smooth, yet also hot against my throat, it tasted smoky but somehow also sweet, and it smelled like a thousand different memories that had come bursting out of my brain.

“What is this?” I asked, taking another sip.

“Something from the Guild’s private collection,” said Dalia. “At this point, we’ve lost track of the year it was made, but if I had to guess, it probably dates back to the early 1800s.”

“And you just have it lying around here, like a bottle of supermarket whiskey?” Beatrice said incredulously.

“Of course not. I had it brought over from the Guild Hall specifically for the occasion. But let’s get back to business, shall we? You were saying that Ms. Lewis is somewhere safe. When were you planning on releasing her to our custody?”

“First things first,” said Beatrice. “Call off your dogs. Gilbert, the tracker, whoever else you have stalking us.”

“I can assure you I don’t know what you’re talk-”

“And then you’ll explain why you attacked us in the cave and again in the park.”

Dalia stared at us as if her gaze could pierce into our minds, and my heart skipped a beat at the thought that she had acquired the apples from the old man at Hunt’s Point. But after a few moments, she shook her head and let out a big sigh.

“I’m afraid you are sadly mistaken on all fronts,” she said. “No one from the Guild attacked you, either in a cave or a park, and we certainly aren’t ’tracking’ you.”

“Then why don’t you tell us wh-”

Dalia held up her hand and Beatrice stopped.

“Let’s just start from the beginning. You two took on a Raid last month to uncover information from a tattoo on Frankie’s back, correct?”

“Yes,” we said in unison.

“But what you didn’t know was that you were working on behalf of our adversary, who has been trying for years to locate our Keeper.”

“Frankie?” I asked. 

Dalia nodded. 

“And a Keeper is . . . ” Beatrice chimed in.

“A protector of Guild secrets. The responsibility is passed down from parent to child, much like our Guild seats.”

“So you’re saying that whoever posted the Raid was trying to steal something from the Guild . . .” I said, the pieces slowly falling into place.

“Exactly. And they got you two to do their dirty work. We of course intercepted the first set of coordinates you turned in. But we didn’t know if you had figured out the rest.”

“So that’s why Gilbert was at the Met that night,” said Beatrice.

“What?” said Dalia, a tiny note of worry in her voice. “No, he wasn’t. He was staking out the door in Long Island City.”

“I saw him there. After we stole, err, took the door knobs,” said Beatrice.  

“I can assure you that wasn’t him,” said Dalia. “You two have a long history, perhaps you were just imagining things.” 

“Maybe,” said Beatrice. “Or maybe you’re just full of sh-”

“So,” I interjected. “If Gilbert was watching the door, then he saw us enter it?”

“Yes,” said Dalia. “He tried to follow but couldn’t open it.”

“That’s because we removed the knob from the other side,” said Beatrice.

“Ah,” said Dalia. “That explains that mystery.”

“But that doesn’t explain who attacked us,” I said. “If Gilbert couldn’t get through the door, then how did someone attack us in the cave?”

“The lighthouse has four doors,” said Beatrice. “Well, had four doors before someone burned it to the ground. They must have come through that door that still had a knob.”

“So someone else has access to the waypoint,” said Dalia, who finished her drink with a gulp. 

“Is that what it was?” I asked. 

“Yes,” said Dalia. “Our Keeper is responsible for guarding the location of the waypoint and its keys. But apparently somewhere along the way, one of them strayed in their mission. Continue.”

“We unlocked one of the doors with one of the knobs from the museum, passed through another portal, and ended up in a cave. Where we found this…”

I reached into the box, retrieved Rita’s diary from inside, and slid it across the table. Dalia eyed it silently for a few seconds before cracking open the cover and flipping through the pages slowly.

“This diary, it has been missing for a long time.”

She set it down in front of me and I picked it back up and flipped to the first page. 

“Who was Rita van Asch?” I asked. 

“She was the sixth chairman of the Guild. It was a particularly taxing time for the company. The Guild had splintered during the War for Independence and this,” she patted the cover of the diary, “recounts some of Rita’s efforts to rebuild our ranks in the war’s aftermath.”

“I see. Was this also hers?” 

I put down the diary and pulled out the wooden box from the swamp, my eyes never leaving Dalia’s. Her features strained to hold back the excitement in her eyes and she rose from her chair to walk to the box.

“And thank you for returning this. We’ve-”

“It’s not what you think it is,” I said. 

“What do you mean?” said Dalia, as she opened the box and pulled out one page of parchment with a small paragraph of writing. “This is-”

“The only page that was in the box,” said Beatrice. “Written in Rita’s handwriting. We were hoping you could help us make sense of it.”

Dalia poured over the front and back of the page as if the rest of the Compendium would magically unfold itself from within the paper. 

“Where did you get this?” she said slowly.

“We think you well know where we got it,” said Beatrice. “Seeing as how one of your thugs tried to attack us immediately after we found it.”

“Again, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no one from the Guild following you or tracking you or whatever you may think is happening. You’re attaching a level of importance to yourself, Ms. Taylor, that is not in tune with reality. So now that we’ve established that, why don’t you tell me what the beak of an extinct bird has to do with our present situation.” 

“It’s Frankie,” I said slowly.

“What about her?”

“She’s . . . I . . . I turned her to stone.”

Dalia’s hands suddenly strained against the table and I was afraid that she was somehow going to crack through the wood. But after a few moments, she eased back and sat down.

“You turned her to stone,” said Dalia, repeating my words back to me as if I was a child telling an obvious lie about why the cookie jar was empty. “Explain.”

I nodded and recounted the rest of our misadventure in the cave. Dalia’s eyes perked up at the mention of the missing box but she let me continued uninterrupted and I described how we had been rendered unconscious and had woken up to find a bound Frankie lying on the cave floor, the box gone. I clamped down my emotions as I narrated our escape, neglecting to mention Beatrice’s ring, and my decision in the fire to stab Frankie with the Medoblad, rather than let her burn to death. The ordeal finished, I picked up my glass and relieved it of the rest of its contents. 

“A fine tale, to be sure,” said Dalia. “But not the truth.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, wondering if she had picked up on my strategic omissions. 

“You expect me to believe that hoi polloi like you have one of the legendary Relics.”

“We don’t need you to believe anything,” said Beatrice. “Because, yes, I am the Keeper of the Medoblad.”

“The Keeper of the Medoblad?” Dalia let out a chuckle and I sensed this meeting was taking a course from which we would not be able to correct. “Did you happen to bring that Relic with you today?”

“Why would I do that?” asked Beatrice. “So you can just take it from me?”

“How convenient,” said Dalia. “But yes, I would have. Regardless, if you actually possessed the Blad, like you claim, we wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.”

“What do you me-”

“This audience has gone on long enough. You two have 24 hours to return Frankie to me, in whatever state she’s currently in, along with the Medoblad. We’ll settle your debt to the Guild then.”

“You can have the girl,” said Beatrice. “But you’re daft if you think I’m giving you the Medoblad.”

“I see,” said Dalia. “So be it. But before you go, let me leave you with a history lesson. Have you heard of Curtana, the Sword of Mercy?”

“Can’t say that I have,” said Beatrice.

“The blade itself dates back to the time of Tristan. Yes, that Tristan. It’s also one of the swords used in the coronation of a new British monarch. Well, it was, until it went missing in the early 1600s and had to be remade by the London Worshipful Company of Cutlers. I’ll leave you to ponder who took it and whether you think you’re capable of succeeding where the British royal family failed.” 

We stood up and Beatrice began putting the book and wooden box away when Dalia started shaking her head.

“What are you doing?” 

“We’re leaving,” Beatrice replied curtly. “What does it lo-”

“No, I meant with those,” Dalia said, pointing to the trove we had brought. “Those are Guild property. So you’ll be leaving them here, if you don’t mind.”

Beatrice clutched the diary against her chest and I looked back and forth between the two of them, wanting more than anything to duck under the table. The battle of wills continued for another minute before Beatrice finally relented and put the book back down on the table.

“Fine,” she said, stacking the diary on top of the wooden box. 

“Ahem,” said Dalia. “I believe you’re forgetting something.”

“What is that?” asked Beatrice.

“That ring, below your wedding band, it’s ours too.”

Beatrice opened her mouth to say something but thought better of it and silently removed her wedding band and then the last memory ring, which she plunked down on the table.

“Anything else?” said Beatrice, the anger in her voice rising. “Would you like my fir-”

I grabbed her hand and she stopped.

“Let’s just get out of here,” I whispered.

“It’s been a pleasure, ladies,” said Dalia. “We’ll be in touch about tomorrow. You can see yourselves out.”

Next: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Read it below.

Read ARC Worlds in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 45

Chapter 44 recap: The head of the Guild reveals themselves to Jen and Beatrice Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 …

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42

“So as you can see, we’ve got our party assembled here at the outskirts of Haven’s Forge. This will be one of the five main cities that players will explore once they get past the first few hours of the game. What’s different about Hero’s Bane is that these cities are huge. We’re talking millions of different NPCs you can talk to, which makes-”

John Hammond, our founder, droned on about the game’s many radical departures from traditional MMORPGs, before introducing each of the devs and their respective handles who would be participating in the run-through. 

“And you both know Jen. She’s playing as a paladin, Laura_X-23.”

I had my avatar do its class-specific dance on the screen at the front of the conference room and suppressed a smile as Duncan winced at the mention of my handle. He was probably convincing himself that it was only a coincidence, that it must be the name of some character from a dorky comic book that I’d read as a kid. Which was true, but I enjoyed seeing him stew. 

“As our bold group of adventurers heads into the mountains that surround Haven’s Forge, you’ll get to see some of the-”

We fought our way up the mountain pass for the next hour before finally reaching the entrance to the dungeon, a set of stone doors carved into the mountainside. 

“Normally it would take the player another four hours to locate the key, but we’ve had a bit of fun for the run-through. Jen, if you don’t mind.”

I nodded and typed “Friend” into the chat window, and the digital doors opened inward. Jeff and Duncan seemed unfazed by the easter egg we had spent weeks debating whether to include, and John tried to explain the reference before giving up and moving on.

The dungeon was immense and it was another hour and a half before the five of us had managed to get to the antechamber next to where the final boss of the run-through, Rakkah the Soul-Weaver awaited. 

“Ok guys,” said Greg, “I’ll run in first, use Intimidating Shout to kinda scatter Rakkah’s minions, and then Anthony you come in and drop your Shout too so we can keep them scattered and not fight too many of them. If things get hairy, Jen, you’ll cast Divine Intervention on Frank, and then he can cast-”

“Greg,” I said politely, not wanting to make my co-worker look like an idiot in front of Hammond, “if I do that, then Frank won’t be able to cast anything.”

