A Study in Ambition

He was always particular about Tuesdays. Four o’clock. Sabina had the book on thaumaturgic resonance tucked under her arm as she took the stairs to his rooms, the worn spine a familiar comfort against her side. She could already picture the afternoon: she would make tea in his small kitchen, he would complain that the leaves she bought were ‘aggressively mediocre,’ and then they would sit in the worn leather armchairs and talk for hours about things no one else seemed to care about. It was their ritual, the fixed point around which the rest of her week revolved.

The heavy oak door at the top of the landing was ajar.

That was the first wrong thing. Jonathon was a man of absolutes. Doors were either open or they were shut. A door left in between was, in his words, an unresolved question, and he did not tolerate them. Sabina paused, her hand hovering just before the wood. A sliver of profound silence emanated from the gap, a quiet so complete it felt like a pressure against her ears. She pushed the door open.

The smell hit her first, a physical force that made her flinch. It was ozone, sharp and sterile like the air after a lightning strike, the signature of a massive, uncontrolled discharge of magic. But layered beneath it was something else, something acrid and viscid that coated the back of her throat. It was vaguely organic, the scent of burnt hair and old, spoiled meat. She took a shallow breath, her stomach tightening.

His study, which was more a library that happened to contain a desk, was in ruins. It was a scene of pure violence. Books had been torn from the shelves, their spines broken, their pages scattered across the floor in drifts. Papers—notes, diagrams, years of research—were strewn everywhere, some ripped to confetti. Jonathon’s life’s work, his meticulously indexed and cross-referenced world, had been disemboweled. Sabina felt a surge of cold, sharp anger, an emotion so immediate it preceded shock. This wasn’t just a mess. This was a desecration.

She took a step inside, then another, her boots crunching on something gritty. She looked down. Not glass, but chalk. The floor was covered in a fine white dust, as if a bag of flour had exploded. His primary summoning circle, the one inlaid with silver thread and permanently etched into the dark floorboards, was shattered. The usually perfect, intricate lines of the sigils were violently smeared, gouged into nothingness in several places. The destruction was frantic, centered. It looked as if something had broken out of its binding and torn the cage apart from the inside.

And in the very center of that ruined geometry lay Jonathon.

He was on his back, his limbs splayed at angles that were not quite natural, not quite peaceful. His gray eyes were open, fixed on the high, beamed ceiling where dust motes danced in a single column of late-afternoon light. He wasn’t seeing them. He wasn’t seeing anything. His favorite tweed jacket was rumpled, and his white hair, normally combed with a mathematician’s precision, was a wild halo around his head. He just looked… finished. Done.

Sabina stopped breathing. The book she was carrying slid from under her arm and hit the floor with a soft, final thud. The sound was obscene in the funereal quiet, but she barely registered it. Her entire world had contracted to the shape of the man on the floor. The air felt too thick to breathe, too heavy to exist in. She thought, He is dead. The thought was flat, clinical, a simple statement of fact that her mind offered up before the grief could find purchase. It was a problem to be analyzed, a theorem to be proven.

Her gaze swept the scene, her mind automatically, instinctively, doing what he had trained it to do. Look past the obvious, Sabina. The truth is always in the detail that doesn’t fit. A summoning gone terribly wrong. That was the narrative presented. A powerful entity breaking its bonds, killing its summoner in a fit of rage before dissipating. It was a classic, cautionary tale. It was plausible. It was what everyone would believe.

But then her eyes caught on it. On his chest, lying flat against the dark wool of his jacket, was a single feather.

It was black, iridescent, its surface shifting with oily slicks of purple and green in the dim light. A raven’s feather, or something very much like it. It was perfect. Unbroken, unburnt, untouched by the explosive violence that had torn the rest of the room apart. It had not fallen there by chance. It had been placed. Carefully. Deliberately. A single, quiet, meticulous statement in a room that was screaming with chaos.

The sight of it broke the spell. Sabina drew a sharp, ragged breath, and the world came rushing back in—the suffocating smell, the chill in the air, the profound, irreversible stillness of her mentor. The feather wasn't part of the chaos. It was commentary on it. A signature. A message. It transformed the scene from a tragedy into an announcement. This wasn’t an accident. This was an execution. And the killer wanted someone to know.

