Not by courier—too conspicuous—but folded into a bundle of routine correspondence that had been redirected twice before reaching the house. By the time it did, Orestis had almost convinced himself that waiting was worse than knowing.
He took it to the reading room and waited until the house was quiet. Then he read.
The document was concise, impersonal, and thorough in the way only professionals bothered with when they expected their work to be questioned later. No embellishment. No speculation. Just findings.
Orestis read it once. Then again, more slowly.
No fraud. No irregular transfers. No concealed losses—nothing that suggested intent, greed, or carelessness. No evidence of embezzlement, overextension, or mismanagement.
The ledgers balanced. Not roughly, not merely well enough—but cleanly. Every number accounted for. Every column closed.
His father’s business, according to the records, was exactly what it appeared to be: cautious, conservative, and unspectacular. A merchant who avoided risks, honoured contracts, and left little room for catastrophe.
He skimmed the inventory section. Shipping manifests aligned with delivery confirmations. Payments corresponded to receipts. Warehouses, where mentioned, were referenced without anomaly.
If something went missing in the future, the books had not noticed it yet. Which meant the loss—whatever it was—had not occurred. Or had not registered.
‘Had not registered’. Now there’s an unpleasant distinction.
He read on, no longer searching for error but for hesitation. For places the auditor had chosen not to pursue. No warehouse inspections. No verification beyond supplied records. No speculation beyond scope.
At the very end, after the formal conclusion, a single line had been added in a different hand.
I do not like that everything balances this neatly. That is a personal discomfort, not a professional finding.
Orestis paused.
Not because the line revealed anything—but because it didn’t. The auditor hadn’t found wrongdoing. He hadn’t even suggested it. The note wasn’t a warning so much as an admission: this is as far as the paper goes.
Orestis folded the report and set it aside.
So, there’s nothing in the books.
That, however, didn’t make the report useless. Accounting did not reveal causes; it ruled them out. And now, several possibilities were gone—no slow bleed, no reckless expansion, no partner siphoning funds. Whatever ruined his family later, it did not begin here.
Which still left him with everything from economic collapse to divine interference. Fortunes didn’t always fall because of mistakes. Sometimes they fell because the world shifted sideways and crushed everything that hadn’t moved fast enough.
For now, all he had was confirmation that the future hadn’t started unravelling yet.
It will eventually. Guess I’ll just have to wait for it like everyone else.
***
Months passed, and Orestis’s efforts began to bear fruit.
To his parents, he was exactly what he intended to be: a prodigy. His father’s pride was quiet and carefully contained, expressed in longer glances and the occasional indulgent hum. His mother’s, by contrast, was effusive.
She hovered. Fussed. Found excuses to hug him whenever he passed. It didn’t help that he was still light enough for her to lift off the ground and spin once before setting him down again. It was… excessive.
Still, he endured it. She meant well, and the warmth she offered was something he hadn’t felt in centuries.
I am not enjoying this. I am tolerating it. There is a meaningful distinction.
All in all, his plan—to live quietly, studiously, and beneath notice—was proceeding remarkably well. Which was precisely why he kept waiting for it to fail.
The disaster arrived on an unremarkable afternoon, wearing good clothes and a composed expression: the heir of one of his father’s recently deceased business partners.
Menandros, according to the clerk who announced him.
Ostensibly, he had come to review the partnership now that responsibility had passed to him. Reasonable. Expected. Death unsettled contracts, and sensible heirs verified what they inherited.
But Orestis felt the shape of it immediately.
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Menandros waited until his father finished signing the ledger before he spoke.
“I appreciate you seeing me on such short notice.” He placed a leather folio on the desk. His movements were precise, economical. He was young—too young to be conducting negotiations of this scale—but grief had carved something firm into his posture.
His father closed the ledger. “Of course. I’m sorry for your loss. How can I help you?”
Menandros inclined his head, acknowledging the courtesy without lingering on it. He opened the folio and withdrew several documents, laying them out neatly.
“My father commissioned several shipments through your company. Specialty goods. Paid in advance.”
His father glanced down. “Yes. I recognize the seal.”
“They were never delivered.”
The words were calm. Measured. They landed anyway.
His father looked up. “That’s a serious claim.”
“So is this.” Menandros tapped the top page. “Delivery confirmation. Signed. Dated.”
His father read it once. Then again.
“That receipt is valid,” he said slowly. “If the goods were delayed—”
“They weren’t delayed,” Menandros said evenly. “They were marked as received.”
His father frowned. “Then they would be in storage.”
“Then produce them.”
The sentence wasn’t raised. It didn’t need to be.
From his chair near the window, Orestis watched his father rise. The movement was smooth, practised—but the tension in his shoulders was not.
His father returned with additional records. “These shipments were logged,” he said. “Received, inspected, and stored.”
“Where?” Menandros asked.
A pause.
“I’ll check.”