“Oh. Right. Fine. Jen, just make sure you’re healing us throughout so that-”

I tuned out the rest of the discussion and glanced at my watch. It was almost 1 and if we cleared out this boss in 15 minutes, even with the debrief after, I still would have about 40 minutes to head uptown to meet Beatrice. 

Our plan seemed to be working fine. Rakkah waited off in the corner as he was programmed to do, letting his minions try to take us down. They were unsuccessful, as video game minions so often are, and once there were only a few left, the big boss rumbled forward on his four enormous legs and began casting his signature attack. 

“Now, we’ve improved the lag compensation in the engine to handle even the most intense graphics, like our friend Rakkah here. So, Bill, could you please crank up the lag?”

One of the devs in the corner who wasn’t playing nodded and my eyes went wide. 

In my speed-addled state this morning, I had completely bypassed testing for lag, which would have taken too many real-time minutes to finish before the compile deadline. Plus I was almost positive that my one little change wouldn’t be affected by lag anyway.

Spoiler alert: it was.

Rakkah’s movements suddenly became stiff and blocky and my own avatar now moved across the screen as if I was suddenly playing on a dial-up connection.

“What’s going on?” Greg typed in the chat that only the players could see. “This never happened before. Ever since we changed the attack to an insta-kill.”

Shit. 

It was now crystal clear that the error I had fixed was in fact put there by design to pass the lag simulation they knew Hammond was going to run. As the game continued to hang, the players all glanced at each and then at Hammond, imploring him to smooth over the situation. But Hammond just sat there watching the screen in silence, his perfectly choreographed script going up in flames. 

That’s when I took matters into my own hands and silently activated the locket around my avatar’s virtual neck, which pulled our entire party into a shimmering portal just as Rakkah’s attack landed on Greg.

“What … what happened?” typed Anthony into the group chat. 

“I got our asses out of there is what,” I responded. 

We emerged from the portal into the middle of a bustling square in Haven’s Forge full of NPCs milling about their business. 

“Shit, I’m dying!” typed Greg. His health was slowly draining down to zero and I cast Holy Light on him to stem the tide. But the hit points that been replenished were quickly consumed by Rakkah’s lingering spell and in a matter of seconds, Greg’s avatar collapsed onto the ground.

Anthony was next, the spell having begun its viral spread to nearby players, and soon our entire party and the surrounding NPCs were all infected. We respawned on the spot, only to be reinfected by the NPCs, who couldn’t die and therefore were free to spread the spell to us over and over again.

“Err, why don’t we take our lunch break now while we sort this out?” Hammond finally interjected as he ushered Jeff and Duncan out of the room before they could say something.

The door closed behind the three of them and I slumped back in my chair. It would only be a matter of time before someone looked at the logs from this morning and saw that-

“I figured it out!” said Bill. “Someone changed Rakkah’s attack back to the virus spell.” 

“Perfect,” said Greg. “So we’ll just change it back and then wait five hours until the whole fucking thing compiles again! Who changed it?”

I didn’t wait for Bill to state the obvious, so I fell on my sword.

“I did. Last night. Thought it was a mistake, there were no comments in the code and I-”

“Fan-fucking-tastic, Jen,” said Anthony. “Bad enough that you decided to call out sick while we’ve been busting our asses so we can impress your boyfriend, but in the five minutes you were here, you managed to completely screw up everything!”

“I didn’t mean to … I … I can fix it.”

“You will do no such thing,” said Greg, who glared at me while taking up a seat next to Bill. “You’ve done enough. We’ll take care of it, somehow.”

The devs continued to squabble with each other while the minutes ticked away. Soon Hammond would be back with Jeff and Duncan, and my job, relationship, and partnership with Beatrice would be gone within the hour. It was almost a relief that Lisa and Stacy had no idea who I was, as it was one less set of people to disappoint. 

“I know!” said Greg “We just reset and then-”

“No, that won’t get rid of the virus,” Bill responded. “You’ll just die again. And again. And again.”

My eyes perked up at the mention of virus. If they wouldn’t let me touch the code base, then I would just force my way in. 

I pulled out the untouched focus buff from my bag along with the remaining piece of the speed buff. The former was green and a putrid smell hit my nostrils as I tore it in half. Beatrice’s earlier warning echoed in my head, but I ignored it and smushed the two halves together before popping the multi-colored concoction into my mouth.

The room slowed to a crawl and I went to work. But where before I had seen thousands of possibilities arrayed before me, here only one path presented itself and my mind had no choice but to follow it. The lines of code flew onto the screen from my fingertips like a virtuoso constructing her masterwork. My virus would hook itself into our procedural generation engine and flood the city with undead ghouls who by definition could not be infected with Rakkah’s curse. This would provide the necessary buffer for our party to run away, like King Arthur away from the French. 

In only a minute of real-time, the thousand-line virus was finished and I sent it off into the build to work its magic. After another 10 seconds, I could see the ghouls beginning to appear as red dots on the overworld map, my coworkers still obliviously arguing with each other. 

I glanced at my watch. It was 1:40 and that meant that I could still make it uptown in time. So I scratched a message on a Post-It note, stuck it on top of Greg’s keyboard, and walked out of the conference room just as Hammond was escorting Duncan and Jeff back in. They couldn’t see me of course, the speed buff still working its alchemy. Later I would wish that I  had doubled-over Duncan with a punch to the gut, but the focus buff had other ideas.

Such as how we were going to survive the summons.

We had plenty of individual pieces to bargain with, but on their own, they wouldn’t be enough to stem the Guild’s wrath. But just like with the virus, my brain pieced together a plan and it flowed effortlessly from my head into an essay-length text to Beatrice.

The mid-day sun hit my eyes and I recoiled from the light. Throngs of people were out and about on their lunch hours, and I weaved through them with ease until I reached the street and climbed into an empty cab.

“48th and Sixth,” I yelled to the startled driver. It was then that the focus buff gave me one final parting gift and I scrambled to write down the pearl of wisdom before my brain conked out like an overclocked processor. But it slipped from my fingers as time resumed its normal flow around me and I collapsed into unconsciousness. 

“You brought everything?” I asked, my footsteps clacking against the floor of the marble lobby as I trailed behind Beatrice, who was carrying a large cardboard box. 

“Yes,” said Beatrice, “although I’m still not convinced this is the right play.”

“Me neither, but when I was hopped up on the buffs, it all made sense. At least I think it did. The last 30 minutes are pretty foggy in my mind.”

“Great,” said Beatrice.

The cab driver was nonplussed to find me passed out when we had arrived, but fortunately, Beatrice had been waiting there to retrieve me. As she pulled me from the car, she had forced the remaining portion of the vitality buff into my mouth as instructed, but that had barely made a dent in the pounding headache I was currently experiencing.

“You able to find out whose office we’re going to?” I asked as we gave fake IDs to the guard at the security desk, who lets us pass through the turnstile with a nod. 

“Nope, nothing. Either for the 42nd floor or any of the five floors above and below it.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

The elevator door opened and we walked inside. Beatrice’s eyes darted around the empty cab until she spotted something in the back left corner.

“Stand under there and activate the glamour,” she said.

“What?”

“The camera is up there. So stand under it so you won’t be seen.”

“Ah. Right. But why the glamour?”

“Because I’m trying to protect you, dummy,” said Beatrice. “The Guild only knows your handle, not your face.”

“Don’t they though?” I asked, as I moved to the corner and rubbed the stone. “Those three at the Council meeting probably told them.”

“The Guild doesn’t care about the Council. Bunch of self-important idiots. They were lucky they got to help out at all.”

“Oh. Gilbert then, he saw us in the cave that night,” Jade’s voice said. 

“I’m not convinced that it was him. It’s been bugging me this whole week, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

The elevator doors slowly opened on the 42nd floor and we waited in trepidation to see what lay beyond. 

It was a hallway. 

It had beige walls, carpeting that was once the same shade of beige as the walls, and off in the distance, what appeared to be a beige-colored door.

“No welcome wagon?” I said, stepping out of the elevator.

“Guess not,” said Beatrice. 

I led the way toward the lone door at the end of the hallway, expecting at any moment that Gilbert or the hooded figure from Inwood or some other sinister character was going to come bursting through. But we traversed the hallway without incident, and I turned the knob slowly and opened the door outward to reveal the top of a dimly-lit staircase.

“Huh,” said Beatrice, peering down the stairwell. “Now we know why there’s no record of anyone on this floor. What a waste of prime Manhattan real estate.” 

I helped Beatrice carry the box down the stairs, where another beige door awaited us at the bottom. Beyond it was another beige hallway, this one only a few feet long capped by yet another door. We walked forward and Beatrice nodded at me. 

My heart pounded in my chest like a boxer thumping a punching bag as I opened the door and stepped through the precipice into a sun-drenched room with floor-to-ceiling windows and a massive wooden table at the center. 

A black-haired woman stood with her back to us at the far end of the table and after a few seconds, she slowly turned around.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” said Dalia de Wyck.

Next: Introductions. Read it below.

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 44

Chapter 43 recap: Jen has a disastrous demo day. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41

“So, do you two know what you’re having?” the waiter said as he set down our glasses of whiskey, one with ice and one neat.

“I’ll have the caprese salad to start and then the sea bass for my main,” I said, handing back the paper-thin menu.

“Same,” said Duncan, as if he couldn’t be bothered to give the meal anything more than the minimum amount of attention. 

The waiter nodded and shuffled away, leaving us to our drinks and our awkward silence. I finally broke it by clinking my glass against the other one, which had remained on the table, before taking a sip of the cold spirit. 

“Ahem,” I said, bringing his attention back to the glass, which he reluctantly took a sip of.  

“Look, Dunc, I’m sorry. About standing you up in Paris. About avoiding your calls the last month. About not giving this relationship the attention it deserved. About taking you for gran-”

“Enough,” he said. “I didn’t ask you here to dinner just to hear this pathetic groveling, Jen. I at least owed you the courtesy of a face-to-face breakup after all we’ve been through.”

“I see. So it’s really over.”

“Did you really think otherwise?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. I’m not that dumb. I just thought that after what you had said in Miami that there was still a tiny chance tha-”

“Whatever chance of us staying together evaporated after you couldn’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and call me. What was I supposed to think?”

“You’re right. About everything. I should have called you right whe-”

Duncan’s face suddenly froze and I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I didn’t know how much longer I could keep up the groveling, but I was running out of ways to say I was sorry. 