She did not move. She couldn’t. The feather held her in place, a single point of order in a universe of chaos. How long she stood there, she didn’t know. Long enough for the column of light to shift from the ceiling to the far wall, turning the dust motes from gold to a muted grey. The silence was broken by the sound of heavy, rhythmic footsteps ascending the stairs. Not one person, but several.

The door, which she had pushed fully open, was filled by three figures in the severe, grey uniforms of the Concord. They moved with a practiced lack of urgency, their faces impassive. One of them, a woman with her hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to stretch the skin around her eyes, held a glowing ward-slate. Its light pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm, casting long, distorted shadows that made the wreckage of the room seem to writhe.

A fourth man stepped past them. He was older, with a soft paunch straining the buttons of his uniform and a face that looked permanently tired. Proctor Laine. Sabina knew him by reputation: a man who processed magical crime scenes with the dispassionate efficiency of an accountant.

He took in the room with a single, sweeping glance, his eyes lingering on Jonathon for no more than a second before moving on. “Failed summoning,” he said, his voice flat. It wasn’t a question. It was a filing category.

“No,” Sabina said. The word came out as a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again, forcing strength into her voice. “No, it wasn’t.”

Laine’s gaze finally settled on her. He registered her presence with a flicker of mild surprise, as if she were just another piece of displaced furniture. “And you are?”

“I’m his apprentice. Sabina.”

“Ah.” A glimmer of something that might have been pity, or perhaps just professional courtesy, entered his expression. “My condolences, Sabina. A terrible thing to find. Jonathon was a great mind.” He used the past tense with an ease that felt like a physical blow. “But even great minds can miscalculate. Especially with age.”

“He didn’t miscalculate.” Sabina took a step forward, gesturing towards Jonathon’s body. Her hand trembled, and she clenched it into a fist. “Look. The circle. The destruction isn’t chaotic. The primary binding sigils have been deliberately scoured away. Not just broken, erased. And that.” She pointed to the feather. “That was placed there. Afterwards. It’s untouched.”

Proctor Laine followed her gesture, his eyes resting on the feather. He sighed, a soft, weary sound. “Child, when a seventh-stratum entity breaks its binding, the resulting energy discharge is anything but predictable. It can flash-freeze one object and incinerate the one next to it. A feather from a component pouch could easily be thrown clear and land just so.”

“He didn’t use raven feathers for this type of summoning,” Sabina insisted, the words coming faster now. “The harmonics are wrong. He wouldn’t. This isn’t a mistake. This is a message.”

Laine took a step closer to her, adopting the tone one uses for a frightened animal. “Grief is a powerful lens. It makes us search for intent, for meaning in tragedy. It’s a natural response.” He glanced at one of the other wardens. “Get her a blanket. And some water.”

“I don’t need a blanket,” she snapped, her voice sharper than she intended. The anger felt good. It was a clean, hot flame against the creeping cold of shock. “I need you to look properly. Someone did this to him and they staged it to look like an accident.”

The Proctor’s patience finally thinned. The feigned gentleness fell away, leaving behind the hard bone of bureaucratic authority. “I have been investigating scenes like this since before you were born, young lady. I know what a summoning-gone-wrong looks like. This is a textbook case. A tragic, textbook case.” He turned away from her, dismissing her as he would a fly. “Secure the scene. We’ll have the cleaners here within the hour. File it as Death by Magical Misadventure, Senior Warlock grade.”

A younger warden, his face still holding a trace of human sympathy, approached her and gently put a hand on her arm. “Come on, Miss. Let’s get you out of here.”

Sabina pulled away from his touch. “You’re not even going to investigate?” Her voice rose, bordering on shrill. She hated the sound of it, hated the loss of control. It was exactly what they expected. The hysterical, grieving apprentice.

Proctor Laine turned back, his face a mask of condescending finality. “There is nothing to investigate. We will seal his research, as is standard procedure to prevent further accidents. The Concord will issue a formal statement of regret. Jonathon was a respected, if unorthodox, member of the community. He will be remembered fondly.”

They were erasing him. Not just the circle on the floor, but his life, his work, the violent truth of his end. They were smoothing it over, filing it away under a convenient label that required no difficult questions and no further effort.

