As someone who spent her entire life wearing down the soles of her shoes on the San Francisco hills, she counted herself as pretty fit. But the stairs of the Aerie were built by people who didn’t care about comfort or ease of use. If anything, they went out of their way to do the exact opposite of those things.
Running the fingers of one hand over the bumps of her hasty braid, Elise slid her tablet out of her bag and pulled up her notes. Her stomach felt light, full of fluttering wings. The thrill of the hunt combined with all the exertion made her heart race.
Finally, she could begin.
* * *
As far as Elise could uncover, no one knew the fog’s name. Everyone knew his birthday, though.
April sixteenth, 1906. Five o’clock in the morning.
It was the deadliest m-event in the twentieth century, and coming at the tail-end of the Great War, it nearly shattered the very heart of the Elvish Protectorate. There was speculation that all the magic use during combat helped make the m-event, but there was only circumstantial evidence to support the claim.
What they did know for certain was that eyewitnesses claimed the elemental appeared in the rubble of the original Aerie approximately ten minutes after the event. As buildings crumbled from the force of the magical wave and fires raged through San Francisco, he was said to have climbed out of the frigid water and onto the rocks of Alcatraz’s bony shore.
After that, information was spotty. Some people claimed they saw him wreaking havoc along the Embarcadero as people scrambled to put out fires and save lives. Some people reported to have seen multiple beings form in the storm of energy that was an m-event. More claimed the whole thing was a new, chaotic weapon developed and deployed by the Iron Chain in a last ditch effort to wipe out the capital of the EVP.
In all Elise’s considerable research, she never found a single piece of evidence to corroborate those claims. Going by what they knew today about spontaneous sapient events, the 1906 disaster was just that — a natural disaster. Perhaps the war contributed to its severity, but it was almost certainly not something developed or seeded by another territory. It just was.
The only rumors she could even partially substantiate were the ones that claimed Patrol took custody of the elemental for a time, but there was no way to check whether it was true or not. When it came to EVP security, Patrol was under no obligation to disclose its records to the public — particularly during the long, terrible years of the war.
Whatever the case, she knew he began appearing again two years after the disaster. Photographs were rare and almost impossible to authenticate, but Elise had them all, as well as every eyewitness account of a man bleeding out of the fog to rescue a drowning child or to put out a fire or to stop a murder. Once a bad omen, a sighting of the elemental had come to mean safety, help.
Part vigilante, part cryptid, all mystery.
One hundred and thirty-nine years, and still, no one knows his name. If the mystery wasn’t so very, very tantalizing, Elise would have found it heartbreaking.
No one knew anything about the elemental — or, perhaps more likely, those who knew him simply kept his secrets close.
But why?
She contemplated the question all throughout the day as she wandered the Aerie, peeking into meditation rooms and avoiding eye contact with any acolytes that looked a tiny bit too enthusiastic. She was biding her time until nightfall, when the fog typically rolled in off the water. There was the slimmest possible chance she would see the elemental, but being on the island where he was born and rumored to haunt, Elise had far better odds than in the city proper.
Keeping her head down throughout the simple dinner of barley and mushroom soup and a single fluffy bread roll, she tried to keep her expression properly solemn around her fellow diners in the long, drafty hall.
It wasn’t easy, considering she wanted to do nothing more than pace the length of the island until sundown. Elise didn’t fear getting in trouble, exactly, but she also didn’t care to broadcast her reasons for her own special pilgrimage to the people around her. She suspected they might disapprove of her motives, considering just how little they had to do with their boundless god.
So she waited, and she made polite discussion when absolutely necessary, and she watched the clear February sky bleed into vivid streaks of tangerine and maroon and electric yellow.
As pilgrims and acolytes swooped from perch to perch, heading in for an evening of what Elise could only assume was quiet contemplation of the vastness of Loft’s gaze, she sat on a crumbling bit of stonework behind the shrine and watched the fog roll in.
Was he religious? Was that why he was rumored to return to the Aerie?
Elise held her breath as she tracked the creeping mist, her eyes tracing the familiar contours of something always changing, never quite the same as the last time she saw it, but as familiar to her as the lines on her palms. The hunger to know what lay within that beguiling force of nature was a hot, constant burn in her gut.
Maybe it was the weather witch in her that keened for the wildness of discovery, or perhaps it was a lifetime of conditioning from her father to chase down anything and everything that caught her interest. Elise didn’t know. At any rate, she wasn’t inclined toward introspection.
As soon as the fog reached the farthest edge of the island, Elise hopped off her crumbling seat and made her way back through the archway and down the steps. The light was fading fast and there were no safety lights fixed to a railing — which also didn’t exist — to help guide her way down the steep slope, but she didn’t think to worry. Her eyes were locked on the jutting dock below, naked without a single boat or the bloated ferry moored to its sides, and where she needed to be when the fog swept in.
Gulls called, and she could hear the sounds of distant horns blaring over the water. Cold wind, so much sharper with its accompanying sting of salt, snapped up to lash her cheeks and the exposed skin of her throat as she half-ran, half-climbed down the steps. She felt no fear as she skidded and nearly stumbled over onto the concrete platform far below her.
The odds that she would encounter the elemental tonight were vanishingly slim, but they carried away all her worries, her mortal fears, and even her common sense with the efficiency of the riptides that coiled like hidden snakes in the water. Her nails were crusted with dirt from gripping the sheer face of the cliff for balance and her breath wheezed in and out of her lungs with the hard scrape of cold air, but Elise didn’t notice either discomfort.
The soles of her boots barely made contact with the concrete of the platform before she was launching herself toward the dock. The boathouse was still and dark. Only a single safety light mounted on the lip of its pitiful little awning illuminated the lonely stretch of the dock as darkness dropped like a velvet curtain over the sky.
That happened in San Francisco sometimes: a gorgeous sunset followed by a swift, shockingly dark night. No fuzzy fade, no lavender blush melting into deepest blue. One moment it was all vivid color, and in the next, Darkness had her hands over your eyes.
Elise hadn’t spent a whole lot of time outside of the city, so she wondered if it was another peculiarity of her hometown or something that happened everywhere. Not that the darkness scared her. It meant about as much to her as the memory of the murder in the boathouse she jogged by without a glance. It was all just context — set dressing for the stage of her endless curiosity.