The brewery stood at the end of the street like something that had sprouted from the pavement without a plan—three stories of unplastered brick, ground-floor windows boarded up, bronze gutters green with oxidation. It smelled of malt and mustiness even from twenty meters away.
Valeria slowed.
An Erynis Church crew had secured the entrance: two guards at the door, a tape with an ethereal marker stretched across the entire width of the sidewalk. The marker pulsed palely in the gray light—active, meaning the rift might still be open, or had closed recently enough that the air remained saturated.
Thorne lifted the tape and ducked under it without stopping. Valeria followed.
One of the guards cleared his throat.
"Inquisitor," he began, "protocol requires—"
"I know the protocol," Thorne said. "Report."
The guard straightened.
"Call at three forty-seven. A neighbor across the street reported noise and light through the boards. We arrived at four fifteen. The doors were locked from the inside; we entered through a first-floor window. On the ground floor, we found two victims. One dead, one—"
"In what condition?"
"Early mutation. Conscious. Asked for water."
Thorne looked at him.
"And?"
"We transferred it to the annihilation sector," the guard said. His voice was flat, rehearsed. "Standard protocol."
Thorne didn't answer. He went inside.
The ground floor of the brewery was one large space—perhaps a fermentation room once, now empty and littered. Wooden vats had been dismantled or rotted away, leaving round marks on the stone floor. Under the windows stood rows of scattered bottles, most of them smashed. The scent hung in the air—malt, mustiness, and beneath that, deeper, something Valeria associated with interrogations in the dungeons when someone used small ethereal charges to maintain consciousness. Ozone and scorched stone. Only more intense.
The rift was in the middle of the room.
It was no longer open—it had closed, leaving a mark. Valeria stepped closer. It was a meter wide and perhaps a meter and a half high. The edges looked like the borders of a scar: the matter here was burned out, hollowed, and dyed a color somewhere between brown and black. Not evenly—in some places it was darker, in others the stone was almost untouched, as if something had torn the space apart irregularly, in bursts.
The stone near the edge was hot.
Valeria pulled her hand back.
"Eight hours," Thorne said behind her. He was crouching by the floor two meters away, tracing a line on the ground with his index finger. "Maybe ten. The rift is closed, but heat lingers in the stone for a long time after a wild opening."
"Why longer than with a controlled one?"
Thorne stood up and brushed off his knee.
"In a controlled opening, a priest enters through a path he designated himself. Narrow, precise. Matter parts, then returns. In a wild opening, matter is torn. Micro-damages remain in the structure, releasing energy for a long time." He pointed to the edge of the rift. "Do you see where it's darker?"
"On the left side, near the bottom."
"That is where the opening began to close, and something held it back. For a moment. Then it let go."
"What held it back?"
Thorne didn't answer immediately. He pulled a small device from his coat pocket—a brass cylinder with a milky bead at the end—and pressed it against the darker section of the edge. The bead did not react. He moved the device higher. Half a meter from the floor, the bead trembled and glowed faintly, a sickly yellow.
"Residual Ether," he said. "But not just from the opening. From something that passed through it."
Valeria stood beside him.
"A monster."
"Something." Thorne pocketed the device. "Small, judging by the tracks." He pointed to the floor. There, further from the rift, Valeria now saw what she had missed earlier: irregular indentations in the stone, too small for a human foot, too deep for accidental damage. Four points, spaced like the paws of a quadruped. "It came through. Stayed a moment. And left the same way, or another."
"Or it's still here."
"If it were still here," Thorne said, "the guards at the doors would look very different."
Valeria surveyed the room. The corners were dark, but motionless.
"The victims," she said.
"Over there."
By the eastern wall, behind the remains of a wooden partition, lay a body. A man, perhaps forty years old, in work clothes. His face was turned away from the entrance. Valeria walked around the partition to get a clear view.
There were no signs of a struggle. No external injuries save for one thing: on his neck, along the jawline, the skin had darkened and drawn inward, as if someone had applied a hot coal there and held it for a minute. The exact same discoloration as the edge of the rift.
"Direct exposure," Thorne said, stepping up beside her. "He stood too close during the opening."
"He didn't run."
"No. Either he didn't have time, or... he didn't know he was supposed to run."
"You think he was here by accident."
"I think someone opened a rift here and didn't mind having an audience."
Valeria looked at him.
Thorne turned his gaze from the body and walked back toward the rift. He crouched by it a second time and stared at the edges for a long while, touching nothing, using no device.
"Thorne," Valeria said.
"Hm."
"This opening is too regular for an accident."
Silence.
"Speak."
"The edges are irregular," she said, "but symmetrically irregular. The darker sections are in the exact same spots on both sides. Someone who tears a rift without control doesn't get that kind of symmetry. They get chaos."
Thorne stared at the edges.
"Keep going."
"I don't know where to," she said. "That is the limit of what I can tell."
"That is an honest limit," Thorne said. He stood. "You are right about the symmetry. In a truly wild opening, the edge is uniformly chaotic. This"—he pointed to the lower part of the rift—"looks like someone faking a wild opening. They controlled the process, but left enough irregularities for it to pass as amateurish."
They stood for a moment at an equal distance from the rift.
"You wanted me to figure that out on my own," Valeria said.
"I wanted to know if you would."
"And?"
"You did. You are a warrior with immense experience, but you lack flexibility and combat experience. Either way, you have not disappointed me." Thorne moved toward the exit. "Write the report. Rift number seven, controlled opening masquerading as wild, one fatality, trace of entities from the Void, edge closed. Do not write the final conclusion."
Valeria stopped.
"Why."
"Because others will read our reports," Thorne said without turning around, "and I prefer they think we are slower than we are."
He walked out. Valeria stood for another moment in the dark room, amid the scent of ozone and malt, looking at the edges of the rift.
Symmetrical irregularities.
Someone had practiced this.