The scheme had been Beatrice’s idea when I told her about the dinner. I was reluctant at first after the fiasco with Lisa and Stacy, but she had assured me that if I used her original short-term serum, I wouldn’t run the risk of another colossal mind wipe. Still, I had reservations. What was the point of confirming my worst suspicions about Duncan if we were just going to break up anyway?

“Because,” Beatrice had said. “You deserve the truth and this is the only way he’ll give it to you.”

So I had shown up 20 minutes early to dinner, ordered us both drinks at the bar, and slid the small ice cube containing a single drop of memory serum inside. 

“Don’t hold back,” Beatrice had said. “Every suspicion you’ve ever had, every missed phone call, every half-baked excuse, call him out on it. If he doesn’t give in at first, keep repeating until he does.”

“OK,” I had said. “But … I mean, he did say he wanted to marry me. There must be something there.”

“Do you really think he wanted you to say yes?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“Then find out.”

Those words echoed in my head while the serum removed all trace of our conversation from Duncan’s memory. As his unblinking eyes stared off into space, I took advantage of his 60-second incapacitation to let free another drop of serum into the whiskey with the vial I had concealed in the palm of my hand. 

“Ahem,” I said, bringing Duncan’s attention to the glass as he came to, and he, again, reluctantly took a small sip of the drugged whiskey.

I played out the conversation the exact same way, except instead of pretending to be resigned to the break-up, I tried a different tact. 

“Did you really think otherwise?” Duncan said again.

“Yes,” I said. “Because I believe in second chances and I know you do too. That’s why I want to move to Hong Kong. To be with you. To try again.”

Duncan smirked and then shook his head.

“Too little, too late. Because I’m moving back to New York. And now that we’re no longer together, Jeff is giving me a more active role in overseeing our RPGLab investment. So I’ll be there at tomorrow’s run-thro-”

The serum kicked in again and I re-upped the dose before trying to quickly process what I’d just learned. So instead of exiting my life, Duncan was invading my city and my job. 

“Ahem,” I said for a third time and Duncan again took a small sip of the whiskey. 

This time, I went on the offensive. 

“Who was she?” I asked 

“What are you talking about?” 

“You drunk dialed me one night last fall. Well, it was night time for you, for me it was one in the afternoon. I picked up and heard you laughing with some woman. Who was she?”

Duncan shifted his eyes around the room before grabbing his glass to take another sip of whiskey, but I folded my hands over his and made him look me in the eyes.

“What? I don’t know what you thought you heard Jen, but I was probably out at a bar with some potential clients. I don’t think you realize how much of our deal flow is based on schmoozing. It’s how we came across your company.”

“I guess I was wrong.”

I treaded water until the serum activated again. Then I repeated the last loop to see if Duncan would tell the same story a second time. 

“When did you imagine this happened?” Duncan asked. 

“November.”

“So six months ago? If you thought I was cheating on you this whole time, why’d you wait this long to confront me? No, I think this whole thing is you trying to make me the bad guy so you can let yourself off the hook.”

“You’re right. I don’t need to feel bad about not going to Paris because you’ve been cheating on me this whole time.”

“You know, what Jen? Fuc-”

I replayed the conversation six more times, and although each time Duncan reacted slightly differently to my accusations, he never broke down completely and gave me a name. And without that, I was just a soon-to-be ex-girlfriend with a huge paranoid streak.

As I began the ninth go around, the waiter appeared in my peripheral vision, but I waved him away. The last thing I needed right now was for the steady state to be upset by two little cups of gazpacho.

But on second thought, maybe a little chaos was just what this time loop needed. 

“Are you going to say anything or are you going to put this all on me?” Duncan finally said after a minute or two had passed without him having taken a sip of whiskey. “I’m not the one who fucked everything up.”

“That’s true. You’re not the one who was sleeping around on the side this whole time. My bad…”

Duncan nearly did a spit take after I dropped that nuke and I worried for a second that the serum wouldn’t take this time around, but I pressed on.

“His name is Garrett. He’s married with a kid. I feel sorry for the wife, but if she can’t please her husband, not my problem. You know?”

“No, I don’t. Listen, if you just came here tonight to rub my face in your unfaithfulness then-”

“I didn’t. Frankly, I had hoped we could both clear the air here tonight and part on equal footing, but if you’re going to insist on claiming that you never strayed, then I guess I have no choice but to believe you.”

“You can believe me because it’s true.”

I was running out of time before the serum kicked in again and still Duncan’s cold-blooded front would not fall, so I went for the hail mary.

“Garrett said you would say that. Said you would hold out until the bitter end before admitting it. But I’ll have to tell him later that he was wrong.”

“You’re something else, you know that? I don’t know what the hell happened to you, but it’s like you’re a completely different person. Seeing as how you’re so eager to jump back into his bed, why don’t you just get out of here?”

“I will, but give me a name, Dunc. I laid all my cards on the table. It’s time you did the same.”

“Fine. Her name is Laura. She works for one of our portfolio companies in Shanghai. And fuck you, by the way, and Garrett.”

I smiled. 

“There is no Garrett.”

Duncan opened his mouth to say something but then the serum kicked in, returning the conversation to the beginning of the night once again. But I now had a game-changing arrow in my quiver. As my fake infidelity was wiped clean from Duncan’s mind, I added another serum drop into his nearly-empty whiskey and waited to nock the arrow and let it fly.

Except that moment never came, because no sooner did Duncan come to than my phone did as well. 

“911,” the text from Greg read. That meant all hands on deck. Even if those hands had been out sick for the last week, I was still expected to get my butt into the office and help out any way I could. 

I clinked my glass against his one more time and downed the rest of my whiskey, and he followed suit. 

“Well, this has been great, Dunc, but I’ve got a work emergency to attend to. See you tomorrow.”

“Wait, what? How do you know that?”

Duncan looked at me strangely, trying to process why his whiskey glass emptied so easily and why I knew he was going to be at the run-through. I kicked myself for being careless and started stumbling out an explanation but then realized I didn’t need one.

“You know what,” I said, “on second thought, forget I was here.”

And he did.

“Make the call.”

I held the phone to my ear as I waited for Beatrice to respond.

“Do you know what time it is?” she said in between yawns. 

“It’s 5:30 a.m. and I’ve been stuck staring at a computer monitor for the last seven hours and I just came off of half a speed buff trying to fix some crappy coding my co-workers saddled me with.”

“Right, so why don’t you make the call, since you were already up?”

“Because,” I said, popping a quarter of my last vitality buff into my mouth, “like you said, you’re a known quantity to the Guild.”

“Fine. I’ll call you back.”

She hung up and I felt the revitalization wash over me again. 

It had been a maddening all-nighter of pointless tedium up until a few hours ago. I had arrived at the office within 20 minutes of the 911 text only to be put to the extremely important task of checking to see if our code was properly commented. Which, of course, would be the absolute last thing that Jeff and Duncan would either care about or want to see. 

I half, no, fully-suspected that the other devs had convinced my boss to call me in because they were annoyed that I’d been excused from fine-tuning the VC branch of the main build the last three weeks. And it certainly hadn’t helped that on top of that, I’d been calling out “sick” all week. 

But then at 3:30 I came across a potentially catastrophic error. 

“Umm, guys?” I had said to the devs who were working on the other side of the room. 

“Not now!” Greg had called back. “We’re finishing something. 30 minutes til we compile the final build.”

Shit. 

The error was a relatively simple one to fix. Somewhere along the way, the run-through boss’s signature move had been changed to an overpowered melee attack that would kill everyone in one hit, rather than a spell that slowly drained one player’s hit points while at the same time spreading like a virus to the nearby players, as we had intended. 

The only problem was that the original code for the spell was somehow missing from this build. So I had scrambled over to my regular workstation to look through the main codebase only to find it in deep hibernation because of my prolonged absence. 

Cursing under my breath, I had trudged back over to the other computer and reluctantly pulled out the speed buff. Rewriting the code from scratch after biting off half of the lilac square had taken a few seconds in real-time, even with my overclocked brain offering up dozens of different options for every decision branch. 

But then I had hit a roadblock when I reopened the game to play-test the fix. While my body and mind had gone into hyperdrive, the game was still running at normal speed and so my avatar slowly trudged across the screen as if he were stuck in molasses. 

Fortunately, the solution had been obvious and after cranking up the game speed to 50x, my character’s movements had soon matched my relative speed. I soon confirmed that my fix had worked and so I closed the play-test window with a satisfying click and waited for my mind and body to decelerate.

But staring at the code as the seconds ticked off at a glacial pace had made me antsy, so I couldn’t resist combing through the codebase making tiny tweaks where I could. Nothing major that anyone would really notice at the run-through, but it would end up saving me a week’s worth of work on the main build once I was in back in the office.

I had thought about telling one of the other devs how close we had come to screwing up the entire run-through but decided to hold my tongue for now. If anyone tried to give me crap in the next few weeks, I could point to the change control logs and show how I had saved everyone’s ass.

My phone rang and I saw Beatrice’s number appear on the screen. 

“What happened?” I asked.

“Called the number and it went straight to voicemail. I hung up and then a minute later got a call back from a restricted number.”

“Who was it?”

“Nobody, it was just a recorded message with an address and a time. 1218 Avenue of the Americas. 42nd floor. 2:30 p.m.”

“2:30? But the run-through starts at 11.”

“And that’s my problem because?”

“Because I’m not going to be done by then. It’s going to take at least three hours, maybe more, depending on how stable the current build is.”

“Fascinating. I’ll just call the Guild back and ask them if we could push the summons until 4. I’m sure it’s fine, they’re a very understanding organization.”

“Not funny. I’m going to get fired if I duck out early.”

“So? Duncan was probably going to get you fired soon anyway. At least now you can leave on your own terms.”

“You know what? You’re right. Why even stay for the run-through? I may as well march down to my boss’s office and leave my resignation let-” 

“I’m going back to sleep. See you at 2:20 outside the building.”

Next: Jen and Beatrice attend an important meeting. Read it below.

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 43

Chapter 42 recap: Jen has a disastrous dinner. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40

I awoke to find the tip of the Medoblad hovering inches above my nose. It was held there by an irate Beatrice, whose eyes burned with an anger I had yet to see her unleash on me.

“Stop, Beatrice, it’s me!” 

The words felt foreign as they left my mouth and I quickly moved my freckled hand down to my chest, but Beatrice brought the blade even closer and I stopped.

“It’s me, Jen! This is just a glamour!”

Beatrice slowly retracted the knife and I scrambled to my feet and staggered backward to the window. I held the green stone out in front of me, the reflection of the mid-morning sun lending it an uncanny luster, before pinching it and letting the illusion fall away. 

