Fire in the sky.

[Cinnabar]

Early in the morning, at a time when most might be breaking fast, a visitor calls upon the Kaczmarek farmstead; grey-uniformed, neatly groomed, and of a decidedly solemn demeanour. Dust upon his boots indicates that the Constable has walked the distance from Myrkentown, though this does not seem to have overly exhausted him - perhaps the early hour is in order to avoid to full heat of day.

Nonetheless he glances around for a time before stepping up to the humble front door and knocking briskly, helmet removed and carried under one arm. Silver hair cropped close to the scalp, along with the brass trimming on his helm, denotes this as being no less than the High Constable himself. Curious indeed. What could he want?

[channe]

The woman who opens the door is in her mid-thirties, black hair swept up in a roughspun scarf, bad teeth, an immigrant's skin; oh, you've met her before in the tavern, Cinnabar, and she recognizes the man almost immediately. She's wiping her hands with a cloth and looks decidedly unconcerned about the chaotic hubbub behind her: children tearing apart the remnants of last night's bread, her younger daughter-in-law, a booming male voice talking in the Dauntless dialect.

Nevertheless, when she sees it is the Constable in uniform, something prompts her to slip outside the door, to close it mostly behind her. It is never a good thing when such things come so early; such should be a Myrkenite folk adage.

"May I help you, Constable?" says Magda Kaczmarek, her voice rough and sewn through with a heavy accent.

[Cinnabar]

It's not something he'd really ever wanted to do, but it would appear to be part of the job. He would prefer not to have to deliver such news standing on the woman's doorstep - in truth he'd much prefer not to have to deliver such news at all, but somethings don't leave any space for what one might prefer. As such, he visibly steels himself, an altogether more serious and sombre-faced young man than might have been the case on their last meeting.

"Mm. It's regarding your daughter, Agnieszka." He makes a good job of the foreign syllables, but it's hardly the time to take delight in such. "She, ah. She went missing from the lawn of the Broken Dagger yesterday afternoon. Disappeared." A memory of that abhorrent noise, the blazing shaft of light from the sky, and he can't help but shake his head slightly as if to dispel the vision. Meanwhile there's not really any tactful way to break the news, so he opts to present the information as clearly as he can.

"I'm not sure exactly what happened. There's not really much by way of leads to follow, but I have men making inquiries in case anyone might know... well, anything about it. I will endeavour to keep you informed." Then he runs out of words and falls silent, regarding the woman with a somehow empty expression; no idea what to say or even what to think of the matter, but stoicly awaiting her reaction as one might await a blow to the face.

"I'm sorry."

[channe]

Forgive her, Cinnabar, when she does not understand; she's a clever woman, but her dozens of ties to this life have made her eminently practical, and the unexplained lies squarely out of reach. She wrings her hands in her apron and fixes him with a confident stare.

"What do you mean, dissappeared? Agnieszka does not dissappear. She is at the barracks or she is here or she is out with her friend with the veil. Perhaps you have just misplaced her. Broken Dagger, you say; maybe she is still with the Olwak girl? Or perhaps at work?"

[Cinnabar]

He blinks at that, not quite the reaction he'd been expecting, but then shakes his head.

"I mean exactly what I say. She was on the tavern's lawn, and I was speaking with her. There was a terrible noise in the sky, and a pillar of light shone down on her. Then she was gone. When the noise ended and the light stopped, she was no longer there. Where she stood, where the light had shone, the grass and earth was also disappeared, leaving only the bare soil a few inches below." He can offer no explanation for this, for he has none.

"I searched around the tavern's grounds but could not find her. If she had run off I would have seen her, but she did not. One instant she was standing in the middle of the light, the next there was the light alone, and then that was also gone."

In the space of this recounting his tone has drifted from polite concern to helpless confusion, as if hoping that perhaps this woman - stolid, sensible, undeniably real and normal, might have some kind of clue as to what he had seen.

"I do not know what to make of it. No one I know has ever heard of such a thing."

