The rain smudged the London skyline into a watercolor of gray as Elias Voss bent over his workbench in the British Library's conservation studio. The air smelled of aged paper, lemon oil, and the faint, iron tang of rain seeping through the stone walls. For three hours, he'd been mending a 17th-century grimoire, its leather cover cracked like parched earth, its pages brittle as dead leaves.
His tweezers hovered over a torn section of vellum when it happened.
A faint, silver glow seeped from the ink of a handwritten spell.
Elias froze. He'd worked on hundreds of old books, but none had ever glowed. He blinked, thinking it was a trick of the fluorescent lights—until the glow spread, painting the air above the page with a translucent figure: a man in a tattered velvet robe, his face half-obscured by a hood, whispering words that didn't make sense. The figure flickered, like a film reel stuck on a frame, before vanishing.
"Bloody hell," Elias muttered, rubbing his eyes. He'd pulled all-nighters for the past week; maybe he was hallucinating.
But when he leaned in again, the glow returned. This time, he saw more: the robed man pressing a knife to the throat of a young woman, her eyes wide with terror. The scene dissolved into static, leaving only the cold, damp air of the studio.
His phone buzzed on the bench. It was Detective Maeve Carter, an old university friend who'd dragged him into more than one "weird artifact" case.
"Elias," her voice was sharp, urgent. "I need you at a crime scene in Camden. Now."
"Another antique heist?" He tried to keep his tone casual, even as his hands shook.
"Worse. A street artist was found dead in his studio. The walls are covered in symbols—like nothing I've ever seen. And the coroner says his body has… burn marks. Not from fire. From something else."
Elias stared at the glowing grimoire. The echoes he'd seen, the symbols Maeve mentioned… it couldn't be a coincidence.
"I'll be there in 20 minutes."
He locked the grimoire in a climate-controlled case, his mind racing. For as long as he could remember, he'd had a knack for sensing "leftovers"—the faint energy of events that had happened in a place. But this was different. This wasn't just a feeling. It was a vision.
By the time he reached Camden, the rain had turned into a downpour. Maeve was waiting outside a graffiti-covered warehouse, her trench coat soaked through. She led him inside, where the air reeked of spray paint and something acrid, like burnt ozone.
The artist's body was covered with a sheet, but the walls were impossible to miss. They were covered in swirling, silver symbols—exactly like the ones in the grimoire. And in the center of the chaos, a single word was scrawled in blood:
ECHO
Maeve turned to him, her eyes dark with worry. "You see it, don't you? This isn't just gang violence. It's… magic."
Elias traced a symbol with his finger. The moment his skin made contact, another vision hit him: the robed man from the library, standing in this very studio, pressing the same knife to the artist's throat. "You saw too much," the man hissed. "The Veil cannot be lifted."
The vision vanished. Elias stumbled back, his heart pounding.
"The Veil," he whispered. "What is that?"
Maeve shook her head. "That's what I need you to find out. Because whoever killed this guy… they're hunting people who can see the echoes. And you're next."