“Where did you get that?” Beatrice demanded after sheathing the Medoblad. 

“Where did you get that?” I  said, pointing to the purloined blade.

“I took it out of your bag when we got back from Inwood,” she said. “Replaced it with a regular knife so you hopefully wouldn’t notice.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not the one the Guild is really after,” said Beatrice. “And it seems like you’ve been hiding things from me. Polly give you that little necklace?” 

“No, I got it from that girl Ty we met at the Council meeting. And, I’m not hiding anything. I was going to tell you everything in a few hours, but I found a cure. From a vendor in Hunt’s Point Produce Market. Ty told me about him, after she told me that the Dodo bird in the Natural History Museum is a fake.”

“Oh?” said Beatrice. “I thought you were going home to recuperate, not go rogue on me again and seek out another teenager you just met to help.”

“And I thought you trusted me,” I said. “After all we’ve been through. But when I got back here last night, I found the door knob gone, and so I took the only other thing of value I could find.”

“Please tell me you didn’t…”

I nodded and pulled the small vial out of my bag and offered it to Beatrice.

“Are there any left? Or did you steal them all?” she asked.

“The answer to both of your questions is yes.” 

“What the fuck does that mean, Jen?”

Beatrice ran to the freezer and opened the door to find it bereft of anything.

“I took all of your apples, yes,” I said. “But I still have two left at home from my own haul from the orchard.”

“Oh, aren’t we lucky then? Two whole apples. Do you know how long it took me to gather all those apples?”

“Years, I’m sure. The sack was quite heavy, but he didn’t seem very impressed at first. After all, we were in the middle of an Empire State-sized produce market. But after I gave him a demonstration of their power, his whole attitude changed and I knew I had him.”

“So great, he gave you that vial and you just ran out of there?”

“No, of course not. I asked for a demonstration and he obliged. First, I made him heal my wrist. Only took the tiniest of drops.”

I rotated my right hand back and forth and then lifted the workbench chair up over my head with ease, before setting it down with a big grin on my face. 

“Congratulations,” said Beatrice. “And I’m sure after that, you were convinced.”

I shook my head.

“Still no. So I stabbed him.”

“You did what?”

I smiled at Beatrice’s reaction.

“Relax, he’s fine. I pulled the knife on him quickly and he didn’t react, not in words and not in thought. He just nodded and stuck out his hand.”

“And you, Jen Jacobs, who a few months ago wouldn’t have said one bad word about anyone, stuck a knife in the hand of a little old man?”

“I’ve changed, maybe not for the better. And how did you know he was an old man? I never said what he looked like.”

“This ‘vendor,’ he have half-moon spectacles and a very pronounced slouch?”

I nodded and Beatrice stormed pass me to the back door and reattached the missing knob.

“Come on,” she said.

“What? What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? Going to see if what that old bugger gave you really works.”

“I told you it did! Wait, you know him, don’t you?”

Beatrice nodded before holding up her right hand, which bore the small ring with the purple stone.

“He sold me this.”

I entered the portal after Beatrice and emerged a few seconds later into the dark, creaky house only to find that I wasn’t myself. 

Beatrice looked back at me with a look of consternation on her face.

“Why did you activate it?” she shouted at me like a teacher lecturing a misbehaving student. 

“I didn’t!” I said in that now familiar voice. “I swear! This thing, sometimes, I feel like it has a mind of its own.”

“OK OK, I believe you. Might as well keep it on. If this serum works, it’s probably better that Frankie doesn’t recognize you.”

“Good point. We didn’t exactly leave on the best of terms at our first meeting.” 

I walked to the back corner of the house where Frankie still lay under the tarp. Summoning all of my courage, I pulled back the covering and prepared myself for the worst.

It was even more horrible than I remembered. 

Frankie lay prone on her back, still in her clothing from that night, which hadn’t been affected by the Medoblad’s alchemy. Her stone hands were positioned under her and her stone feet were close together as if they were still bound, but her face was frozen into a mask of calmness.

I didn’t want to imagine what, if anything, she was thinking. Was her mind still awake within the stone, radiating anger at me for trapping her in there? Or was she merely sleeping, with no knowledge of what had happened to her? In either case, part of me was glad that I wouldn’t have to face her directly.

I uncorked the vial, careful not to let any liquid slip out. One droplet had healed my wrist and two had cured the bloody wound I had created in the vendor’s hand, and I hoped that the rest of the contents would be enough to undo the petrification I had unleashed. 

“Ready?” asked Beatrice.

I nodded twice and poured all of the serum onto Frankie’s cheek. It hit the stone and trickled down, the golden liquid pooling at the base of her neck. We waited with bated breath for what seemed like hours for something to happen, until finally, the serum dissolved into the stone.

“Look!” I cried and the pale hues of Frankie’s skin began to blossom amongst the cold gray. The color spread until her entire head was free from the prison and I saw her eyes begin to move slightly back and forth before she finally opened them. 

“Can you hear me?” asked Beatrice and Frankie’s green eyes shifted toward her. She nudged her head up and then down ever so slightly but in that moment, it felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

“You’re safe now,” I said, in Jade’s voice. “We’re here to help you.”

Frankie turned her gaze to me and I swore that she looked right through the glamour and saw me underneath. 

“Let’s help her up,” I said to Beatrice and we each grabbed one of Frankie’s arms, only to feel cold stone underneath her clothes. 

“Something’s not right,” said Beatrice as we watched Frankie’s face writhe in pain before she opened her mouth.

“The pearl in the triangle is gold.”

Her voice was barely above a whisper and as soon as the last word left her lips, Frankie closed her eyes and the stone retook her. 

“No!” I cried as the red strands of Frankie’s hair turned gray and she became still once again. “It … was … supposed … to … work.” 

My fists pounded the wooden floorboards and I sobbed uncontrollably until Beatrice finally pulled me away from her.

“Get a hold of yourself! She’s gone.”

“That’s not true! We just need more of that healing serum. Maybe we can trade the old ma-”

“Enough,” said Beatrice, who threw the tarp back over Frankie. “It’s one dead end after another. First we dredged up a hundreds-year-old book out of a swamp only to find the thing practically blank. Then you somehow pull that miracle serum out of your ass and it actually worked! But only for five fucking minutes, just long enough for dear ‘ol Frankie to recite us a cryptic riddle. And you’ll probably tear your hair out over the next two days trying to figure out what the hell ‘the pearl in the triangle’ means. 

“It must be where the gold token is locat-” 

“By all means try, but I’m done.”

Beatrice stormed off to the portal and disappeared, leaving me alone with my failure.

The empty serum bottle lay next to the tarp and I picked it up to peer through the small opening. There was a drop or two collected at the bottom, which alone was probably worth more than all the money in my bank account. I re-stoppered the vial and tucked it into one of the still-full cardboard boxes that were strewn about the room. 

My phone suddenly buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out to expecting to find the daily reminder I had made for myself to call in “sick” to work, but instead, it was a text from Duncan.

“Dinner tonight at 8.”

Shit. Was it Monday already? The last thing I wanted to do now was have a heart-to-heart with Duncan. What was I going to say? 

Maybe his offer to move to Hong Kong was still on the table. Only a month ago I had contemplated accepting it to escape from Beatrice, but now I found myself in need of it again. 

“I’ll be there,” I responded before leaving Frankie to her endless sleep.

I found Beatrice staring out the window when I returned to the office, the glamour tucked in my pocket to avoid any accidental activation mid-transit. 

“Look, I thought about what you sai-”

“In college, I used to think I’d have an office like this. High floor, big windows looking out over the city, the mere mortals below hurrying to and fro while I watched from up here, above it all. I thought that was power. But that was before the Quests though. Before someone gave me the call number to Rita’s diary.”

“And then what happened?” I asked. 

“After I learned the truth? I realized I had been trying to climb up the wrong ladder. That the real power was wielded in the shadows, wielded by the ones who had mastered the secrets of alchemy, or had it handed it to them by their forebears. And I wanted desperately to ascend to their heights.”

“We still can,” I said. 

“No, it’s over. I have half a mind to walk back through that door and burn the whole house to the ground, drown myself in memory serum, and try to have as happy of a life as I can with my jackass husband and my kid before the Guild tracks me down.”

“That doesn’t sound like the woman I know. The woman I kn-”

Beatrice turned back from the window and glared at me with venomous eyes.

“Oh, give it a rest, Jen. You never really knew me. I may play the tough-ass bitch that takes what she wants, but deep down-”

“You’re still that scared little girl hiding in the closet,” I said and Beatrice gasped.

“How … how do you know about that?”

“And you’re the woman who’s had enough. You’re the woman who went toe to toe with the Guild with nothing but perseverance and ingenuity on her side. You’re a mom with a son to protect. And you’re the only person I’ve got left in my life.”

I tried to hold my stoic facade together until Beatrice decided whether I’d given the most inspirational speech she’d ever heard or the craziest. She closed the gap between us in two strides and wrapped her arms around me and I found myself comforting the woman who had threatened to kill me but had also saved me.

“So, now what?” Beatrice asked as she slowly pulled back and pretended that she hadn’t just hugged me. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”

Next: An interesting round of cocktails. Read it below.

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 42

Chapter 41 recap: Jen and Beatrice attempt to cure Frankie but fail spectacularly. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39

The redhead with the sparkling green eyes, brown freckles, and the deep, raspy voice walked into the lobby of the posh Upper East Side hotel, plopped down the no-annual-fee credit card made of cheap plastic, and then took the elevator up to her suite overlooking Central Park for the night. She tapped her room key against the sensor, walked through the spacious sitting room and into the marble bathroom, where a floor-to-ceiling mirror proudly reflected her smiling features. 

But then the smile wavered, slightly, and the woman brought her hand up slowly to the small green stone hanging around her neck over a silver locket. She squeezed it gently between her thumb and index figure, and then vanished. 

In her place, was me.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a brief second, before squeezing the stone again and closing my eyes. When I opened them, the reflection of the redhead once more stared back. I gazed at the glamour in the mirror for nearly ten minutes, trying to spot some trace of me underneath the alchemy, but the illusion was impenetrable, just as Ty said it would be.

I had grabbed the necklace from her hand like a child being offered a piece of candy after a day spent eating nothing but broccoli. She had explained how to activate it and then watched as I placed it slowly around my neck and pinched the stone. The sensation was like nothing I had ever felt before, as if someone had dumped a never-emptying bucket of water on me. 