[channe]

Solid. Sensible. Undeniably real and normal, just as what happened yesterday on the lawn of the Broken Dagger was not. She hangs on to the door, now, and blinks at him, the words just confusing themselves before they arrive at her tongue, the panic that comes so rarely rising to tie her tongue tight. Surely Cinnabar has seen this gulping, terrible look before, in the mothers of those men who died at the Battle of Haberdasher's Row --

-- "I have not either, it is impossible for her to be there one moment and not be there the next," says Magda, who is being taunted now with the sheer amount of impossible things that have run across her doorstep in the past few years. "Light -- I -- pardons," she stammers, and seems quite out of breath.

"That is impossible, so perhaps you did not see what you said that you saw?"

[Cinnabar]

"I would very much like to believe that I am mistaken." His words are meant as some small comfort, but his expression contains only certainty in the truth of his account. Baffling and inconceivable as it is, he knows what he saw happen, even if he has no idea what it means.

But for now there is a mother to calm, and so he steps forward to touch her elbow lightly, nodding towards the interior of her home.

"I think perhaps you ought to sit down for a moment. It is a great shock, I know." No less a shock for her than it was for him, who was stood not a handful of yards from the girl when she vanished.

[channe]

Magda Kaczmarek had always feared the appearance of grey at her door; either the black-and-grey of a Janeiro man, or this. It had been a source of grim amusement that she was waiting for news of a daughter and not a son, that her eldest boys are family men and not soldiers, that life in Myrken Wood is such a inverted strange morass.

So: there is wrenching relief that Cinnabar has not come to tell her of her daughter's death, and a more insidious panic that takes its place with every passing breath.

As if Calomel's words were some kind of cue, Dominik appears in the slight opening of the door -- "Mama, let me talk to him," he says, and Magda nods, and they switch places -- a quick, quick glance inside the small house, Cinnabar, and you'll see not a well-appointed space but a dirt floor, a smoky open stove, and other symptoms of wrenching poverty.

So the High Constable is now faced with the dark-haired second son, with sharp eyes resting on his helmet first before meeting Cinnabar's gaze. Considerably calmer, but that's only to be expected, considering his reputation around town: a card shark, a slippery-yet-trustworthy man, a hatcher of madcap schemes that always seem, impossibly, to work.

"Magic, mebbe? She wasn't messin' wi' no-one, if that's what you're here to ask. She don't got nobody pissed off at her at all." For once, is what follows, unspoken, before Dominik continues. "What do we do?"

[Cinnabar]

No comment made at Dominik's appearance, or the fact that he was clearly listening in on their conversation. Indeed there is perhaps some small hint of selfish relief in the Constable's features as Agnie's mother is ushered back into the house. Soothing the confusion and grief of those who have lost someone hurts, the rawness of their pain grating across his own nerves; it's a difficult thing that sets him on edge for hours afterwards. But this, the reasoned, methodical approach he can manage. Just the facts. A glance after Magda, then a nod to the son, voice kept discreet and low.

"I can only assume it was some sort of magic, though nothing I've heard the like of before. Unfortunately there's precious little trace of anything that might help us learn what's become of her, and we have no one adept in the arts who would be able to assist us."

He thinks for a moment, recalling the scene. "There was a sound in the sky shortly beforehand - like thunder, perhaps, but more drawn-out and... grinding. Like feeding iron scraps into a millstone." He memory of the noise makes his teeth itch even now. "That, and a smell like lightning. Then, a short while later the noise came again, and with it the light. I saw no sign that she had been injured or harmed by it, only that she was there one moment, then not there. No trace of her remained, no smoke, no ash... there was nothing."

At Dominik's other point he shakes his head slightly, apologetic. "I came here only to bring the news. I wish I had more information - and happier information, at that - but unfortunately that is all I have. You know as much as I do about it, now." As to the question of future action, he thinks for a time.

"This is so far beyond my understanding it's ridiculous." He regards the man's face for a moment, quite at a loss. "I'll have people keep an eye out in case she is returned, or shows up elsewhere. And others listening for news of anything similar happening around Myrken. Beyond that, I really don't know."

