If arithmancy is the pursuit of divine mathematics, thaumaturgy the way of the miraculous fist, and forecasting the method of sacred observation, then the study of aetherology is the study of holy colloquy. We speak to the aetherians and the aetherians speak back, and together we bend reality to our enjoined will. May both parties always be nourished by such blessed dialogue!

 - The Beloved Summoner, “On the Art of Summoning”, circa 317 AR

"Wait." Quincy looked down at Nemira. Much to her surprise she saw concern in his broad face. "Master Nemira, the bodies in there are...it's bad. Real bad. If you need a moment to prepare yourself—"

"I don't." Nemira leaned on her torch and frowned up at him in turn. "The Council's letter has already informed me of what to expect. Beyond that, I have examined just about every drawing and photograph documenting aetheric infestation that exists and read all the literature I could get my hands on about it. I saw my first cadaver inflicted with the condition when I was sixteen years old. I am here for the express purpose of taking care of this and apprehending whatever arcane tool the culprit possesses in the Supernatural Public Guard’s stead at the written approval of my employer. In short, I agree with Detective North: let's get this over with already."

Lena let out a snort. Nemira didn't bother trying to interpret it.

Quincy considered her words briefly before giving a nod. "Let's."

A memory rose up unbidden in her mind. That dog on the flagstone floor of the temple and its twisting malformed flesh. Electricity shooting up her palm as she squeezed her master's hand hard enough to hurt them both. The bile burning her throat as it rose into her mouth.

Best to steel your heart to these sorry sights, my girl. This will never get any easier.

Quincy signaled to the guard at the door, a small woman with a ruddy face and pneuma that burned with the color of violets. She stood before the door and, displaying swift and practiced movements of her wrist, sketched a formula in the air with a stylus carved of moonstone. A loud click came from the door, and metal groaned as it slowly swung inwards.

"The newspapers have been doing nothing but stirring up the public about this case for the last few days." It was Lena who led the conversation this time as they filed into the medical examiner's room one after the other. She had a rather elegant-sounding voice Nemira thought ill-suited her, like someone's well-bred governess who was fond of obscenities. "All in all, it's pretty cut and dry: four bigwigs spending the night at the Queen of Hearts in Goldman Park, boozin' and tossing cards around without a care in the world. Only one of them made it out alive."

Three metal exam tables were laid  across the cold and sterile room of the medical examiner’s office, each with a body laid upon it. The shapes they made under the tarps that covered them were all wrong. 

Lena made her way over to one end of the grisly queue of corpses, pulling out her dark stylus as he did so. Quincy hovered near Nemira, and for a moment she wondered if he doubted what she had told them before they entered the room. After speaking with him at length, she could see him being the gentlemanly sort who'd try to catch a lady on the verge of fainting. 

"Every eye witness told us the same thing, more or less," continued Lena. "Lord Claude of House Black showed his buddies something he had in a jewelry box. There was a flash of light, Lord Claude screamed and ran out of the gambling hall like a bat out of hell, and then everyone else followed suit when they saw the state the rest of the men at the blackjack table were in."

She scrawled a formula in the air. Nemira could see the figures the detective traced out in her pneuma from where she stood, the almost-numbers that always made her feel that if she simply stared hard enough at them for long enough she could make sense of them. They hovered in the air for a brief time before shooting across the tarps and dissipating over them. Invisible hands seemed to grip the ends of each square of covering. In a single, synchronized movement, they all slid down to the floor. A fierce shudder crawled across her skin at what she saw. 

“God damn.” The curse came from Quincy. “I don’t know how you’re supposed to get used to this.”

“You steel your heart,” said Nemira coolly. Face carefully schooled into a mask of placidity, she walked slowly up the row of bodies, examining each of them in turn. The first man had once been a portly fellow, pale skinned and dark haired. His finger- and toenails had grown so long they curled in on themselves, deep green and dotted with delicate leaves and unfurled buds. Flowers sprouted from the tear ducts of his eyes, the canals of his ears and nostrils, and the mouth wrenched wide open in a frozen scream, their petals luridly pink. At her proximity, the plants overgrowing from the man’s corpse rustled to life. Their pleas echoed through the Firmament and into her ears.

Mercy! Mercy we beg of thee! 

The darkness…the darkness…It is so horrid, so vast…

O gentle sunlight, when next is the dawn? Our soil is poisoned and the water is gone.

The second man was quite tall, and skin a dark brown so much like her mama’s she wondered if he also hailed from New Yamba. Feathers, wings, and talons shoved themselves out of every orifice he possessed and made many more new ones all over his body with their attempts at escape. They were not still at all, but twitched and flapped and shook at random, a lively mass of human parts and avian appendages. She heard them clearly as she passed, but it was nothing comprehensible. The shrieking of raptors, shrill bird calls, and the frantic beating of countless pairs of wings added up to a desperate symphony for freedom.

The final body retained the least amount of his human features. The man no longer had a recognizable face. His skeleton had been pulled at like clay, forming the snapping jaws of some sharp-toothed beast that rose out of a mass of tangled, brittle hair. Fangs of various sizes sprouted from his every pore while yellow, misshapen claws had pushed themselves out of the knuckle joints of his hands and feet. There was only one sound it emitted in the Firmament that she detected: an endless, despairing howl.

