An Hour Short of Forever

Archmage Ottavian Morcere

Victim NPC

The greatest wizard of the age, dead in his observatory an hour before his scheduled, chartered, lawful death. He is smiling. The invitations to his Deathday said formal dress, no resurrection magic.

Corvin Ashe

Suspect

First Apprentice of Ninespire, twenty years in service — the man everyone assumed would inherit the tower. Polished, proprietorial, and tonight the color of cold ash.

Liria Venn

Suspect

The youngest apprentice — a scrivener-prodigy whose star fell hard this year: a burned thesis, a broken engagement, a reputation quietly ruined. She keeps her ink-stained hands folded and her eyes down. When she is…

Thessaly Bran

Suspect

The artificer-apprentice — burn-scarred fingers, a jeweler's loupe on a chain, builder of half the tower's wonders. She speaks of the phylactery the way pilgrims speak of shrines.

Dorian Vex

Suspect

The demonologist-apprentice — chalk dust on black sleeves, a courteous young man who talks to something in the cellar and calls it a colleague.

Marrowick

Witness

The tower's bound demon — soot-black, silver-eyed, contract-collared, kept as furniture and consulted like an oracle. It has spent a year counting down to midnight, aloud, gleefully, at meals.

Seraphine Morcere

Witness

The Archmage's wife — dead ten years, and still the hostess. She passes through walls but not the front gate; the vow that keeps her here is older than most of the guests.

Sister Hesper Vayle

Suspect

The church's licensed witness to the rite — gray habit, iron composure, and a warhammer she calls ceremonial. She was alone with the phylactery at the wrong hour, and everyone knows it.

Aurelio Grath

Suspect

Syndic of the Arcanists' Bourse — velvet, ledgers, condolences priced to move. He holds paper on the tower, and he arrived with an executor's patience already spent.

Odile Ferrant

Witness

The alchemist of the rite — stained apron over funeral silk. She mixed the severance oils to the master's own corrected formula, and has been rereading her notes all night like a woman rechecking a sum that will not…

Benedikt Crane

Witness

Body-servant to the Archmage for forty years — keys at his belt, grief in his collar, the only man alive who knows which floorboards complain.

Isaure Morcere

Detective

The estranged daughter — renounced magic, renounced the name, arrived in traveling black with no luggage to speak of. She says she has come to watch her father die. She has said it twice, in case anyone missed it.