“Hello, my name is Jade,” I had said with someone else’s voice, extending someone else’s hand, and Ty had rolled her eyes, before shaking it. “Nice to meet you.” 

I had repeated the vocal exercise until I could utter more than those simple phrases without the cognitive dissonance threatening to overwhelm my already overtaxed mind.

“Don’t overdo it,” she had warned me.

“What do you mean?” I had asked, still marveling at my new appearance.

“Spend too much time as the glamour and you begin to lose sense of yourself. At least, that’s what my mom told me when she gave it to me. I’ve only used that one sparingly. There was something thrilling about walking around as a fully-fledged woman, but maybe it won’t affect you as much, since you’re old.”

“Hey, I’m only 28!” I had said. “And I’ll only use it when I’m out in public.” 

“Even so, try to take a break every so often. And don’t get caught up in your own reflection.”

I had ignored Ty’s advice and instead had spent the entire day as “Jade.” After getting used to the feeling of having an invisible sheet of fluid draped around my entire body, the experience was oddly freeing. 

Jade didn’t have two friends whose memories she had accidentally erased. She didn’t have a long-distance boyfriend who was about to dump her. She didn’t have a soul-crushing job or a partner who at any moment could betray her to save herself. Most of all, Jade didn’t have a Guild summons hanging around her neck like an anchor. 

As I had meandered through the Village before finally making my way uptown, I had seriously contemplated getting on a train at Penn Station and not coming back. But then the dull throbbing in my wrist had snapped me back to reality, and I had ducked into Macy’s and deactivated the glamour in a dressing room. I had sat there for almost an hour in front of the mirror, resisting the urge to transform back into Jade, until finally a saleswoman had banged on the door and demanded that I come out. A tweak of the stone and Jade had returned. I had resisted the mirror’s final siren song and walked out, but now found myself unable to break free from the current lure.

It was then that Ty’s last warning finally reverberated in my mind and I pulled myself away from the bathroom mirror, walked into the bedroom and collapsed backward onto the bed. My phone buzzed after a few minutes, and I pulled it out to see a response from Beatrice to my warning earlier in the day that we were being followed. 

“K” was all it read and I tossed the phone aside in exasperation. 

Fine, I thought. She can take care of herself. 

I closed my green eyes and moved my injured hand slowly up to the green stone. It was only for a split second, but I could swear I felt the glamour tighten around me, as if Jade didn’t want to disappear. Except that was ridiculous. As much as I had lived as Jade when I played Warriors of Olympus, or when I began the Quests, there was no Jade. It had always been just me.

But before I could send her back into the stone, my hand suddenly fell slack against my stomach and my mind drifted away into the abyss of sleep.

The market stirred with a raucous energy, even though it was Sunday night. Everywhere I looked, crates of fruits or vegetables were being pushed on hand trucks and forklifts with such velocity that several times I nearly found myself knocked to the ground. The woman who had sold me my pass into the market had regarded me with suspicion and now I understood why. 

This was not a quaint farmer’s market where you could leisurely browse for organic fruits and vegetables while sipping an oat milk latte. No, this was one of the way stations responsible for feeding millions of New Yorkers and 99% of them probably had no idea that it even existed. Just as the City Hall station had, the market reminded me of magic and alchemy, this important, fundamental truth of the world that remained just out of sight.

I picked up my pace as I searched the rows for the aisle number that Ty had given me. Somehow half an hour had already passed since I had entered Hunts Point, and yet I still hadn’t even made it halfway across the massive expanse. The speed buff hidden deep in my bag would have made all this running unnecessary, but Beatrice had made me promise when she had restocked me before I left the office yesterday morning to only use the buffs in an absolute emergency going forward.

Finally, with only a few minutes to spare, I reached the designated aisle and pulled the glamour free from under my sweater, activating it without breaking stride. The now-familiar weight settled around me, but I ignored it and pressed on, until I saw a sign with large black letters taped above several columns of wooden crates. 

“Mackinaw Brothers Produce,” it said and peaches peeked out through the slats of the dozen columns of crates stacked end to end and I looked at my watch to see the clock strike 10:04 p.m. 

“Hello?” I called out in Jade’s voice, but no one answered. “Anyone here?”

I walked the length of the crates several times looking for the vendor, but to no avail. Had this whole thing been some sort of practical joke by Ty? Or worse, had she lured me into the bowels of this urban monstrosity so I would be easy prey for the Guild tracker?

Fortunately for me, the answer was neither, as one stack of the crates suddenly lurched forward to reveal a small gap and a small man with grey hair and half-moon spectacles peeked his head out.

“You Jade?” he asked, his hunched back making it difficult for him to look at me through the glasses.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re late,” the man said. 

I began to argue that there was no way for me to know that he was hiding behind the crates, but he waved away my protestations and beckoned me through. As my host pulled the crates back into place to seal us away from the rest of the market, I looked around the small interior. 

At one end sat a small card table with a green shade lamp that dimly illuminated the space and two folding chairs on either side. On the backs of the crates hung rolled-up pieces of tarp. I wondered what sorts of objects were hidden beneath and whether there was something here that would free Frankie from her stone prison. 

“So,” said the man, sitting down slowly in the far chair, “now that we’re alone, would you mind taking off that ridiculous disguise? It’s hurting my eyes.”

“Wh-what are you talking about?” I said, the weight of the glamour suddenly feeling even more constricting around my body. 

“That glamour. Deactivate it, please. As much as I like it when a pretty woman comes to see me, I prefer to see who I’m actually dealing with.”

I complied and then cringed as the old man looked me up and down before I crossed my arms against my chest and sat down across from him. 

“Don’t know why you’re using that anyway, you’re almost as pretty as she was.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment? Because I really don’t need to-”

“Calm down, calm down. Didn’t mean anything by it. Forget I said anything.”

“Fine. Can we just get on with it then? I’m kind of in a hurry.”

“No, you’re not,” the man said. “Those people out there, hauling produce around at all hours of the night? They’re in a hurry.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“No, of course you didn’t. Now, what is it you think that I can assist you with?”

“I need a curative. My friend, she … she was hurt by a Relic.”

The old man’s eyebrows rose at the mention of Relic and he muttered softly to himself before slowly standing up and walking over to one of the rolled-up tarps. He began to untie the knot but then stopped and returned to the table. 

“Your friend, what happened to her?”

The vision of that night flashed in my head, and for a moment I was back there, the fire raging all around me and Beatrice and Frankie unconscious on the lighthouse floor. 

“She … she was turned to stone.”

The old man stared at me in silence and I waited for him to unfurl his wares and offer me a vial of silvery liquid that would undo the curse. But he just sat there, as if he too had been petrified. 

“Sir?” I said after several more minutes had passed. 

“Thinking,” he said. “Shh.”

“Sorry,” I replied, looking at my watch. I had hoped to make it back to the hotel in time to get a decent night’s sleep before reuniting with Beatrice, but at this rate, that wasn’t going to happen.

Finally, he clapped his hands and stood up again. 

“OK,” he said.

“What?”

“I have something special for your friend.”

“You do?” I practically shouted. 

“Yes. It’s a serum distilled from the needles of a golden porcupine. Very rare creature. Lives in one particular part of one particular jungle in Indonesia. Half of its needles are venomous and half are curative.”

“Fascinating. Can I have it?”

“No, that’s not how it works. Come back by 5 a.m. with your payment and you’ll get your cure.”

“You must be joking! My friend, she can’t-”

The old man shook his head back and forth. 

“This market has existed, in one form or another, since 1812. And since that time, we alchemists have plied our wares according to a simple set of rules, number one of which is payment before goods. So go bring me something of equal value and then you’ll get the help you need. I’m sure your friend can manage in her state a little while longer, no?”

“What the hell does that mean, equal value? You didn’t even name your price!”

I dug my hand into my bag to retrieve the Medoblad only to pull out a large but very ordinary chef’s knife.

The man gave me a smirk before pulling the chain of the lamp down to extinguish the light as if he was packing it in for the night.

“Wait a minute,” I cried. “We’re not done here, I have something else!”

Next: A cure of sorts. Read it below.

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 41

Chapter 40 recap: Jade is born. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · Jon Auerbach

Chapter 38 recap: Jen recovers from the failed Inwood mission.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38

“Hi, it’s Larissa Jacobs, I can’t get to the phone right now, probably because I’m on shift, but if you leave a brief message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Bye!”

I hung up the phone before the beep sounded and it took every remaining ounce of strength not to cry. Not that anyone would have noticed, as the car was mostly empty. I had already ridden the train all the way to the end at Pelham Bay Park before we turned around at the terminus and slowly rumbled along the elevated track back toward Manhattan.

Why had I decided, after all these years, that this was the moment that I wanted to hear my mom’s voice again? 

It wasn’t as though if I left her a message, she would call back in a few hours and tell me everything was going to be OK. Even when she was alive, that would sometimes take days. I didn’t understand it then, why she worked double shifts so often that there were weeks where we saw each other for a few minutes at most. To be honest, I still really didn’t understand it. But that message was one of the only things I had left of her, besides some photos and the locket. 

The train screeched to a halt at Hunts Point and I pushed aside old voices and memories as Ty Anzio entered the car. We ignored each other for a solid 40 minutes while the train resumed its southward trek. She was dressed in grey sweats, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled tightly around her hair. It would be another half hour until our official meeting time and when I saw her doze off in her seat, I took the cue and I closed my eyes, trying to rest my overtaxed mind. But such efforts were useless and instead my thoughts drifted back to the black business card with the gold writing that had led me here. 

The Chrysler Building elevator hadn’t even reached the 20th floor before I had pulled the card out of my bag and began typing the number into my phone.

“It’s Jade, from the Raid Board and the Council meeting. I need help,” I had texted, as I exited into the empty lobby. It had been nearly 8, when the earliest of the worker bees would be trudging in with sleepy eyes holding cups of coffee purchased from the cart outside. But then I had realized that it was actually Saturday. One less email to send then, I had thought, as I had been calling out “sick” from work since the day after the Council meeting, and would continue to do so until this whole business was behind us.

“It’s early,” the reply had said. And then, “what do you need?”

“Something to cure a wound with an otherworldly glow.”

The lie was a good one and I thought of Steve and that scar on his stomach all those months ago. How had he actually gotten that scar, I wondered.

A silence of minutes had ensued until finally, the response came.

“Be in the third car on the 6 train, at Brooklyn Bridge, at 10:30. Don’t acknowledge me before then.”