As his father turned back to the ledgers, Orestis let his gaze drift to his book while his thoughts moved beneath the surface.
Signed receipts. All marked as received, but missing the actual goods.
The pattern narrowed sharply. Theft avoided paperwork, clerical errors didn’t repeat cleanly, and fraud left fingerprints. This was something else. Something that interacted with process, not people.
“That’s… odd,” his father murmured as he sorted the records.
Menandros leaned forward. “What is?”
“These deliveries,” his father said slowly, “different buyers. Different goods. Different schedules.”
Different on the surface. Identical underneath.
“… They were all routed through the same warehouse,” he finished.
Menandros straightened. “Which one?”
His father reread the heading, as though hoping the ink would change. “Warehouse Seven.”
The location carried weight for his father. To Menandros, it was irrelevant.
“I didn’t come here unprepared,” Menandros said as he reached into the folio again and withdrew another document. Then another. He laid them out with the same careful alignment. “Four. That I’ve confirmed so far.”
His father went very still.
“Four buyers,” Menandros continued, “all missing goods. All with receipts. All eventually told the matter was… unclear.”
His father closed his eyes. The implications were grave.
“This looks bad,” Menandros said—not accusing. Not yet. “I don’t want it to be fraud. But if it’s negligence, I need restitution.”
“And if it’s neither?” his father asked quietly.
Menandros met his gaze. “Then I need answers. Quickly.”
When Menandros left, the office felt too large.
Orestis closed his book. Warehouse Seven was no longer just a name. It was a location.
And he needed to see it to confirm his suspicions.
***
Late that night, Orestis slipped out of bed and drew on divine power, shaping it into a tight shell of silence around his room.
After sealing the space from prying ears and inconvenient questions, he began to draw the sigils required to open a gate.
The gateway spell was one he had rarely bothered to use before, despite knowing it by heart. Back when he was immortal, there had been little reason to choose it over teleportation. The latter had been simpler: brutally direct, inelegant, and fast. It moved the caster’s body to the destination immediately, without bothering to ask whether the ground below was solid or several dozen metres away.
Dangerous in principle. Just not dangerous to me. Not then.
He had been skilled enough to correct midair with a second jump, appearing neatly on the ground below. Even then, the only reason for the correction was to spare the surroundings. He, at least, would have been fine after the impact.
That was no longer the case. These days, he’d prefer not to test how fragile he’d become.
He didn’t know the precise location of Warehouse Seven, but that was hardly a problem. A rough idea was enough. He finished the sigil sequence, and a thin, glowing line split the air in front of him. It widened smoothly into a perfect circle, hanging in the room like a wound that refused to bleed.
Through it, he saw an arial view of the city.
A few moments of searching were enough. Once he had a clear view of the warehouse district—and the squat, unremarkable structure he was looking for—he dispelled the gate and used teleportation instead, now that he could see exactly where he was going.
The world folded, and he appeared directly in front of the warehouse door.
Nothing looked or felt wrong from the outside. No warped stone, no distortion, no aura worth mentioning. Just a locked door and the faint smell of old wood.
He unlocked it with a simple spell and pushed it open without a sound. The moment he stepped inside, reality gave up the pretence.
The space was wrong. The interior stretched farther than the building should have allowed—distances pulling apart subtly, shelves receding just a little too far with each step, the ceiling climbing higher than the exterior roofline could possibly justify.
And then there was the pressure.
Something brushed against his mind, probing, nudging—clumsy and imprecise. It slid off him without effect, like fingers scraping uselessly against stone. It was crude, but unmistakable.
Orestis exhaled slowly.
“Ledger wight,” he murmured.
Formally known as an Anamnestis Devourer.
He tilted his head and looked up. The ceiling disappeared into darkness, vast and hollow, far too high for a warehouse that looked so modest from the street.
He conjured a small orb of light and tossed it upward. The glow climbed—and revealed the thing clinging where the ceiling should have been.
Ledger wights were born as spiritual entities, parasitic ideas that anchored themselves to locations rather than flesh. Once they fed enough—on records, ownership, memory—they evolved. The first evolution always gave them physical form, borrowed from something living within the lair they claimed.
In this case, it had chosen a spider.
Orestis sighed.
“Of course,” he muttered. “Why not an ant? Or a gecko. Even a cockroach would’ve been less annoying.”
Spiders were patient. Methodical. They waited. And wights inherited traits from their chosen forms—patience made them very hard to notice.
Worse, this one hadn’t stopped at its first evolution.
Judging by its size—its body nearly three times the height of a man, limbs spanning impossible distances—it had fed well. Possibly evolved twice over. The space around it bent accordingly, stretched and hollowed into something that no longer obeyed simple measurements.
Orestis stared up at it. He could destroy it. Easily.
Which meant he absolutely could not.
If his family was going to emerge from this with their reputation intact, there needed to be witnesses. Proof mattered. If this was handled quietly, his family would never recover their name.