The signed documents in Lutz's portfolio felt like a live thing, a captured bird of prey that needed to be caged properly before it could truly be called his. The euphoria of the successful swindle was a fleeting luxury; now came the meticulous, unglamorous work of making the deception legally, financially, and operationally real.
His first stop was the Imperial Patent Office, a place that seemed to deliberately cultivate an atmosphere of slow, grinding permanence to discourage all but the most determined. The grand marble halls echoed with the soft clicks of official stamps and the low murmur of clerks. He bypassed the general inquiry line, heading directly for the desk of a senior filing clerk he'd discreetly greased with silver during his reconnaissance days prior.
"Mr. Morgan," the clerk, a man named Flynn with a perpetually tired expression, said with a nod of recognition. "You have the completed application?"
"I do," Lutz said, sliding the thick vellum folder across the polished wood. It contained not only the formal application, painstakingly filled out, but also Filip's detailed schematics for the nail driver, which Gene had advised constituted a "reduction to practice," strengthening the patent claim. The most critical page was the assignment document, now bearing Filip's flamboyant signature, legally transferring all rights to "The Northern Star Import & Export Co."
Flynn took the bundle, his fingers moving with practiced efficiency. He checked the signatures, verified the notary's seal—another small fee Lutz had paid to a public notary in a stuffy office an hour earlier—and began affixing a series of stamps to the cover sheet. Each thwack of the imperial seal was a hammer blow nailing down a piece of Filip's future. Lutz then paid the filing fee—5 Gold Hammers—from his dwindling purse, receiving a formal, stamped receipt in return. The invention was now officially "patent-pending" under the empire's protection, and more importantly, legally owned by his shell company. It was the first, and most important, lock on the cage.
Next, he went to the Bureau of Corporate Registry, a less grand but equally bureaucratic institution. Here, he submitted the articles of incorporation for both "Filip Innovations" and the reinstatement papers for "The Northern Star." This process was a symphony of paperwork. He provided the lists of directors—himself for Northern Star, Filip and himself for Filip Innovations—the stated business purposes ("manufacture and sale of mechanical apparatuses" for Filip Innovations; "holding and management of investments and intellectual property" for Northern Star), and the capital structures.
The clerk, a young woman with ink-stained cuffs, scrutinized the documents. "The ownership of Filip Innovations is listed as eighty percent to Northern Star, twenty percent to Mr. Filip himself," she stated, verifying the fact.
"Indeed," Lutz replied smoothly. "A structure to incentivize the creative talent while ensuring stable, long-term management." It was the same lie, repackaged for a different audience, and it was accepted with a nod. More stamps, more fees. Another three Hammers vanished from his purse. The companies now existed not just as ideas, but as legal entities in the eyes of the Feysacian state, capable of entering contracts, owning property, and being sued.
As the carriage carried him back towards Vesper Lane, the late afternoon sun casting long, golden shadows through the hazy air, he allowed himself to process the day. The administrative fortress was built. The legal moat was filled. The financial drawbridge was raised and lowered at his command.
'After all that paperwork and the fees, only 17 Hammers left, if this doesn't go well, I'm really fucked, i should start looking around the good districts for targets to hit.'
His thoughts turned to the future. The Northern Star can't just be a name on paper, he mused, watching the cityscape roll by. Once the money starts flowing, it needs a presence. An office, a manager to handle the day-to-day correspondence, a ledger to make the cash flows look legitimate. He mentally allocated a portion of the 100 Hammers he'd set aside for the shell company to this future expansion. It was an inevitable cost of scaling the deception.
He arrived home as the sky was turning a deep, purple and orange twilight. The familiar scent of beeswax and simmering stew was a welcome anchor after a day spent in the soulless halls of bureaucracy. Eliza had prepared a simple but hearty dinner, and he sat with her, making polite conversation about her day, the quality of the bread, the price of vegetables. The normalcy of it was a strange, comforting contrast to the predatory financial engineering he had just completed.
After dinner, he retreated to his study to keep studying Jotun, the silence of the house a palpable presence. After 1 and a half hours of studying, he tidied himself up and went to sleep, as always, with creed under his pillow.
The sleep that finally claimed Lutz was not the deep, oblivious void of the innocent. It was the thin, brittle crust over a lake of perpetual vigilance, a habit carved into his soul by the desperate nights in Indaw Harbor.
So around 3 hours later, when the sound came—a faint, almost imperceptible scuff, the whisper of a floorboard bearing weight it wasn't accustomed to—he didn't just wake up. He surfaced. Instantly, completely, his heart hammering a silent alarm against his ribs.
His eyes snapped open, absorbing the absolute darkness of his bedroom. He didn't move, didn't even breathe deeply. He simply listened, every fiber of his being tuned to the frequency of threat. The sound hadn't come from the street or the basement. It was closer. Internal. It came from across the second-floor landing.
Eliza's room.
The thought was a cold spike of adrenaline. The harmless, earnest girl who worried about stew and dusting. A target, not because of anything she was, but because of who he was.
His hand slid with practiced silence under his pillow, his fingers closing around the cool, familiar hilt of Creed. The moment he gripped it, a subtle clarity washed over him, sharpening the edges of the shadows, clarifying the faint sounds of the sleeping city outside his window. His mind, still groggy with sleep, felt like a smudged lens suddenly wiped clean, although with hunger and desire.