That’s where I had sat and that’s where I awoke when the conductor finally called out “Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall, next and final stop on this train.” I looked over at the middle door to see Ty standing against the metal poles and I slowly got up and joined her as the train ended its long journey. Stepping out onto the platform, I felt Ty’s hand immediately pull me back into the car and before I could protest, the doors closed.

The train rolled out of the station and I started to ask Ty what we were doing here, but she held her hand up. We continued on into a dark tunnel, only to emerge a few minutes later in the most magnificent subway station I had ever seen. Tiles decorated the walls up to the arched ceilings, where honest-to-goodness skylights and chandeliers were interspersed throughout.

I took in the sights, the train banking slowly around the curved tracks when suddenly, the door in front of us opened.

“This is where we get off,” said Ty, who hopped out onto the platform without a fuss.

I looked at her as the train car finished its turn through the curve and she shook her head at my hesitation, as if I was her mom and had just embarrassed her in front of her friends.

“Come on,” I muttered to myself, before counting to three, closing my eyes, and jumping out of the train.

That proved to be a mistake.

I felt my feet hit the platform at a horrid angle and down I went, my hands instinctively reaching out to brace my fall before I remembered the sorry state of my wrist and pulled them back. My shoulder hit first and then my head, and I yelled out in pain.

“Shh,” said Ty, who ran over to me and helped me to my feet. “Don’t want the conductor to hear us and stop the train.”

“Sorry,” I said, getting my bearings. My head throbbed and my shoulder twitched, but I ignored both and followed Ty to a nearby stairwell. We walked halfway up until the platform was completely out of sight at which point I collapsed against the wall. 

“Couldn’t we have met at a coffee shop?” I asked.

“Nope,” said Ty, who sat down across from me with her legs crisscrossed like she was attending a middle school assembly. “Not with a Guild tracker on your tail.”

“What the hell is that?” 

I started frantically turning out my pockets looking for a silver ring or some other object that wasn’t supposed to be there, but Ty waved off my search.

“What it sounds like. A person hired by the Guild to follow you around. And from the one they’ve got following you, looks like you are at the center of the Guild’s radar.”

“Great,” I muttered.

“Luckily for you, he doesn’t know about that malfunctioning door, so he’s still riding a car behind, waiting for you to get off.”

“Oh, thanks, I guess.”

“You’re welcome. Everyone always forgets about this place. There are private tours a couple of times a month, but you’d be surprised how many people riding the 6 through the turnaround don’t even notice that there’s this entire station, hiding in plain sight.”

“I could believe that,” I said. “Same way people don’t realize magic is real.”

“Yeah, exactly!” Ty said, clapping her thighs before staring at me more intently. “You look like shit, by the way. Did you actually get stabbed with a Relic or were you just out all night partying?”

“Neither,” I said, making a mental note of her Relic reference. “Was out all night, but not to drink. And the cure I need isn’t for me, it’s for a friend.”

“I see,” said Ty. “That blonde you were with the other night? Molly?”

“Yep,” I said, continuing the lie. “So, can you help me?”

“Ummm, obviously. That’s why we’re here. I happen to know a guy who trades in the sort of thing you’re looking for.”

“He has ground-up dodo bird beaks?” I said, as Ty raised her eyebrows. “I mean,” I stammered, cursing myself for giving away the farm, “someone once told me that it was the ultimate curative.”

“That’s the rumor, at least,” said Ty. “But I hope you didn’t think you were just going to waltz into the Natural History Museum and take theirs.”

“I wasn’t,” I lied, “but why not?”

“Because it’s a fake. The real one was stolen years ago. Now the only one left that anyone knows about is at Oxford, but good luck getting through their security.”

“Oh, so then what does your guy have?”

“You’ll see. Just make sure you arrive right when he opens tomorrow night. He’s very particular about punctuality.”

“Tomorrow night? I don’t think my friend has that kind of time.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Jade, but the Market isn’t even open today, so looks like you don’t have a choice. Besides, it gives you some time to enjoy this beautiful forgotten piece of New York’s history.”

Ty pushed herself up to her feet and stretched her hands over her head, and turned to walk up the steps and out of the station.

“Wait!” I shouted to her. “What about the Guild tracker? He’s eventually going to find me again, right?”

Ty smiled, before pulling something shiny out from the front pocket of her sweatshirt.

“Not if you’re wearing this.”

Next: A new alchemy branch is revealed. Read it below.

Read ARC Worlds in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 40

Chapter 39 recap: Jen visits a long-forgotten NYC relic in search of help. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37

We fled along the water. 

Not with the quickness of the speed buffs, which were stupidly in a box in our island headquarters, but with the urgency of a gazelle trying to outrun a hungry lion. The hooded figure pursued us with equal zeal, and I braved a half-second glance back to see him slowly gaining. 

Beatrice ran a few paces ahead while I lagged behind, thanks to the wooden box. 

“I can’t keep this up!” I shouted to Beatrice, my forearms burning from the strain. “It’s too heavy!”

Beatrice suddenly stopped short and I nearly collided with her from behind. I could see the edge of the park and the city streets just up ahead. She turned and there was something small and smoking in her hand. 

“Keep going,” she said and I saw the fire in her eyes. “I’ll catch up to you.”

“O-OK,” was all I could muster as I left her there, alone. I reached the street and started retracing our route from earlier. Beatrice would be fine, I tried to convince myself. She had no shortage of weapons in her arsenal, and apparently had a few that I still didn’t know about. And if she really got into trouble, she could always use whatever strength was left in the ring. I, on the other hand, had nothing of the sort, unless my mom’s locket had somehow been gifted with alchemic powers when I had fed it to that rat all those months ago.

The streets were eerily quiet, devoid of people and cars, and I realized with a sinking feeling that we were trapped here until the next train arrived. I ran along 215th Street until I saw two flickering lights appear in the distance. 

The stairs. Which meant that the subway platform was only a few blocks further. I crossed the street and was about to descend to the lower depths of Inwood when I heard a shout from behind me. 

I turned and saw Beatrice sprinting toward me, her face red with exertion.  

“Go, go!” she cried, grabbing the box from me. “We don’t have much time.” She rushed passed me and disappeared down the stairs. I followed, my arms relieved to be free of the burden but my legs now protesting as I tried taking the steps two at a time.

“What did you do?” I yelled ahead.

“Threw a special firecracker at him,” she said. “Hopefully it set him on fire. Keep moving.”

I reached the landing halfway to the bottom and heard the whistle of an approaching train. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck, but one that was immediately eclipsed by my very next step. I felt my foot barely scrape the edge of the stair before my body tumbled downward. 

The next landing quickly rose up to meet me and I held out my hands to brace myself for the impact. I heard a crunch erupt from my right wrist as I hit the pavement and cried out in pain. Beatrice was almost at the bottom, but had stopped and was now gripping the banister, looking past me with a look of horror on her face. I slowly swiveled my head around to see the figure, smoke billowing from his still burning cloak, standing at the top of the stairs. 

I summoned what little strength I had left and tried pushing myself up with my left hand, but the night’s exertion had completely drained my reserves and I slumped back down. The train whistled again in the distance and I watched as Beatrice turned toward the platform and then back at me and our pursuer above.

“Help. Me,” I croaked, before trying and failing again to get to my feet. The seven seconds it took for Beatrice to make her decision ticked off like they were days, but when I saw her set the box down and leap up the steps toward me, all remaining doubts I had about her were erased. As she slung my limp arm around her shoulder and hoisted me up, a crack erupted above us. 

“What … what was that?” I said with a whimper. 

“Don’t know,” said Beatrice. “But we need to get the hell out of here. Now!”

Somehow she braced me against her body and dragged me down the rest of the stairs, grabbing the box on the way. We reached the bottom and I finally steadied myself. The subway tracks loomed in front of us and I finally saw the train chugging slowly down the elevated platform to the north. 

“Can you make it the rest of the way?” asked Beatrice, who had broken into a jog. “If we’re not on that train…”

I put one foot in front of the other, ignoring the throbbing pain in my hand and the protests of my body and the terror flooding my mind, and nodded. 

The ceiling was ugly, that much I had concluded from my 30 minutes of ceaseless staring. The carpet was also ugly, a dull gray that had maybe once been brown before the years of uncleaned dirt and grime had ossified on top, but it was oddly comforting. I don’t know if I had slept in the hours since we had stumbled into the office, as the pain in my wrist made it hard to keep track of anything else but its constant presence. 

It had eventually died down to a dull hum that ignited whenever I tried to lift my arm, and so I had waited patiently on the carpet until Beatrice returned from the other side of the door. A vitality buff would be welcome, but I doubted it would do anything more than get me to my feet and what I needed now, more than anything, was nothing. I just wanted to be able to close my eyes and let everything fade away. But the events of the evening kept playing over and over again in my mind, like a tape stuck on loop in an old VCR.

Somehow, we had made it up the platform steps before the already waiting train had closed its doors. Our pursuer, by some stroke of luck, had not, and so we had sat silently in the almost-empty subway car with the almost-empty Compendium until the conductor sleepily called out “Times Square, 42nd Street.” From there, it was a short but paranoid walk east to the Chrysler Building, where we were greeted with a raised eyebrow by the security guard until Beatrice had flashed him our badges and he nodded.

We had stood vigilant by the door, waiting for the hooded figure to burst through, but after an hour of perfect silence, we nodded to each other and I had collapsed into my current position. 

It would be another hour before Beatrice would finally emerged from the black expanse beyond the door. She looked alert but exhausted, and I wondered how many buffs she had eaten. 

“Here,” she said, crouching down beside me and placing a small vial next to me. 

“Wh-what’s this?” I asked. “Haven’t seen this before.”

“It’s a vitality serum. It wouldn’t congeal into a gummy for some reason, so it’s less portable but far more potent. Don’t know if it will actually fix your wrist but maybe it will dull the pain for a while.”

“Thanks,” I said. 

“Don’t thank me yet, you haven’t drank it.”

“No, I mean, for earlier.”

“Oh,” said Beatrice. “I hope you didn’t think I was just going to lea-”

“I didn’t. But, still, thank you.”

I waited for Beatrice to launch into a speech about how now we were even or that we were something closer than partners, more like sisters, but she just stood over me with a dispassionate expression on her face.

“What?  What can I say, except, you’re welcome?”

“No, that’s enough,” I said, pushing myself up to a sitting position with my good hand and picking up the vial. The liquid was brownish-gray, which was fitting, and I swirled it around for a few seconds before Beatrice took it back to unstopper it for me. Downing it in one big swig, I waited for the familiar rejuvenation to wash over me. 

