“This is of utmost importance to all of us, especially you.” Those had been the Diamera’s words; the ones that had sent Cal out into the street in the dead of night, rushing as fast as he dared. Never before had Cal seen her so close to panic. There was a fear in her eyes that sent twin bolts of electricity down his entire body. Usually, the Diamera was the voice of reason in any situation, no matter the severity. She was the one person you could always count on to be composed in the face of utter chaos. The old woman had a calming effect on everything and everyone. With her gaze alone, she could halt a fight and put an entire room at ease.

The urgency in her voice now was what found Cal hurrying along the narrow, and frankly quite dangerous, back allies of Phranthis at 11 o’clock on an otherwise pleasant Sunday evening. The Diamera had given him two names. One was a place and the other, a person. 

“Find Marcond, there will be a woman waiting for you, her name is Carinna. Godspeed.” These details made his mission all the more perplexing. Cal knew Phranthis like the back of his hand, it being where he had spent the majority of his early life. This sub-district, however, was unknown to him. The same went for the woman. Though he was familiar with all of the Diamera’s regular clients, this was not one known to him.

Cal now risked slowing his pace. He had reached the reference point given to him by the Diamera to get him close to his destination. For the first time since he had set off, Cal spared a glance around him. His surroundings would be, at the least, repulsive to any of the normal inhabitants of the northern regions. At the worst, they would be terrifying. Cal had long since become accustomed to the drab and melancholy trappings of the southern end, with its top heavy and badly engineered houses leaning in to block all but the merest sliver of sky. This was unfortunate, for the stars in that sky were at their brightest and most beautiful to the eye above Phranthis and its neighboring southern districts. Due to the high price of oil, there weren’t any superfluous torches to be found here. The same could not be said for the north where each residence vied for the attention of a spectator’s eye with extravagant displays of affluence lighting the streets to midday brilliance. The lack of such man-made brightness in the southern districts meant that one’s eyes were drawn upwards to the natural display of lights above.  

Cal directed his gaze earthward once more. Having spent most of his time as a young child playing in these poorly paved allies, Cal knew all the beggars and street urchins by face and most of those by name. Normally, he would have stopped to call a greeting to old Sirchiet sitting at his usual post on the corner of Halminth and Forso. Tonight, Cal walked right past him, barely registering the man’s feeble wave. The last of the Diamera’s hurried words now sounded in his mind,

“You will know it when you see it” In Cal’s experience, nothing beginning with that cliché phrase ever worked out to the advantage of those involved. This night was to be no exception.