Run: 2026-02-20-01KHY7VNG48F6JDNBF4S75KKQ3

The air in the abandoned Tube station tasted of damp concrete and something else, something acrid and faintly floral – the scent of burnt rosemary, Detective Harlow Quinn thought, wrinkling her nose. Rain hammered against the vaulted ceiling, a relentless, grey drumbeat that did little to mask the low hum of energy that vibrated beneath her feet. The Veil Market. It always smelled like this. She adjusted the worn leather strap of her watch, the rhythmic tick a small, solid counterpoint to the unsettling stillness of the place. DS Morris would have called it chaotic, a riot of illicit transactions and whispered bargains. Quinn preferred to think of it as a carefully constructed fraud. “Anything?” she asked, her voice clipped and deliberate, as she approached Eva Kowalski, who was meticulously photographing a pile of iridescent scales scattered on a stained concrete slab. Eva, bundled in a too-large raincoat, nervously tucked a stray curl behind her round glasses. “Just… this,” Eva said, her voice barely audible above the rain. “They seem to be from a Duskwing moth, heavily processed. Not natural. And the residue… it’s a Class Three alchemical stimulant. Rare, and extremely expensive. Usually only available to the higher-level merchants.” Quinn knelt, pulling out a small, sterile kit from her satchel. The kit felt reassuringly familiar, a small pocket of order in this swirling vortex of the bizarre. She carefully collected samples of the scales, placing them in evidence bags. “Expensive doesn’t automatically equal criminal, Eva. It could be a collector.” “A collector who’s deliberately contaminating a moth’s exoskeleton? And who’s using a Class Three stimulant as a base for some kind of… ritual?” Eva’s fingers tightened around her camera. “The pattern, Detective, it’s not random. There’s intentionality. And it’s layered.” The victim, a Mr. Silas Blackwood, lay sprawled on his back amongst the scales. He was dressed in an ostentatious velvet smoking jacket, the fabric now stained a sickly purple. A single, perfectly formed rose, crafted entirely from obsidian, rested on his chest. It wasn’t the rose itself that bothered Quinn – these kinds of morbid trinkets were commonplace in the Market – but the way it was placed. It hadn’t simply been placed; it had been forced. There were faint, silvery lines marring the velvet around the base of the rose, almost invisible unless you knew what to look for. “Cause of death?” Quinn asked, her eyes scanning the scene. “Internal bleeding,” Eva replied, consulting her digital notepad. “Sharp force trauma. Likely inflicted with a bladed instrument. The wounds are… inconsistent. Almost like they were deliberately obscured.” Quinn noticed something else. The tracks. Not footprints, exactly. More like… impressions. Faint, shimmering outlines on the damp concrete, too subtle to register without a specific lens. She pulled out a small magnifying glass from her kit. As she focused, the impressions solidified, revealing themselves as the claw marks of a creature that wasn't entirely animal. “There’s something else here,” she said, her voice low. “Something that isn't human.” “You don’t think…” Eva hesitated, her freckled face pale. “A Shade?” Quinn didn’t answer directly. She moved to a side wall, running her gloved hand along the rough concrete. There, almost concealed by a layer of grime, was a faint etching – a stylized depiction of a serpent coiled around a key. The same symbol was etched into the handle of a small, ornate dagger discovered clutched in Blackwood’s hand. “The Serpent’s Key,” Quinn murmured, consulting the mental database she’d cultivated over years of dealing with the Market. “A symbol of access. To what, precisely, remains unclear. But it’s tied to several unresolved cases of disappearances and… unusual deaths. All linked to this Market.” “Blackwood was a collector,” Eva offered, her voice still shaky. “He specialized in rare artifacts, particularly ones with… occult significance.” “He was also a negotiator,” Quinn corrected. “He dealt with the bad actors here. And he was about to expose something.” She held up the Veil Compass, its brass casing gleaming faintly in the dim light. The needle frantically spun, then settled, pointing directly at the rose on Blackwood's chest. “The Compass is reacting to the rose,” Eva said, her eyes widening. “It’s… pulling towards the residual energy. It’s not just a compass, Detective. It’s a tracker of the woven.” “The woven,” Quinn echoed, the phrase tasting like ash in her mouth. It referred to the underlying network of supernatural connections that bound the Veil Market together – the ley lines, the pocket dimensions, the shadowy entities that drifted through the spaces between realities. Suddenly, a voice cut through the rain and the hum of energy. "Impressive, Detective. Truly impressive.” Standing at the entrance to the chamber, bathed in the pale light filtering through a gap in the ceiling, was Inspector Davies. He was a politician's choice, someone who favored bureaucracy over investigation, and a staunch believer in the mundane. He wore a perfectly tailored suit that seemed oddly out of place in the dilapidated station. “I wasn’t aware you were using… esoteric equipment,” Davies said, his tone laced with thinly veiled disapproval. “We’ve already secured the perimeter. Standard procedure. We’re prioritizing a straightforward murder investigation.” “Straightforward?” Quinn raised an eyebrow. “A man murdered with a bladed instrument, his body marked with the sign of the Serpent’s Key, and a sibylline rose placed deliberately on his chest? That’s your definition of straightforward, Davies?” “The Market is a den of iniquity, Quinn. It’s best to treat it as such. Focus on the criminal element, the potential smuggling rings, the gambling debts. Leave the… mythmaking to the specialists.” Quinn ignored him, turning her attention back to the details. “Eva, run a spectral analysis on the rose. I want to know everything about it – its material composition, its energy signature, its history.” She pointed to the shimmering impressions on the floor. “And I want you to enhance those tracks. See if you can identify the creature that left them.” Davies shifted uncomfortably. “Quinn, I don’t have the resources for—” “I’ll requisition them,” Quinn said, her voice hardening. “Someone needs to understand what happened here. Someone needs to find out why a Shade would go to such lengths to mark a dead man.” She looked back at the rose, a prickle of unease crawling across her skin. The Veil Compass continued to spin, relentlessly pulling her deeper into the labyrinthine secrets of the Veil Market. She felt it, a cold thread connecting Blackwood’s death to something ancient, something profoundly dark. And she knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that Davies was wrong. This wasn't just a murder. This was a summoning.