The young warden guided her firmly out into the hall. The heavy oak door was pulled shut, and she heard the distinct click of a magical lock engaging. She was outside, staring at the impassive wood, the unresolved question now a definitive statement. She was locked out. The anger in her chest cooled, hardening from a hot flame into something dense and heavy, like a block of ice. They wouldn’t find his killer. They had already decided there wasn’t one. Fine. Then she would.

Her apartment was two rooms above a bakery. The air always smelled faintly of burnt sugar and yeast, a smell she had once found comforting and now found cloying. The grey Concord blanket lay crumpled on the floor where she’d dropped it. It offered no warmth, only a reminder of Proctor Laine’s placid, dismissive face. She left it there.

The silence in the room was absolute. It was the kind of quiet that follows a great, shattering noise, an absence that was itself a presence. She moved through the small space, her movements stiff and automatic. She made tea, letting the hot water run over her fingers without flinching, and carried the mug to the small wooden desk wedged into an alcove. It was there, beneath a false bottom in her sock drawer, that she kept them.

The journals were a set of five, bound in worn black leather, their pages filled with Jonathon’s tight, angular script. He had given them to her a year ago. “Contingency,” he’d said, with a wry smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “The Concord has a distressing habit of classifying genius as madness post-mortem. I’d rather you had these than their archivists.”

She took out the most recent volume and laid it open on the desk. The code was second nature to her now, a private language they had developed together. It was a complex cipher based on stellar cartography and the resonant frequencies of certain crystals. To anyone else, the pages would look like astrological charts interspersed with nonsense poetry. To Sabina, it was his mind, laid bare.

She started at the last entry she had read with him, a treatise on the limitations of scrying through temporal currents. Her fingers traced the familiar symbols, but her mind struggled to focus. His handwriting, usually so controlled, seemed to break down as she turned the pages. The lines became more cramped, the symbols more heavily inked, as if he were pressing the pen into the paper with increasing force. She worked backwards from the end, looking for a break in his routine, a deviation from his academic obsessions.

Hours passed. The tea went cold. The scent of baking bread from downstairs faded as the night deepened, replaced by the cool, metallic smell of the city after rain. She worked under the narrow beam of a single desk lamp, the rest of the apartment lost to shadow. The rhythmic scratching of her own pen on a notepad as she translated was the only sound. It felt like a conversation with a ghost. Here, he was debating the ethical implications of soul-trapping. Here, a frustrated note about a failed warding matrix. Here, a sketch of a constellation that didn’t exist.

Then she found it.

It was a section of about twenty pages, tucked near the end of the final journal. The heading was simple: Parliament. The handwriting was starkly different. Hasty. Urgent. The margins were filled with annotations, corrections, and frantic-looking diagrams. It was not the writing of a scholar exploring a theory. It was the writing of a man trying to solve a problem, and failing.

She began to translate, her heart starting a low, heavy beat against her ribs. The text described a trio of infernal entities. Not the brutish, elemental demons of common lore, but something else. Something more refined, more intelligent. And more dangerous. Jonathon had listed their names—Edgar, Cato, Jan—and their supposed specialities. They were information brokers. Interrogators. Beings who could extract truths that were otherwise unobtainable.

Sabina’s breath caught. This was it. This had to be what he was looking into. This was why he had been killed. He had gotten too close to something, and had been considering a tool he knew was impossibly dangerous.

Her eyes scanned the dense block of text, landing on a sentence Jonathon had underlined three times, the ink so thick it had bled slightly through to the next page. A single, stark warning, separate from the academic analysis. She read her own translation of it, her lips moving silently.

They do not trade in facts, but in the reshaping of them.

The words seemed to lift off the page and hang in the cold air of the room. It wasn't a warning against being lied to. It was a warning against a far more subtle form of deception. They didn’t just offer false information. They offered information that was technically true but contextually poisonous, designed to make the recipient see the world in a new, warped way. They didn’t give you lies; they made you build your own.

A profound cold, deeper than any grief, settled in her bones. This was the path. Jonathon had been looking down it, and someone had stopped him. The Concord had sealed the crime scene and closed the case. The killer, whoever they were, had left a single, arrogant feather and disappeared. There were no witnesses, no clues, no one to turn to. No one but them.

She stared at the names on the page. Edgar. Cato. Jan. To summon them was an act of profound desperation, a violation of the Concord’s primary laws. It was a risk that could cost her not just her magic, but her mind, her soul. It was a game she did not know how to play, against opponents who had mastered it before humanity had a written language.

