The lock on the Vance Conservatory was forged from silent spells and cold iron, and it had not been broken. The window panes were veined with warding runes, and they were not cracked. Yet the Whispering Orrery, a clockwork galaxy of silver and screaming gems, was gone. Inspector Alistair Finch stood in the velvet-draped room, the absence of the artifact so loud it felt like a ringing in his ears. It was, his gut told him, the signature of a ghost.
His ghost had a name: Elara. They’d found her curled in a nearby alley, a dusting of frost on her eyelashes, one delicate, star-shaped cog from the Orrery clutched in her hand. She was the city’s most infamous somnambulist.
“I was asleep,” she’d said at the precinct, her voice soft as moth wings. She was wrapped in a coarse grey blanket, looking like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. “I am always asleep.”
Finch circled the interrogation room. The girl had a natural Rizz about her, an unnerving sincerity that made the impossible sound plausible. It was a known phenomenon in Penumbra, that inexplicable pull some people had. Hers was potent. “An entire, guarded conservatory, Miss Elara. You floated through walls, did you?”
“My dreams are… vivid,” she offered. “Sometimes I walk. I don’t choose the destination.”
He’d seen her file. A long history of nocturnal wanderings, of waking up in gardens and on rooftops. Her wealthy family had tried everything—doctors, mystics, chains on the door. Nothing worked. Was she a master thief using a lifelong ailment as the perfect cover, or was she just, as the street kids would say, delulu? Lost in a fantasy of her own making?
“The victim, Caspian Vance, is calling for your head on a pike,” Finch said, changing tactics. Caspian was the worst kind of nepo baby, inheriting a collection of wonders he couldn’t begin to understand. The way his smile never reached his eyes when Finch had interviewed him earlier had given the Inspector the ick, a profound, instinctual revulsion.
“He shouldn’t have had it,” Elara whispered, looking at her own pale hands. “It was unhappy.”
Finch paused. “The Orrery was… unhappy?”
“It was screaming. In my sleep, I could hear it. A little silver song of pain.”
This was new. The case was twisting. It was supposed to be a simple theft. Now it was becoming a bizarre side quest into the esoteric. “So you staged a rescue mission in your pajamas?” he asked, the sarcasm a thin shield.
“I don’t think I stole it,” she said, her gaze turning inward. “I think I… manifested it. I wanted it to be safe so badly that my dream pulled it to me.”
Finch ran a hand over his tired face. Manifestation. A power only the most potent dreamers were rumored to possess. He’d always dismissed it as folklore. But the crime scene… no forced entry, no tripped wards. It was giving preternatural. It was giving him a headache.
Was she trying to gaslight him? To make him question the very fabric of reality to cover a simple, albeit brilliant, heist? He conducted a silent vibe check, a little trick of his own, focusing his intent and trying to read the resonance of the room. He felt no deceit from her, only a vast, oceanic confusion and a current of deep, empathetic sorrow.
He left her in the cell and went back to his office, pulling up the old city archives. The Elara family line was riddled with mystics, seers, and oneiromancers—masters of the dream-world. A century ago, an ancestor was recorded as having “dream-walked a ship full of spices from the harbor to the town square” to protest high tariffs. It was a forgotten history, a power that had faded into myth.
Maybe Elara wasn’t in her villain era. Maybe she was in her ‘accidental messiah’ era.
The next night, Finch didn’t go home. He sat in his darkened office, watching the city lights. Around 3 a.m., his precinct’s own magical detector, a contraption of brass and humming crystals, began to chime softly. It was tracking a small, unregistered locus of power moving through the city. Finch grabbed his coat.
He followed the signal to the Old Aqueduct, a ribbon of stone and moss arching over the slumbering canals. And there she was. Elara, in a simple white nightgown, walking along the precipice as sure-footedly as if it were a garden path. Her eyes were closed, her face serene. She was not walking, he realized. She was gliding an inch above the stone.
She stopped, her hands outstretched as if feeling for something in the air. Finch watched, breathless, as a faint shimmer appeared before her. It coalesced, spun, and solidified. It was the Whispering Orrery, assembling itself out of moonlight and memory, the star-shaped cog from her hand the final piece to click into place. It hummed a quiet, contented tune, its gem-tipped constellations pulsing with gentle light. It wasn’t stolen; it was recalled.
Elara’s dream-self reached out and caressed one of the silver rings. She hadn’t stolen the Orrery. She had called it home.
Finch knew what he had to do. The law had its place, but Penumbra had its own, deeper rules.
His final report was a work of fiction. He detailed an elaborate insurance scam by Caspian Vance, citing evidence of a flawless replica and a carefully staged disappearance. He painted Vance as a desperate man trying to maintain a lifestyle he couldn’t afford. The real Orrery, he wrote, had likely been sold on the black market months ago.
When they released Elara, Finch was waiting. He handed her a small, lead-lined box. “For your nocturnal travels,” he said gruffly. “It dampens the signal. Try to dream of less expensive things.”
She gave him a small, knowing smile, the first he’d seen. It was a smile that understood the strange justice of their city, a place where the most solid alibi could be found in the heart of a dream.
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