"Meet Vice President Norman Wordsworth of Wordsworth Winery, Treasurer of the Inter-Alliance Consumables Merchant Guild Ashmon Yeki, and Lord Aimeric of House Black, a cousin of Claude's and a prominent patron of various foodstuff business ventures." Lena lowered her stylus and scratched the back of her head, exhaling a heavy sigh that aged her a decade in an instant. "Today's the first day we've gotten a break from reporters swarming around the building. The victims' families are begging for word on their bodies or the perp by the hour. We're running out of time before these corpses turn into aberrants, but we can't go searching for Lord Claude blind when he’s most likely in possession of an infernal instrument this lethal, and there's no way in hell we can let anyone else see these poor fucks like this."

Nemira glanced sidelong at her. "And yet you seem quite reluctant to allow the Council to do what it does best."

"Ma'am—"

"Master Summoner, thank you."

"—I'm reluctant to allow any random civilian to get tossed on their ass into detective work," she snapped. "I don't give a rat's ass about your damn Council, ma'am, especially if the best they can send are girls who just graduated Saint Melantha's."

"Lena!" Quincy sounded truly fed up. "My God, do I need to kick you out of this office, too? Knock. It. Off."

Nemira held up a hand at Quincy, who looked close to stomping over and grabbing his partner by the scruff of her jumpsuit.

"Did you happen to witness the hubbub at Swordhand Square a few months ago?" she asked Lena, keeping her voice even. "The one about the terrifying giant bird that suddenly crash-landed there and gave all the knights a fright."

"I’ve read the reports, but I was on vacation at the time. What does that have to do with anything?" she replied, the anger in her eyes cooling to suspicion.

"Interesting answer. How long have you been a detective?"

"None of your damn business."

"She got promoted to detective and became my partner not even two years ago," answered Quincy.

Nemira didn't miss the way Lena glared at him above her head. She uttered a slight laugh. On the inside, however, she felt nothing but a bone deep weariness settling in. Maybe there had been some truth to Sai-em's words after all. Was the rest of her career going to be like this? A series of encounters with Coinish citizens who would do nothing but doubt her every step of the way until she gave them a personal demonstration of her capabilities?

"The Council doesn't send their best, Detective," said Nemira, squashing the miserable thought down into the depths of her mind. "We are so few in number that they send whoever they have on hand only when they absolutely must. You've clearly never seen a summoner at work before, but that’s not surprising. Not many ever do."

She strode back to the middle body as she spoke, instinctually rooting her stance more solidly against the white-tiled floor. The pneuma in her torch flared up as though someone had tossed more logs into a bonfire.

"I'd be more than satisfied if all you do for us is extract the aetherians out of the bodies," said Quincy, and from the quiet solemnity of his tone Nemira knew at once that he had worked with a summoner before. Or maybe he had simply been one of the responders to the Swordsman’s Park incident. It hadn’t been one of her most subtle maneuvers, that was for sure. "Even if you left the capture of Lord Black to us, we'd still owe you a debt."

"Accepting presents, bribes, or other offerings from clients is strictly prohibited by the Council in order to maintain our position of neutrality," Nemira told him. Her pale pneuma suffused her whole body until it raged from her as clear as day in the corporeal plane, visible to any and all who looked at her. From the corner of her eye she watched Lena leap back in shock. "Besides, this is what I do, and I do not leave my tasks half-done."

She lifted her torch and swung it over the bodies. One by one they burst into cold and smokeless flame. The room and the detectives faded from her vision, leaving nothing else before her but the trapped aetherians. Hundreds of sprites and daemons shoved and kicked at the borders of a dark and windowless place they didn’t understand, caught between the physical plane and the Firmament. The bodies that housed them began to convulse worse than ever before, but above the snapping bones and twisting muscles and rattling metal tables, the cacophony of their wailing flooded her ears the hardest. 

“Hear me, distant kin,” she cried. Her voice boomed out, a deep and unnatural sound, and her pneuma pulsed to the rhythm of her words. “Forget solidity, forget the heaviness of mortal air! Follow my light and loosen your shapes. The walls are down and always have been. Be free!”

Their weeping stopped. A great, eerie stillness overcame them. Then, in a sound more felt than heard, they gave a singular sigh. The pneuma she had cast over the bodies blew out like a candle caught in the wind, stealing her breath along with it. Above them rose a bright spark, then another, and another. Soon, a colorful constellation of innumerable dots of light had gathered. The corpses below the sea of stars were that of men once more, looking for all the world as though they were simply asleep. 

“A boon,” came a voice. Many blended into one. “A boon for our distant kin. We will grant a boon. A boon…”

Nemira wet her dry lips, allowing the pneuma wreathed around herself to fade away as well. Her head spun so bad she could barely bring the room back into focus. All she could see were stars. Untold numbers of them all around her, begging her to stay and count them one by one.

“Master Summoner.” Quincy spoke into her ear. Somehow, he still sounded so far away. “Would any of them be able to recall what it was Lord Black had in his possession? Or perhaps the last thing he said to the men before he killed them.”

She nodded feebly, both hands clutching her torch to keep herself upright. She squeezed her eyes shut against the beautiful multitude of lights and said, voice harsh with fatigue, “My distant kin, all I want…all I want is for me and the other mortals in this room with me to listen to the last words the men below you heard most clearly before they had become your prison cells. That is all I ask.” 

The aetherians didn’t hesitate. A new voice echoed from the constellation of their presence. Masculine and well spoken, tinged with excitement. Not theirs at all, but a record of the past pulled from the memories of the dead.

“My boys, mark my words,” said Claude of House Black. “With this we are going to be wealthy beyond all reckoning. Behold, the ring of Anima Rex!”