Bereft: Foretold

45 | A Silver Ribbon

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Cage Meriwether was not a complicated man.

He enjoyed the pursuit of knowledge and found pleasure in learning, in indulging new experiences, and in seeing new sights. It was very much his drug of choice. Where others found psychological nourishment in the oblivion provided by a needle or by flavored smoke, Cage's nirvana was a well-thought puzzle or an intricate knot of problems. He rarely cared about the where, the what, the why, or the how of an enigma and its solution. Cage cared only for the end-result, the experience. There was no avenue he would not take to reach it.

Stabbing a man in the heart was not the greatest evil he'd committed in his chase for solutions. That old chestnut about knowledge being power was true—and that power often begot the attention of dangerous individuals, or led its holder into his own carefully wrought demise. Evil was the art of knowledge. Cage knew that well.

That selfish, if innocent, need to learn was what originally brought the studious augur into the presence of the King Below. He'd simply spoken aloud a name—a name lost to history, a name written only once in all of Terrestria's duration, an epithet so long buried in the crumbling wreckage of empires left to rot, it'd been nothing but a whisper breathed upon a stone slate. A whisper had been enough. In 1851, a bargain was struck, and Cage's life was forever altered.

Cage sighed through his nose and banished the thought as he strolled around the construct's outer limit, keeping pace with his own script woven in its middle. Lucian remained at the construct's head with his palm held prone before himself, feeding the convoluted circles a steady stream of energy. Cage passed behind those Black Iris boys who stood monitoring the spell's integrity, and they knew to keep their gazes lowered.

Never meet the devil's eye. An old saying in the syndicate, it'd begun life as a tongue-in-cheek phrase when Cage had founded their little congregation, but it'd since taken on a nefarious mien. Never meet his eye. That man's dangerous.

Brings a whole new meaning to 'does not play well with others,' Cage mused with a smile as he came to stand at Lucian's side.

"Why are you grinning?" the younger mage asked, a line forming between his brows. "This is not funny."

Cage only winked.

Lucian muttered something unintelligible before taking a breath, settling into the spell once more. His sleeve was rolled up to his elbow, and his veins were braced against his braced muscles. "You told him you were laying a spell upon that mana ampoule."

"I did, didn't I?" Cage tapped a finger against his chin. "When did you become so nosy, Luke?"

"You did nothing to that ampoule. What game are you playing now, Micajah?"

"Game? This is no time for a game! Why, there are lives at stake, Lucky Luke! Well—." Cage nodded at the body still laying prone in the construct in a pool of his own blood. "Not his. Already dead."

"Do you take anything seriously?"

His voice rose with anger and Cage paused their dialog to check on the witches. The youngest, Saule, was shaken after witnessing Cage stab Darius in the chest, and was now sitting against an interior wall with Mistress Voronin attempting to coax her into drinking something. The other women, Mistress Stavros and her own coven member, were watching the mages with covered, attentive gazes. They didn't trust Lucian's boys anymore than Cage trusted her.

"You allowed yourself to be captured."

Cage glanced at Lucian, waiting for the question.

"Why allow them to snare you again? You will not always be able to get free. They will find a way to pin you, eventually. Or they'll kill you out right."