Private Hamrer Hippyer

[Arq*]

The year had thinned into the kind of tired gold that stained the Gilded Veil's curtains. Arq kept telling himself it was just a cycle — seasons folding into each other like the pleats of a well-worn costume — but the nights accumulated into a heavy sash around his ribs. Sommer had left like someone closing a favorite book without a bookmark: she'd said she'd return after "sorting things," and the word had been rearranged and repurposed by the passage of moons until it lost its original shape. For the first three months he tried to keep the house as if she might step back through the dressing-room curtain any minute: her comm-bracelet hanging on the peg where she always left it, the stage lights left dimmed to the amber she liked. By month six, the performers had new signatures to their bows; by month nine, the bartenders were writing her name on cocktail napkins as a ritual, and by the cycle's end the regulars were debating whether Sommer was a person or a story they told the newcomers for warmth.
Running the Veil alone was a form of performance art Arq neither asked for nor wanted to perfect. He could thread a crowd like a tailor — place a laugh here, a softened argument there, pull a patron away from a knife fight with a well-timed compliment — but the ledger of daily operations required a different muscle. Paperwork gnawed at his fingers; suppliers demanded favors in ways that made his rings buzz with uncomfortable familiarity; and the house's ancient ventilation system coughed up memories of cheaper smoke and worse secrets. Exhausted, he called for reinforcements the only way he knew how: he called Kael.​

 

[Kaelon Virex]

Kael arrived in a cloud of cigarette smoke and too-bright charm, a grin that did half his negotiations and a shoulder that did the other half. He had the kind of walk that suggested trouble and reconciliation could be accomplished in a single shrug. "Manager," Kael said when Arq offered him a chair and the duties of the night bar — which was a lie that suited both of them. He took the title as someone might accept a dare. The staff liked him immediately; he was the sort of man who could pivot from matching a drunk patron's tragic poetry to breaking up a brawl with a joke so sharp it drew blood from egos rather than skin. Arq kept the artistic direction — the shows, the dancers, the costumes — while Kael made the books stop bleeding.

 

[Arq*]

At first, the arrangement was a thing of rare domestic felicity. Arq, who adored ritual and spectacle, rebuilt the show schedules like a priest rewriting liturgy; Kael smoothed out the nights like a surgeon suturing a wound. They filled Sommer-sized silences with gossip: whispers of where she had gone, theories about why, rumors that evaporated the instant you tried to hold them. Kael flirted with the house's tempers and then disarmed them. He paid back a debt to a supplier with a pleasurable smirk; he convinced a crooked inspector to look the other way with a private show and an even more private promise. The Veil hummed. For a while, that was enough.


Then the year became a full cycle and the emptiness became an ache you could trip over in the hallway. Letters came — bills, business notices, a few postcards from planets nobody wanted to admit to visiting — but no Sommer. People began to lean into absence. Fans started wearing little, unofficial blue ribbons. A dancer named Collee wore a strip of Sommer's old stage fabric stitched into her costume as if the weave might carry a scent back through space. Arq painted a small portrait of Sommer and hid it backstage; sometimes he'd sit alone with it, balancing a cup of bitter tea on his knee while the portrait watched him with impossible, painted patience.


It was on a night when rain sounded like a million tiny applause that the invitation arrived.


It came sealed with wax in a color that made Arq feel a cold memory: the exact blue of Sommer's eye-shadow the night she laughed too loud at a politician's funeral. The envelope was heavy with perfume — not the usual, floral signatures of the wealthy, but something earthy and unsettling, like crushed night-blooming fruit and the metallic tang of old rituals. No return address. No sigil Arq recognized, only a single line on the outside in a script that coiled like a sleeping snake: FOR THE VEIL.

 

[Kaelon Virex]

Kael held it between two fingers and read it aloud as if the syllables were a joke only he was allowed to tell. "You are cordially invited to witness the Unveiling," he announced, his voice taking on that ridiculous stage cadence that could make anyone believe they were in a better story. The letter asked for attendance at a location that didn't exist on any of the maps he knew, at an hour that meant nothing unless you believed in clocks set by moonlight. It promised revelations, and worse — it promised answers. Beneath the flourish of ink was a small, clean smear of something darker. Blood, perhaps. Or something that wanted to be mistaken for blood.

 

[Arq*]

Arq, who lived for the theatrics, wanted to accept immediately and spend the next week designing an entrance — something with silk, and shattered mirrors, and the kind of smoke that told confessions before the words arrived. Kael, who had a healthy respect for both trouble and its consequences, wanted to throw it in the kitchen sink and forget it. They compromised by doing what they always did: they treated it like a show. They prepared.

They sent three envoys — a bartender named Mox with a jaw that could take a punch and still smile, a dancer called Lyssa who could slip into a crowd like a shadow slips into the corners of a room, and a tech-savant named Jerr who had a fondness for illegal listening devices. The trio left under the pretense of a supplier run and returned hours later with stories that tasted of fever: a road with no markers, statues of something between animal and god, a chapel adorned with mirrors that reflected other people's faces back at them in the wrong order. They claimed the invitation had felt like a hand closing around their palms, like a promise of being seen. Mox's knuckles were bruised as if he'd been in a scuffle. Lyssa had something slashed along her forearm that bled a bright, oily red that did not match the regular hurt of a blade. Jerr refused to meet Kael's eyes.

 

[Arq*]

"It's not a joke," Mox said. He said it like someone naming a fault in the universe he wished to ignore. "They sang at dawn. They called themselves an order. They—" He stopped, and the rest of the sentence became the kind of whisper you only hear when you're trying not to wake someone sleeping. "They called to someone."

Arq wanted to laugh, because laughter was sometimes how he kept from howling. He wanted the absurdity of it: a cult, a secret ceremony, an invitation addressed in a handwriting that looked like a lover's. He wanted to name the situation and pin it on the wall like a butterfly. But there was a seed of attention beneath his theatrics that unfurled itself in the dark: this could be a stage, yes. It could be a trap, also. It could be the lever that moves the world under the floorboards of the Veil.

So they decided to go. Not all of them — not the whole company — but a troupe: Arq, Kael, Mox, Lyssa and Jerr. They would go like actors on a mission, wearing the armor of spectacle.