Sagnix of Maribor
The South Ward Gatehouse, Craftsmen Quarter, Maribor
1253
I hadn't slept a wink. For hours, I had sat in the suffocating silence of my workspace, my ears straining against the muffled rumbles of the lower quarter crossroads outside. Every drip of water from the eaves sounded like a breaking grate; every creak of the timber beams sounded like a beast scratching its way up from the floorboards.
I rubbed my face with both hands, the rough skin of my palms scraping against a thick layer of exhaustion. The sun was finally beginning to rise, bleeding a pale, sickly light through the high frosted windows.
"Fool," I muttered to myself, the word tasting like stale ink. "Utter, glory hungry fool, him and I both it seems..."
I had let a knight walk straight into the municipal drainage trenches with nothing but a sword and a grand speech about chivalry. By now, whatever was down there had probably done him in. He was likely floating face-down in a river of shit, his pristine crimson surcoat turning black with sewage while the things beneath the city tore into him, or if they were creative cutthroats, stripped him for the armor and sword.
Thankfully, he had seemed more a knight errant than a landed one. Likely there would be no furious baronial house marching on Maribor demanding vengeance for a slaughtered heir. But a death was still a death, and the contract was still open. The tourney was days away.
I pulled a fresh, clean piece of parchment toward me, dipping my quill into the inkwell with stained fingers. I should still report his death to the higher ups, I thought grimly, and beg the Duke's council for immediate military intervention.
After finishing the writ, I began to pack away my ledgers, stacking the tax manifests and sealing the reports into a heavy leather satchel. If I made haste to the inner city now, I could set up an appointment with the High Steward's scribes before the morning courts opened. It was a humiliating surrender, but pigs would just have to fly; the garrison would have to muck through the slums.
I was just sliding the buckle of my satchel closed when a sudden, violent wave of commotion erupted outside the gatehouse.
I froze, the leather strap slipping from my fingers. Before I could even stand up to cross to see what the commotion was about, a series of hurried, thundering knocks rattled the heavy oak doorstep of my office.
"Master Sagnix! He is back, sire!" Mikail's voice screamed through the wood, high-pitched and utterly frantic. "The knight! He's back, and he's got... a monster head of some sort!"
My breath hitched. I practically threw my weight against the latches, tearing the heavy oak door inward so fast it slammed against the stone wall. I didn't stop to question the lad. I pushed past him, my boots clattering down the short corridor and out into the damp morning air of the crossroads.
The pale dawn light was just breaking over the crooked roofs of the ward, but the few early-morning passerbys weren't looking at the sky. They were huddled against the walls parting ways for a tall figure making his way towards me, frozen in absolute, slack-jawed terror.
Walking in the center of the muddy lane was the knight I had written off as dead. He was no longer the pristine, golden figure that had left my office the evening before. He didn't seem injured--there was no limp to his heavy stride, or weakness in his posture--but he was profoundly filthy. The lower half of his deep red surcoat was stained, sodden with the oily water of the sewage canals. A foul stench of stagnant rot radiated off his figure, but it wasn't the filth that had the commoners paralyzed. It was what he was holding in his hand.
He held the trophy casually by its wide, mutated maw, his steel-clad fingers dug deep into the rubbery, dead flesh of its lower jaw. I had never seen anything like it in all my years handling the ward's ledgers. It was a massive, hideously elongated skull, covered in a sickly grey-green hide that looked like waterlogged leather. It had no proper nose--just flat, skeletal slits--and its bulbous, milk-white eyes were wide and unblinking, staring vacantly into the mud. A few jagged, needle-like fangs still protruded from the upper gums, dripping a dark, gelatinous fluid that looked like ink when it struck the wet earth.
"By all that is good..." I breathed, the whisper dying in my throat as I crossed my arms tightly over my chest to stop my hands from shaking. "Merciful Melitele, what in the hells is that thing?"
He stopped directly in front of me, the heavy corpse-head still held firmly in his grip. The faceless mirror of his closed golden visor tilted slightly downward toward me, entirely unbothered by the horror he had just hauled out of the earth. His posture was rigid, almost aggresive, the calm elegance he'd displayed the night before was completely gone, replaced by a sharp, abrasive tension.
"I dealt with the beasts that were terrorizing your townspeople," he said, his voice echoing from the metal, lacked its previous melodic warmth. It was curt, clipped, and bitingly dismissive. "There was a group of them, they were spread out, so I only had to dispatch them one at a time."
"There was... more than one of these...?" My voice cracked as I stared at the grey-green monstrosity at his side.
"Six," he said, the sharpness of his tone making Mikail flinch behind me. "Foglets, they are called. Ambush predators that rely on illusionary mist." He reached into a pouch at his hip and tossed a damp, heavy linen rag onto my hands. I unrolled it with a greasy slap, revealing five pairs of pale, leathery, pointed ears caked in dark fluid. "There was a lair down there. I found some remains of your missing people."
