Wraithblood: The Elixir, Episode 1

Your father was a slave trader.

You are Nerina Strake, the best locksmith, trapbuilder, engineer, and clockmaker in the city of Istarinmul. Your father was Niall Strake, the best slave trader in the Empire of Nighmar, so clever he eluded the Ghosts, the Emperor’s spies and assassins, for decades. But when the Ghosts confronted your father’s patron, Niall Strake recognized which way the wind was blowing, so he left the Empire of Nighmar, fleeing south to the Padishah’s capital of Istarinmul.

And there he prospered, feeding Istarinmul’s endless appetite for fresh slaves.

You were an afterthought, the youngest of your father’s children, his only daughter. No doubt he planned to marry you off to a business partner at the cheapest possible dowry.

But you are a little…strange.

As far back as you can remember, you were obsessed with numbers. Mathematics, you realize, provides the underlying truth of the universe – all else is merely a physical expression of the underlying mathematical reality. You did not learn to speak until you were seven – but you did your first equation at the age of three.

You baffled your father…but Niall Strake was not the sort of man to let any opportunity for profit pass him by. He apprenticed you to locksmiths, to jewelers, to engineers and clockmakers, and you absorbed every scrap of knowledge they shared. By fifteen, you could surpass them all, and Niall Strake was known as an excellent slave trader and the finest locksmith and trapmaker in Istarinmul…selling the devices you built. And as you grew older, you came to loathe your father, as his cruelty and hard heart became more apparent.

So to keep you under control, on your eighteenth birthday he began dosing your food with wraithblood.

After that, the suffering of his slaves…didn’t matter quite so much.

A few years later, the hallucinations began. You didn’t care…they were beautiful, sublime, and you spent enormous sums to buy more and more wraithblood, neglecting your work and clients. But soon the hallucinations turned nightmarish, and yet you could not stop drinking vial after vial of wraithblood.

In desperation, you went to the priests of the Threefold King, who strapped you to a bed for two weeks and ignored you as you screamed and raved and sobbed and cursed. It has now been almost six months since that, and six years since the first vial of wraithblood. Your father and brothers are dead, murdered by his business rivals, and you have serious problems.

Debt, for one. In the depths of your madness, you borrowed huge sums to support your wraithblood addiction and to pay off your other creditors. Now the money is gone, and the wolves are at the door. If you don’t find the money within two weeks, they’ll sell you in slavery to cover the debts. You don’t believe in the gods, or the divine election of the Padishah, or in love, or in the mercy of your fellow men. You believe in numbers, in equations…but you can’t find a way to balance your own equation in a way that doesn’t end with you in chains upon an auction block.

And sometimes you want a vial of wraithblood so badly that your hands shake at the thought of it.

There might be a way out, however.

A man named Raggan has invited you to join a business “enterprise” that you suspect is more than slightly illegal, given how Raggan is a notorious smuggler. But if it works, you can raise enough money to cover your debts, or at least buy some time…

A knock at your workshop door (a massive thing built of reinforced steel) interrupts your thoughts.

You slide open the steel plate covering the small window and peer outside.

You see the dusty street outside your workshop, the noon sun blazing against the whitewashed walls. A man stands at your door, wrapped in a cloak of fine blue silk – too fine for this neighborhood. However, across the street you notice two toughs lurking in the alley, eyeing the blue-cloaked man with obvious avarice.

Even as you watch, the toughs cross the street, making for the blue-cloaked man.

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