She closed the journal. The soft thud of the leather cover echoed in the quiet room. The risk was immense. But the alternative—letting Jonathon’s murder become a footnote in a bureaucratic file, letting that black feather be the final word—was unthinkable.

She pushed away from the desk. Her legs were stiff. The decision, once made, left no room for hesitation. To hesitate now would be to let the fear in, and the fear would paralyze her.

In her narrow bedroom, she knelt and rolled back the threadbare rug. Beneath it, the floorboards were old and dark, but one section, near the wall, was a fraction paler than the rest. She pressed her thumb into a specific knot in the wood. There was a soft, internal click, and a rectangular section of the floor came loose. She lifted the trapdoor. A draft of cool, still air rose from the darkness below, smelling of stone and contained silence.

A steep, narrow ladder led down into the room Jonathon had helped her build. He had called it her ‘panic room,’ though the term they used in formal magical theory was a null-chamber. The walls were thick concrete, lined with two inches of lead plating that blocked nearly all forms of magical scrying and sympathetic interference. It was a dead space, a hole in the world’s magical fabric. It was meant to be a place to hide, to be invisible. She had never imagined using it as a stage.

Her bare feet made no sound on the cold concrete floor. She lit a single, thick tallow candle, its flame barely flickering in the motionless air. The light threw her shadow, stark and oversized, against the dull grey walls.

The components were stored in a small, locked chest in the corner. She worked with a practiced efficiency that felt like it belonged to someone else, some calmer, more capable version of herself. Her hands were steady as she measured out a cup of finely powdered silver, the metal catching the candlelight with a cold, sterile gleam. She uncorked a small vial of raven’s blood, the liquid thick and almost black. She remembered Jonathon explaining the sympathetic properties of corvid blood—its connection to secrets, to things seen from a great height. The memory was a sharp, physical ache in her chest.

She set these items aside and picked up the last component. It was a sliver of a mirror, no bigger than her thumb, wrapped in black velvet. Jonathon had given it to her on her last birthday. It had been part of a larger scrying mirror, one that had been kept for a century in a mountaintop observatory, angled so that it had only ever reflected the light of the stars, never the sun, moon, or any terrestrial object. It held a reflection of pure distance, of cold, empty space. It was used to stabilize dimensional gateways. She unwrapped it now, her fingers careful on its sharp edges. It did not reflect her face, only a distorted, dark swirl, like captured night.

The fear, which had been a low hum beneath her ribs, began to coil tighter in her stomach. This was the point of no return. Gathering the materials was one thing; a student could claim academic curiosity. But to use them, to draw the circle and place the components—that was an act of deliberate invocation. There would be no explaining this away.

She knelt in the center of the room. With a piece of chalk consecrated in salt, she began to draw. The circle had to be perfect. One break in the line, one incorrectly rendered sigil, and the entities would either fail to manifest or, worse, manifest unbound. Her arm moved in a smooth, sure arc. The chalk scraped against the concrete, the sound unnaturally loud in the dead air of the chamber.

She drew the outer containment ring first, then the inner triangle of manifestation. Between them, she inscribed the sigils of binding—complex, interlocking geometries that were less a cage and more a set of contractual clauses rendered in symbolic form. This was Jonathon’s specialty, the area of his work that the Concord had deemed ‘unorthodox.’ Not brute force, but magical legalese. A pact was a negotiation, he always said, and the circle was the document on which it was written.

Her hands moved with a memory of their own, a fluency born of years of practice under his tutelage. But inside, her thoughts were a frantic scramble. She was preparing a cage for tigers without knowing what bait to use. The act felt hollow, a pantomime of control.

Finally, it was done. The circle was a complex and beautiful thing on the drab floor, a perfect piece of magical theory. She stood and walked its perimeter, checking every line, every intersection. Perfect. She placed the components at the three points of the inner triangle: the bowl of silver, the vial of blood, the sliver of star-mirror. Her hands trembled, just once, as she set the mirror down. She clenched them into fists at her sides, forcing the tremor to stop.

