"This is all we have. Rumors, mostly. Reports from patrolling Templars about strange occurrences in the Old City. Nothing concrete. No name."
Vale takes the folder and opens it. The first report is eight years old: a Templar investigating ghost sightings in the warehouse district had found evidence of necromantic activity but no necromancer to attach it to. There had been residual magic in the air, a trail that led nowhere, as if the practitioner had simply vanished. The spirits that had been reported in the area had all moved on peacefully before the Templar arrived. Whoever had been there had finished their work and left nothing behind but the faint scent of ozone and a conspicuous absence of ghosts.
The next report is the same. And the next. And the next. The pattern is so consistent it stops being coincidence and starts painting a picture.
Over eight years, various Templars had investigated dozens of incidents of suspected necromancy in the Old City. Every time,they found spirits who had already passed on. Every time, there were traces of death magic but no evidence of binding or control. Every time, the locals claimed they didn't know who had been there and couldn't say where they'd gone, with the kind of vague, unhelpful politeness that means they know exactly who it was and wouldn't tell a Templar if their lives depended on it. The residents of the Old City are not, it seems, inclined to assist Templars investigating their own neighborhood. As long as a necromancer isn't raising the dead to terrorize them, they don't particularly care about having one in their midst.
They call him The Speaker.
Vale carries the reports to a research table and spreads them across the surface, sinking into a wooden chair that is considerably more comfortable than the one in Cael's office. Eight years of quiet, meticulous work. An unknown necromancer helping spirits move on, never raising the dead, never causing harm. The reports note that violent hauntings in the Old City decreased substantially during this period. Reports of wayward spirits and restless ghosts nearly stopped entirely. The district's ambient unease, the low-grade dread that always accompanies restless dead, is all but absent.
The Speaker hadn't just been helping individual spirits. He'd been cleaning up the entire district, one ghost at a time.
The reports raise more questions than they answer, but they clarify one thing that's been nagging at him. If this necromancer has only been speaking to spirits, guiding the dead onward rather than dragging them back, then the power expenditure would be minimal compared to the kind of magic required to open rifts. A psychopomp practicing carefully, using death magic in small, controlled amounts, could theoretically work for a decade or more before the corruption reached critical stages.
More importantly, this is not the work of a monster.
This is the work of someone who sees suffering and can't look away, even though every use of their power is slowly killing them. Someone who has been poisoning himself for the better part of a decade to ease the pain of others, not because anyone asked him to, not because anyone thanked him for it, but because the pain was there and he could do something about it and that was enough.
"Damn," Vale mutters.
Fiora looks up from her book. "Find what you need?"
He did not find what he needs. What he needs is for this to be simple. What he needs is for the necromancer he chased through the cemetery to be the same one tearing open rifts, so he can catch him and close the case and sleep for the first time in two weeks. What he got instead is a man who comforts ghosts and is dying for it, and a case that just got considerably more complicated.
Vale closes the folder. "Is there anything on the recent rift activity? Anything that might connect?"
"Separate file." She pulls another folder, this one considerably thicker. "The rift attacks started about three weeks ago. The pattern doesn't match typical necromantic practice. These are forced openings, crude and unstable, as though someone is trying to breach the veil through raw power rather than skill."
Vale takes that folder and starts reading. Fiora is right. The rift attacks show none of the careful control evident in The Speaker's work, or in most practiced necromancy, for that matter. Necromancers must choose their battles carefully to prolong their lives. Opening a cluster of rifts in such a short window is ruinously taxing. Whoever is doing this is powerful and burning through time they don't have, spending their remaining days with the reckless abandon of someone who has already decided how this ends.
But as Vale reads deeper, something stops him cold.
The magical signature left at each rift site isn't purely necromantic. There's something else threaded through it, something that makes his skin prickle with uneasy recognition. Woven into the death magic, faint but unmistakable, are traces of holy energy. They are corrupted, twisted beyond their original purpose, but holy in origin.
Vale knows that signature. He's carried it in his own veins for three hundred years.
Whoever is opening these rifts isn't just a necromancer. They're a Templar.
He reads the reports again, more carefully this time, and the picture that emerges turns his stomach. The ritual sites are old, pre-Order, as the necromancer in the cemetery had claimed. But the method of breaching the veil uses techniques that combine death magic with a bastardized form of holy blessing. It's not something a necromancer could learn from books or from practice. It requires firsthand knowledge of Templar rites, the kind of knowledge that only comes from years of training within the Order itself. The kind of knowledge Vale carries in his bones.
Vale sits back in his chair, staring at the reports without seeing them.
A Templar practicing death magic. A Templar opening rifts. It should be impossible. Holy magic and death magic are fundamentally opposed, two forces that destroy each other on contact. The corruption alone would be devastating. A Templar's body is saturated with holy energy from decades of blessings and rites, and introducing death magic into that system would be an act of deliberate self-destruction. The conflict between the two forces would tear a person apart from the inside.
Unless that person was willing to pay the price. Unless they were desperate enough, or angry enough, to endure it.
"Fiora." Vale's voice is quieter now. "I need records on Templars who've left the Order. Specifically anyone who was recovered. Rescued as a child. Brought into the church young."
Fiora gives him a long, searching look. She's been doing this for two hundred years, and she knows what that kind of request means. "That's a different kind of request, Vale."
"I know."
She disappears again. This time she's gone longer, and when she returns, she's carrying a sealed box rather than a folder. The seal bears the mark of the Order's program for recovering children from dangerous magical environments and raising them within the church. It's a program the Order is proud of publicly and considerably less transparent about privately, which in Vale's experience is a reliable indicator that something is wrong with it.
"These records are restricted," Fiora says, setting the box down. "Sanctus clearance required."
"I have operational authority on the rift case. That supersedes archival restrictions."