He slid from the bed, his bare feet making no sound on the polished wood floor. He moved like a thief, pressing himself against the wall beside his bedroom door. He leaned his head close to the wood, his ear straining. There it was again. Not a scuff this time, but a soft, wet, rhythmic sound. A stifled sob. Then a faint creak—the sound of a body shifting weight on a bed.
'She's crying? Being held hostage? They're probably looking for me and found her instead, because I left her the bigger bedroom...'
He needed an advantage. His eyes darted to the small nightstand. Inside the drawer, nestled in a velvet pouch, was his other tool: Night's Melody. The whistle felt cool and strangely dense in his hand, its surface like a captured piece of a starless night sky, the three holes on top seeming to drink the faint ambient light. The moment his skin made contact, a wave of lethargy washed over him, a heavy blanket trying to smother his alertness. It was the artifact's passive effect, a constant stream of sleepiness on the wearer. A price is always exacted, he thought, fighting back a yawn.
He returned to the door, the whistle cold against his lips. He took a deep, silent breath, and began to blow, his fingers hovering but not pressing any of the holes.
It was a breath given form, a low, haunting, and profoundly weary melody that seemed to seep not through the air, but through the very substance of the night itself. The First Melody: Melody of Slumber.
The effect was immediate and insidious. The already quiet house seemed to sink into a deeper, more profound silence, as if the walls themselves were dozing off. The faint sobbing sound from Eliza's room started to hitch.
And Lutz felt it. A leaden weight pressed down on his own eyelids. His thoughts moving through syrup. He had just woken up; his body was already pleading for rest. The artifact's effect was biting deep, even with its effect on the user reduced, it was still potent. He focused, gritting his teeth, pouring his will into the continuous, soft exhalation. Ten seconds. Just ten.
It felt like an eternity. Each second was a battle against the overwhelming urge to simply slide down the wall and surrender to the melody he was creating. He counted in his head, a stark, numerical anchor in the sea of encroaching sleep. …seven… eight… nine… TEN.
He stopped, pulling the whistle from his lips with a gasp, as if coming up for air. The melody ceased, but the oppressive, sleepy atmosphere it had woven lingered in the air like a ghost. He shook his head, fighting the fog. He pinched the flesh on his forearm, hard, once, twice, three times, the sharp pain a welcome counterpoint to the lethargy. The adrenaline, Creed's augmentation, and his own sheer will formed a triage against the artifact's drawback.
Now was the moment. He used his Agile body and enhanced dexterity, turning the doorknob with infinitesimal slowness, preventing even the faintest click. He slipped out into the corridor, a phantom in his own home.
The hallway was pitch black, but his acquired senses, now slightly enhanced, sharpened his perception, painted the world in the night's shades of deep blue and grey. He could see the pattern on the runner, the grain of the wood on Eliza's door. The door was slightly ajar, open just a crack. A sliver of deeper darkness.
He moved towards it, his steps utterly silent. The sobbing had ceased. All was quiet. Too quiet. He leaned forward, his eye aligning with the crack in the door.
His vision, adept to such environments that were usual to a thief, pierced the gloom of Eliza's room. He saw her, lying on her bed. But her posture was wrong. She wasn't nestled comfortably. She was on her side, one arm dangling off the edge, as if she had been sitting up, perhaps startled awake, and then been forcibly laid back down by the overwhelming wave of the Melody of Slumber. The sight sent a fresh jolt of cold fury through him. She had been awake. Something had been in here with her.
In that exact moment, a primal instinct, honed in back-alley scuffles, screamed a warning. It wasn't a sound. It was a pressure change, a displacement of air to his left.
He reacted without thought. He jerked his head back from the door crack and simultaneously brought Night's Melody to his lips. His fingers, moving with the speed granted by his most recent potion, slapped down on the first and second holes. He blew.
The Third Melody: Melody of Slowness erupted from the whistle.
This sound was different from the first. It wasn't weary; it was thick, syrupy, a dissonant chord that seemed to congeal the very air. He felt its effect immediately—a strange, dragging sensation in his own muscles, as if he were moving through deep water. It was like his limbs had been injected with a sudden, profound fatigue.
As he blew the melody and felt the slowness seize him, a shape detached itself from the deeper shadows of Eliza's room, right beside the doorframe. It was a blur of motion, but a motion that suddenly became strained, bogged down. A hand, clutching a large, ordinary kitchen knife—one of his kitchen knives—lashed out from the darkness. The blade, meant for his throat, instead whistled past his face, the cold steel grazing the very tip of his nose with a sting of passing cold. He felt a single, warm drop of blood well up.
The force behind the thrust, even slowed, was tremendous. The knife buried itself deep into the wooden doorframe right where his head had been a millisecond before, the impact a solid, sickening thunk that vibrated through the quiet house.
Lutz used the momentum of his dodge and the augmented physique from Creed to propel himself backward in a controlled leap, putting several feet of corridor between himself and the attacker. He landed in a low crouch, his heart a wild drum in his chest, the taste of blood and fear sharp in his mouth. Night's Melody was still in his left hand, Creed held ready in his right.
He stared at the figure now fully emerging from the shadows near Eliza's door.
The Melody of Slowness was still in effect, its dissonant notes hanging in the air. The intruder's movements were labored, as if fighting against invisible chains. It was a man, dressed in dark, nondescript clothing that blended perfectly with the night. But it was the face, or what Lutz could see of it, that froze the blood in his veins.
The man's features were twisted in a rictus of rage and effort.
Lutz instantly recognized him, it was the man he had stole the stone-carved seal from, to get an invitation into the Winter Garden, it was Yevgeny Andariel.