What happened next was something else entirely. It started in my stomach, a warm soothing feeling like the one you felt when drinking a mug of hot cocoa after a cold day out in the snow. But then that warmth exploded into a deluge of heat that washed over my entire body like an unexpected wave during low tide. The heat and the pressure kept increasing, as if the liquid wanted to force its way out of every pore of my body. I gritted my teeth and fell back onto the floor, trying to hold back a scream. But it was too much to take and I let out a loud, guttural cry as I reached my breaking point.

And then, it was gone. 

The heat, the pain in my wrist, the constant tiredness and anxiety after too many late nights and too many days filled with endless worry, gone. I tested my wrist by trying to push myself back up and found that while I didn’t feel any pain, neither did I have the strength to support my weight.

“Huh,” I said, trying and failing again. 

“What?” asked Beatrice. 

“My wrist, I don’t think the serum fixed it.”

I rotated it back and forth, still feeling no pain but doubted I could lift even a pencil with it.

“Well why would it? It’s not a healing potion.”

“But I thought maybe th-”

The door suddenly swung open and we both looked over with panicked faces, but it was only Eva standing at the threshold.

“Wh-what are you doing here?” asked Beatrice, running over to the girl and pushing her inside. 

“I need something,” said Eva in a voice barely above a whisper. She walked over to the lone chair at the workbench and sat down, a forlorn look on her face.

“And you have a perfectly good method of contacting me without risking someone following you up here,” Beatrice said. “Which in this instance would have been fucking prudent to use, seeing as how we were just attacked by the Guild.”

Eva looked out the window, before the glamour vanished and was replaced by a scared little girl. 

“Oh,” said Polly. “Didn’t realize.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Beatrice sternly. “Hence why following the communication protocol before barging in here unannounced would have saved you a trip down here. Go home and get some sleep and I’ll touch base with you soon.”

“But-”

“Go.” 

Polly rose from the chair, rubbing the green stone as she did. The tall blonde who took her place glared down at Beatrice, before walking out the door without another word.

“What that really necessary?” I said. “She looked lik-”

“You too, Jen,” said Beatrice.

“What?”

“Go home. I’m going to do the same. Can’t remember the last time I slept there alone.”

“Where’s your son? And your husband?”

The question left my lips before I realized that maybe she didn’t want to answer.

“They’re somewhere safe. Well, at least Jack-Jack is. Don’t really care where Garrett went.”

“You don’t know?” I asked. 

“No. I sent them both away a few hours after the Council meeting. The benefits of being over-prepared, I guess.” 

She quickly wiped away a tear and looked out the window. 

“So what time should we meet back here? Noon?”

Beatrice shook her head.

“9 a.m. On Monday.”

“What? That only gives us two more days and we sti-”

“I can’t keep doing this,” said Beatrice. “I know you probably think I’m some sort of inhuman robot that can just plow ahead, no matter the circumstances, but even I have a breaking point and I don’t want to reach it.”

“But we’re no further along than we were a few days ago. We might even have moved backwards, seeing as how our only lead is to find a fucking extinct dodo bird!”

“I found one already,” said Beatrice. “It’s in the Natural History Museum.”

“Oh,” I said, before I burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” said Beatrice, looking at me like I had just lost my mind, but I couldn’t stop.

“It’s just … of course it is. We needed to find a way to open the door in Long Island City and there was a pile of old door knobs just sitting there at the Met. Now, we need to heal a mythical curse and there’s a long-dead bird on display at the museum across town.”

“You think it’s a trap? But that doesn’t make any sense, how would they know that-”

“I don’t know what to think. What I do know is that I’m going to take you up on your suggestion that I get some sleep.”

I lied.

Next: Jen searches for a leg up. Read it below.

Subscribe now

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 39

Editor’s Note: If you’re interested in the age-old debate of Books v. Film, read on here. Chapter 38 recap: Jen recovers from the failed Inwood mission. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36

“Why did we come here at night again?” I asked as we walked down from the elevated tracks of the 1 train. It was nearly midnight. Another day gone, another day closer to our doom. 

“Because,” said Beatrice, “do you want to be the bottom-of-the-hour story on the local news? ‘Two women arrested for digging up historic rock.’ No thanks.”

“Good point.”

We walked west and then south before reaching an odd sight: a pair of magnificent stone staircases set between two buildings that led up to the rest of Inwood. 

“This city,” Beatrice muttered, as she began her climb. I followed, taking deep breaths on the flat landings interspersed throughout and ticking off the steps as I went. By the time I made it the top, my count had reached 110 and I was drenched with sweat, despite the cold night air.

“I hope that’s the most exercise we have to do tonight,” I said, as we continued onward toward the park.

“Not likely,” said Beatrice. “And don’t think we’re going to take the easy way out either. No buffs, no ring, if we can help it.”

“Fine,” I said. The streets were deserted and I felt like we were invaders from across the sea, come to plunder this land’s treasure. We had taped shovels to the inside of our long winter coats, but the adhesive was failing and so I brought my arm tight against the side of my body. 

Finally, we reached the edge of the park. I considered the threshold we were about to cross. It was as if the forest beyond had finally said “no more” to the city and used the last of its strength to throw up a barrier against further human encroachment. Still, we stepped into the park with little fanfare and continued onward.

“How are you doing?” Beatrice said, after a few minutes.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I feel like this shovel is about to fall out of my coat, but otherwi-”

“No, not right now. I meant, how are you dealing with the aftermath of accidentally erasing yourself from your friends’ lives?”

“Oh,” I said. “I … I don’t know. I haven’t exactly had the chance to process it. Maybe when this is all over and I can finally catch my breath, but for now I’ve forced myself to just keep looking forward.”

“I guess that makes sense. But make sure you look back eventually,” she said. 

I nodded but didn’t respond, and Beatrice took the hint to drop it. After all we had been through, these random moments of kindness from her still surprised me. Even though I had saved her life, even though I had proven myself, there was always a nagging thought that this would be the encounter that would set Beatrice off. But I pushed such speculation to the back of my mind, along with the blank stares on Lisa and Stacy’s faces, and tried to focus on the task at hand.

We passed an empty baseball field before the path curled into the trees, around the edge of a field that abutted the marshy water of an inlet from the Harlem River, and we closed in our quarry. 

The rock had been unceremoniously plopped in the middle of the path and we approached it gingerly. A lone streetlamp cast a dim glow across the plaque affixed to the boulder, just enough to make out the words.

“According to legend, on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian village, Peter Minuit in 1626, purchased Manhattan Island for trinkets and beads then worth about 60 guilders. 

This boulder also marks the spot where a tulip tree grew to a height of 165 feet and a girth of 20 feet. It was, until its death in 1938 at the age of 280 years, the last living link with the Reckgawanc Indians who lived here.”

I finished reading and opened my coat. The shovel fell free onto the dirt and I stooped down slowly to pick it up, feeling a familiar pang of unease. After all, this was now the second historic rock in a month that I was attempting to unearth. And, given the size of the thing, moving it without any alchemic assistance looked to be a tall order. Beatrice, too, appeared to have misgivings, as she was still considering the text of the plaque. 

“Should we get on with the digging?” she asked. “Maybe if we started here,” she scratched a circle in the dirt a few feet away from the rock, “we could tunnel under the rock without having to move it.”

I stared at the dirt, my mind trying to recall that day when I, no, when Rita must have stood on this spot. Despite the incomplete memory, something felt off about what we were attempting to do. It was then that it started to rain. A cold rain, like the one I remembered from that late December morning.

“No,” I said. “This isn’t right.”

“What do you mean?” said Beatrice, who had unsheathed her shovel from her own coat and was testing the stiffness of the dirt. 

“She didn’t hide it here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course she did, you said that-”

“I know what I said. I know what I remember, too, and this doesn’t fit. She didn’t pack a shovel.”

“So?” said Beatrice. “Maybe you didn’t see that part.”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “Even if I didn’t remember packing up the shovel, I remember walking to the stable carrying the box in one hand and holding an umbrella in the other. What was she going to dig with? Her hands?”

“Maybe,” Beatrice said. “Or maybe someone was going to help her. You didn’t get to the end, remember?”

“Oh, I do,” I said, the irritation in my voice growing. “But I remember enough. I didn’t hide … she didn’t hide the box here.” I read the words of the plaque again and a smile suddenly bloomed on my face. “And this proves it.”

“What?”

“There was a tulip tree here. A tall one if this plaque is to be believed. So how did Rita, without a shovel, dig through the roots and hide the box? Does she sound like the kind of woman who would get down on her hands and knees and start digging like a gopher?”

“No, but-”

“I do not mind manual labor,” I said, and I could almost hear her voice coming out of my mouth. “But only on my terms and at a time of my choosing.”

“Stop!” cried Beatrice. 

“She came through here, the two soldiers must have escorted her. With them as cover, no one would question her. Much simpler than rowing a boat all the way up the East River and then the Harlem River. She wouldn’t have stopped to dig a hole that any idiot could have uncovered later that day, even if the tree hadn’t been planted yet. No, not Rita. She hid the box someplace that would leave no trace that she had been there, that no one would stumble upon accidentally.”

I turned away from the rock and everything suddenly clicked into place.

“There,” I said, pointing toward the water at the edge of the field.

Beatrice followed my gaze and when she saw what I was looking at, her face fell. 

“You’re joking, right? The great Rita van Asch hid her most important treasure in the muck of this swamp?”

“Exactly.”

The stone sunk into the brackish water, its otherworldly red glow piercing through the muck. I crouched down, the cold marsh soaking my pants for the third time and the cold rain continuing to drench the rest of me, and scanned the radius of light to see if the box was there. 

It wasn’t. 

I stood up, cringing as the trickle of remaining sludge dripped down my legs, and fished the stone out of the water again with my shovel.

“Any luck?” called Beatrice from the shore. 

“Nope,” I replied as I waded even further into the morass, the red rock beating back the darkness like the Phial of Galadriel. It was a stroke of luck that I had even managed to hold onto the stone during that awful night in the cave, but at the time it seemed like a useless consolation prize for surviving Gilbert’s attempt to kill us. Who needed a magic glowing rock when you had one of the most powerful flashlights ever created included as a throw-in feature on your phone? But the last marsh in Manhattan had bested our technology and so alchemy had answered the call. 

“How much longer are you going to trudge around in there? I told you that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that the box was still there. She probably came back after the war was over and fished it out.”

“Then why did the memory ring still exist? No, it’s still here, we just need t-”

My foot knocked into something hard on the swamp floor and I nearly tumbled face first into the water. I traced the contours of the object with my foot before dropping the stone. This time, its light illuminated the lid of a familiar wooden box and I nearly jumped in the air with joy.