[channe]

I can only assume --
Came here only to bring the news --
Beyond that, I really don't know --
I'll have people keep an eye out --

There are two lessons Dominik Kaczmarek is learning today. One is that his sister is missing; the second, that she is presumed dead by the authorities she unwillingly serves, and the Constabulary's hands are tied. Such may not be what Calomel meant, but it is certainly what he is communicating. It does not surprise the man, who looks to be about as old as the High Constable, and considerably angrier.

It does not surprise him. And why should it? His view of the authorities had them coloring Agnie's dissappearance as just another peasant's death, regrettable but expendable flesh --

"Agnie has a good friend: Rhaena Olwak, who lives with her brother Kals at the Broken Dagger," says Dominik quietly. "Rhaena's fiance, Bryce Larose, died in a quick-set lightnin' storm up at the north-gate fort last year, wi' two o' his brothers and one or two other Janiero shitheads. I didn't think it meant nothin' until you said -- well, they never found their bodies."

And then, he narrows his eyes at Cinnabar. "... there's a just a bit o' a line between dissappeared an' dead. Sure you got the right one?"

[Cinnabar]

The Constable is shaking his head as Dominik mentions the deaths by lightning, though that slows to be replaced by a keen attention as the man speaks on; it could perhaps be coincidence - but that said, it could be a lead in a matter which has been markedly bare of such so far.

"This was not lightning. The smell, yes, but the sound was wrong, and the light itself was no thunderbolt - it was a pillar of light, several feet across; it lasted for much longer than a lightning bolt. Much longer."

He considers this for a time, questions springing to mind. "Do you know anyone who saw it happen? Would Janeiro have kept records of it? Bryce Larose - what were the names of the others?" And then a grin, incongruous given the situation. Where a moment before there had been a blank and impassable wall, now there were chinks of light to follow, to pry at.

"At what point did I say I believed her dead, sir? I said disappeared, and that is what I meant. To call it otherwise is to assume something without having the proof of it."

[channe]

" I don' know any other names. She didn't like 'em very much, didn't talk about 'em at all. I," said Dominik Kaczmarek, card-shark and anarchist and skinny somewhat-farmer, "don' know what them soldiers do. They don't tell Agnie nothin', which is about what you can expect from Janeiro an' folk like that. I asked b'cause it's too much tha' folk in power jus' write people like us off. 'Another one dead,' they say. 'Too bad.' Unsolved murder after unsolved murder. People dissappear an' they don't come back."

He pauses, standing tall there in the doorway. "Agnie," he says, pronounced and certain, "can't be one o' those, you hear me, Constable?"

[Cinnabar]

The Constable's demeanour seems suddenly changed, going from being uncertain and subdued to full of energy and fiery determination. Because at least now he has something to investigate. "Nonetheless, I'll check with the Brotherhood, and use whatever leverage I can get. They might know something useful."

A hand is offered to the young man, accompanied by a wolfish grin. "I don't write people off, I promise you that." Undoubtable sincerity in his tone and gaze, conviction that every possible lead would be followed until all avenues of inquiry lie exhausted. A certain intensity about him, as if he is somehow more there than he was a moment ago. "Whatever there is to find out, we'll find it."

[channe]

Firey determination: that, Dominik knows well. He's -- a little impressed, is the young Mr. Kaczmarek, and he reaches out and shakes the Constable's hand. A different breed than the others, he supposes. Full judgment will be reserved for when Agnie is back from -- from wherever it is she has gone; Dominik is worried, but he is not for a moment delusional that his sister will do anything but go down fighting.

"You need anythin', Constable, you find me, yes? We *will* find it." His voice is quiet.

[Cinnabar]

"Absolutely." Conviction in his voice, a firm grip to the young man's hand, then he's stepping back and offering a quick bow.

"I'll keep you informed if anything comes up. In the meantime, if you hear anything I can be reached at the Constabulary's offices. Good day, sir."

His stride as he turns to head back towards town is hurried, determined, as he has things to do and people to organise. He has a lead.