She took a deep breath, the still air feeling thin in her lungs. She was ready. The room was sealed, the circle was drawn, the price of the bargain—a conduit to a mortal emotion, a rare and potent delicacy—was decided. Everything was in place. She knew the incantation by heart. She knew the risks. She knew this was an act of utter, irrevocable folly.

She took a deep breath, the still air feeling thin in her lungs. She was ready. The room was sealed, the circle was drawn, the price of the bargain—a conduit to a mortal emotion, a rare and potent delicacy—was decided. Everything was in place. She knew the incantation by heart. She knew the risks. She knew this was an act of utter, irrevocable folly.

Then she opened her mouth to speak, and the candle flame, which had been so steady, guttered wildly. It did not dance as if in a draft; there was no draft. It shrank and elongated, spasming as if the tallow itself were in pain. A profound cold began to seep from the concrete floor, not the damp chill of a basement but a dry, sterile cold that felt like it was actively leeching the warmth from her skin. It was the absence of heat, the absence of energy. The absence of life.

She began the incantation.

The words were ancient, predating the language she spoke by millennia. She had practiced them until they were smooth, but now, spoken aloud into the charged silence, they felt heavy and foreign on her tongue. Each syllable was a weight, a stone she had to lift and place carefully into the air. They vibrated in her jaw, a low thrum that seemed to come from her bones rather than her throat. It felt less like she was speaking and more like her body was being used as an instrument to broadcast a signal she did not fully understand.

The air thickened. The shadows cast by the frantic candle seemed to deepen, clinging to the corners of the room. With every verse of the summoning, the pressure in the chamber increased, a physical weight on her shoulders and the back of her neck.

And in the middle of it all, Jonathon’s voice surfaced in her memory. It was not a ghostly whisper but a clear, academic tone, the voice of a lecture he had given her years ago in his dusty study. Never let them know what you truly want. The moment they understand your core desire, they own it. And by extension, they own you. A demon negotiates with the want, not the person.

Her own voice did not falter. The incantation continued, a river of sound flowing out of her, but her mind, her actual consciousness, snagged on the memory.

The want.

Her want was simple. It was a raw, burning thing in the center of her chest. Who killed you? But she couldn’t ask that. To reveal that her goal was vengeance, or even justice, for Jonathon would be to hand them the perfect weapon. They would twist her grief, her loyalty, her anger. They would use her love for him to manipulate her every move. They would reshape the facts of his death until she couldn’t tell the killer from a friend, or from herself.

She needed a different problem for them to solve. A misdirection. A lie, intricate and plausible enough to occupy three ancient, hyper-intelligent beings.

The incantation was nearing its end. The cold was so intense now that her breath misted in the air. The raven’s blood in its vial began to vibrate, a faint, high-pitched hum emanating from the glass. The silver powder shifted, forming faint, geometric patterns in its bowl.

She had to give them a target. A goal. A fabricated obsession to mask her real one.

Her mind, usually so quick and ordered, was a frantic, blank space. What would a witch like her want, desperately enough to summon a Parliament of infernals? Power? Too broad. Wealth? Too vulgar. She was Jonathon’s apprentice. Her world was books, theories, artifacts.

An artifact. A grimoire.

The idea landed with a sense of relief so sharp it was almost painful. Yes. A stolen grimoire from Jonathon’s private collection. Something rare, something powerful. Something a rival might have killed him for. It was a perfect lie, a story that ran parallel to the truth, using its momentum. It explained the state of the study, the possibility of a struggle. It gave them a tangible object to search for.

The final verse of the incantation was on her lips. The candle flame shot up to a terrifying height, burning with a pure white light, and then extinguished, plunging the room into absolute darkness. But the circle on the floor began to glow with a faint, residual light of its own.

Her heart hammered against her ribs. The lie was good. It was solid.

But as the pressure in the room reached an unbearable peak, as the air itself seemed to tear open within the triangle of manifestation, a clean, sharp thought cut through her panic.

A stolen grimoire. Which one? What were its properties? Who was the rival she would accuse? What was their motive?

The lie had a shape, but no substance. It was a hollow shell. She had constructed the most intricate cage imaginable, and she was about to invite the tigers inside with no bait. The words of the incantation were gone from her mouth, the final syllable echoing in a space that was no longer empty.

And Sabina stood in the humming darkness, realizing with a jolt of pure, cold terror that she had absolutely no idea what she was going to say.