“I found it!” I yelled to Beatrice and her face lit up as she ran to the edge of the water.

“Are you sure?” she asked. 

“Sure enough that I think you need to come into the water and help me.”

Beatrice winced as she entered the mire but soon was standing next to me over our submerged prize. I dug my shovel into the ground below the box and tried to wedge it free, but it protested. 

“The weights must still be in there,” I said, recalling the metal that Rita had placed inside. “We’re going to have to pick it up ourselves.”

Beatrice nodded and together we reached into the water, grabbed an end of the box, and pulled upward. It was as heavy as I remembered, but with our combined strength, we wrested it free from its watery prison and slowly carried it to shore. 

The rain beat down upon us as we considered the box. Its similarity to the one that we had found and then lost that night in the cave was eerie, almost as if it hadn’t been sitting at the bottom of the marsh for who knows how long.  

“Shall we?” said Beatrice. 

I nodded and lifted the lid, which, surprisingly, opened without a fuss. And, inside, just as Rita had placed it, was an object wrapped in cloth, along with the metal weights. 

“I don’t believe it!” I said, shaking my head. 

“Well, don’t believe it just yet,” Beatrice said, as she retrieved the object and peeled back the wrapping to reveal a brown leather tome.

“That’s just how it looked, incredible!” I said. The weights, too, looked exactly as they had in the memory, and I removed them carefully from the bottom of the box and dumped them on the wet grass.

I closed the box, laying the linen on top, and Beatrice put the Compendium down on the lid. It hadn’t aged in the slightest from the day it was hidden, its cover still the same shade of brown. I wondered if it was the box or the linen shroud or something else entirely that had protected the book from the ravages of time.

We huddled close together to block the rain from soaking our newly found treasure and I pulled back the cover to reveal the first page. 

Which was blank. 

I turned the page to find a second blank page, and then again to find a third, a fourth, and so on. The book must have been hundreds of pages long, but I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that I could sit here for hours flipping through it and not find a hint of writing. 

“What. The. Hell,” Beatrice said. “It’s completely empty!”

She shook her head and repeated the fruitless exercise, before closing it and throwing her hands up in disgust. 

“I knew it couldn’t be that simple,” I said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew!”  

I stared at the book and wanted to light the damned thing on fire before dropkicking it into the swamp.

“Calm the fuck down,” said Beatrice. “Let’s just get out of here and we can regroup at the office. Maybe there’s something we’re missing.”

“Fine,” I said, as I ran my fingers down the edges of the pages, which ran together as if the book had never been opened. It was then that I felt it: a small bump, barely perceptible among the scores of vacant sheets. I searched for it again, to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me, and found it a second time. 

“What is it?” asked Beatrice. 

“There’s something in here, just need to…” 

I opened the book near the spot and slowly turned the pages until I found them. A trio of them was stuck together, but my fingers worked them apart quickly. The first page was blank, along with the second, but the third had several lines of handwritten letters at the bottom, in a familiar script.

“The discovery of Raphus cucullatus in 1598 by the VOC was a revelation, but like most discoveries of the last several centuries, it quickly succumbed to the savage appetites of a populace hungry for new magic. Untold dodo bird specimens were wasted by virile men hoping to be imbued with the power of ancient times. It was not until the wife of a board member secreted away a pinch of the ground-up beak for her ailing daughter that the bird’s true potential was realized. The restorative properties were soon demonstrated to be almost unparalleled, capable even of reversing the effects of Relics now lost to us.”

I looked up from the page and my eyes met Beatrice’s, who nodded silently. We were cold, tired, and soaked to our cores, and to top it off, we now had to locate the remnants of a bird 400 years extinct in just four days. Not to mention that we still didn’t know where the other wooden box was. 

Even with alchemy fueling our bodies and our minds, it all seemed too much to bear. A growing part of me just wanted to give up, to let the Guild kick us out, and then I could go back and pick up the deteriorating pieces of my old life. But as I learned long ago, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And as I struggled to pick up the wooden box, I saw that opposing force running toward us from the tulip tree rock.

Next: A sprint. Read it below.

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 38

Chapter 37 recap: Jen and Beatrice discovery a long-lost archive. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach

Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35

It is raining. How fitting. But time is short and my window to leave the island is closing. So today will have to be the day. I wrap the Compendium in cloth several times over before placing it in the familiar worn wooden box with several metal weights, and grab my umbrella. It is a short walk to the stables and my horse is saddled and ready to go. Luckily for me, he has seen too many winters for the British to find him useful but he still suits my purposes and I hope the hands will still take care of him after I leave the island.

I secure the box to the saddle and the animal winces as I lead him into the cold and the wet but he will have bear it now and he will have to bear it later, just as I will and just as the boxes have always done. We ride north, out of the city and through the abandoned farms, until at last I see the fort looming on the hill. A dozen memories flood into my mind about this place. It has been nearly two lifetimes since we came ashore at the edge of that forest for the first time, when we bought this island from the Lenape. 

I hope I am the only one left among the living who remembers that day.

As the teeming mass of Redcoats come into view, I have second thoughts about approaching on land but quickly cast them aside. I do not mind manual labor, as my blooming garden each summer can attest to, but only on my terms and at a time of my choosing. It is a privilege I believe I am entitled to after all these years. Still, rowing up the length of the island and back by myself would be fraught with peril, and I would rather rely on my wit and my charm than my ability to outmaneuver the British in open water.

I dismount and pull out some sugar chunks from the saddlebag. The horse does not like the mud sticking to his hooves but he happily takes the sweet reward. I tie him to a tree and walk into the lion’s den.

Two soldiers approach, their faces red to match their jackets, and I pity them, but only for a minute.

“Halt,” says the first one. 

“What are you doing here?” says the second.

I dispense with the formalities and summon the word to my tongue.

“Peitho.”

I felt something grasping my shoulders and I struggled to stay in the moment. The power that had been at my command was unlike anything I had experienced before. It wasn’t borrowed or siphoned or tapped, it was raw and it was mine. But the pulling persisted until I was wrenched out of Rita’s memory. 

For a second, I saw her from the back, standing there on the dirt road. Her tied-up brown hair rustled slowly in the wind and I wanted to hold out just a second longer so I could finally see this woman whose essence had seeped into my mind.

But when I opened my eyes again, all I saw was the dusty, old book in front of me and the dim light of the lone lamp in our island headquarters. I turned around in the chair and saw Beatrice standing behind me, her brow glistening with sweat, and unsure if she should come closer. 

“Wh-what happened?” I said. “The memory, it wasn’t…” I looked back at Rita’s 1777 diary to find the ink that had appeared on the page from Polly’s ring smeared into an indecipherable blob like last time. Which meant one thing: the memory was gone. 

“Why did you pull me out of it?” I said, trying to stand up, but my legs gave way and I stumbled back into the chair. 

“Take it easy,” Beatrice said. “Here.” She offered me the familiar maroon buff but I refused her. We were both beginning to rely too heavily on them and I worried that I was treading Kate’s path all over again.

“I’m fine. It’s just . . . I didn’t get far enough. She was heading north ”

I recounted Rita’s memory to Beatrice and her face fell when I reached the end. 

“Oh,” she said. “I wanted to let you go further, but this time it was different. With the other diary, you kind of were just asleep on the page. That’s how it started out this time, at least. Then, your hands started moving, making these really weird gestures and then you started talking.”

“Peitho,” I said without thinking and Beatrice drew back, but nothing happened. 

“She did something, to the soldiers. On her own. They were dead, but not dead, if that makes sense.”

“Not really. I’ve never heard of anyone using alchemy like that, like the magic was inherent to them. This is why more than ever we need to get that Compendium.”

“Agreed,” I said. Our latest harebrained idea had been to find Rita’s Compendium, which would, and this was all wishful thinking, include the antidote for the stone curse I had inflicted on Frankie. Rita’s last diary entry from 1777 had stated briefly that she had “hid Compendium in the usual place” before she had left New York to join her husband at Valley Forge. 

Reading that passage over again now, with the knowledge of the memory rings, had been a revelation, and Beatrice had practically run to Polly’s apartment to take back the ring after her own ring hadn’t worked. But I convinced her to play it cool, to not let Polly in on the fact that the ring was more than just a band of silver, lest she demand something in return. Fortunately, by the time I had stumbled back teary-eyed to the 47th floor last night after my disastrous dinner, the ring was there. And when it had dissolved into a pool of silver ink and then into the familiar handwriting this morning, it seemed like things were starting to go our way.

“I wish I could have seen just a little bit more, seen who she gave the Compendium to. Maybe it’s still sitting in a library somewhere, just like her diary.” 

“I know, but I didn’t want to let you keep going and have it be her who woke up.”

“You think that’s what the rings are? Some sort of distributed consciousness that will bring Rita back to life?”

“Maybe,” said Beatrice. “I don’t know. That’s why I wanted to let Polly try the memory this time. Probably better that she didn’t. The girl already knows too much. But I’m glad we don’t have another diary. I don’t want to find out that I was right.”

“So now what?” I asked. “We’re quickly running out of leads.”

“I wouldn’t call it a lead. What were the chances that Rita knew about the Medoblad, knew how to reverse its effects, and just happened to write it down in neat handwriting for us to discover 200 years later? I mean, I found the thing in a cave on a Greek island you’ve never heard of.” 

“It was worth a shot,” I said. “Even if it didn’t have the cure, it would still have been a good chip to barter with. Seeing as how Rita’s gold token is probably lost in the ether as well.”

“I know, I know,” said Beatrice. “Maybe City Hall will surprise us and find the property records we requested.”

“Yeah, in like 100 years. Right around the time the sea rises and sinks all of Manhattan.”

“Wait a minute,” Beatrice said with a note of excitement. “You said Rita was heading north, to the place where the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Lenape.”

“Yes, she hoped she was the only one alive who remembered that day. I figured it was just a meeting place where she was giving the Compendium to someone. You don’t think…”

“I’ve been up there. Took Jack-Jack to run around for an afternoon a few summers ago. It’s probably the last piece of mostly untouched land in Manhattan. And there’s a rock with a plaque on it that claims to be the spot where the sale to the Dutch was made.”

“Then maybe the Compendium is buried under that rock,” I said, although I knew it couldn’t be that simple. 

Nothing ever was in this messed-up world I inhabited.

Next: A trip to the far reaches of Manhattan. Read it below.

Subscribe now

ARC Worlds

Guild of Tokens, Chapter 37

Chapter 36 recap: Jen journeys to the past to find the way forward. Part 1 | Part 2 | Interlude | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Jon Auerbach