I swallowed hard, trying to look anywhere but at the contents of the rag. "Six..."
"Yes, six," He said, stepping closer. The foul, metallic stench of stagnant rot on his armor hit me like a physical blow, but there was an aggressive, irritable edge to his movement that felt far more dangerous than the smell. He was looming, his armored fingers twitching rhythmically against his thighs. "And I found something else. Something that should be brought to your attention, and perhaps even to the Duke's household as well."
I rubbed my temple, chalking up his severe, ruder tone to the sheer exhaustion of crawling through half a mile of human excrement to kill a half-dozen demons.
"The Duke's hou--?" I echoed, trying to steady my breath. "Ser, the Duke's household doesn't easily trouble itself with the South Ward, never mind with sew--"
"They will trouble themselves with this," he cut me off entirely, his faceless visor staring right through me. As he was speaking he stepped stepped forward, his heavy, iron-shod boots driving into the mud as he walked straight past me, brushing my shoulder with enough rigid force to spin me slightly on my heel. He strode through the doorway and marched directly into my private office without another word.
"Excuse me! Ser Harlow, wait--" I stammered, scrambling around to hurry after him, Mikail hovering nervously at my back.
By the time I breached the threshold, he had already crossed the small room. With a sudden, careless heave, he lifted the severed, dripping foglet head and plopped it directly down on top of my mahogany desk. The wet, heavy thud of the dead skull echoed in the quiet space, and a slow, dark stream of gelatinous, foul-smelling fluid began to seep out across my workstation.
"In the name of the gods, you can't just--" I started, my voice rising in sharp irritation as I gestured frantically at the desecrated desk.
But the words died instantly in my throat as the knight turned his head, the blank, unblinking mirror of his golden visor fixing squarely on me, he just loomed over the desk, his massive frame blocking out the pale dawn light from the window, radiating a cold, hostile stillness that felt entirely predatory. The dangerous air rolling off him damn near froze the air in the room, shutting me up before I could utter another syllable. Mikail wisely retreated into the hallway, pulling the door half-shut.
He reached back into the dark folds of his ruined crimson surcoat and pulled out a long, stained strip of heavy linen. He slapped it down onto the wood right beside the dead beast's snout, the fabric wet with a greasy, blackish paste.
"I found this in the sewers," he said.
I swallowed hard, keeping my hands flat against my thighs to hide the tremors. "What... what is that?"
"A lure," he responded, his armored fingers twitching rhythmically against his belt. "Some sort of monster bait. Someone wanted these things out of the marshes, they went through the trouble of planting these on a path into the sewers, from an opened out drainage vent, they led them directly into the city on purpose. You have a saboteur beneath your streets."
My heart did a slow, sickening drop. "A saboteur? In these slums? That's... that's absurd, who would--"
"You shouldn't care who, as of now it does not matter." The knight cut in, his tone curt as he spoke, placing his heavy gauntlets flat on the desk. "Usually, I would not put much stock in petty political theories, but a smart man would realize that with the grandest tournament in Temeria in who knows how long, set to open in a week, a pack of invisible, voice-stealing killers butchering your citizens in the dark is an efficient way to cause a panic, sully a certain someone's name. If I were you, I would take that rag to the Duke's Steward and warn him someone want's to put doubt in Prince Jurkast's abilities to secure his city."
He stood back up to his full, imposing height, the plates of his armor shifting with a sharp, metallic click as he stared down at me through the cold steel of his mask.
"But before you run off to the inner city," he murmured, his voice dropping into an unhurried register, "let us discuss my fee. Five hundred orens."
"Five hundred?!" The word burst from my chest before my good sense could strangle it. My hands left my thighs, flying up in sheer, bureaucratic horror. "Five! Not even a Witcher would ask for that much! The contract explicitly stated a flexible scale topping out at two hundred and fifty at the most! Five hundred orens would empty half of the quarterly maintenance reserve for the South Ward!"
The knight didn't break his posture. He simply leaned forward again, the movement so sudden and silently aggressive that I instinctively threw my weight backward against the rungs of my chair. The master-crafted steel plates of his gauntlets sat into the mahogany desk, dragging forrows in the black monster bile that was still seeping across my desk.
"I am not some desperate loner afraid of pitchforks and peasants," he said. The melodic cadence he possessed yesterday was entirely gone, replaced by a cold unhurried tone that vibrated out of his helm. "I am a knight of the realm, one that took great, unimaginable personal risks cleansing the literal rot beneath your feet while you sat by your fire. You will pay me my due, Overseer, or I will take it from you with very little effort."
A sudden, suffocating pressure slammed into the room, so thick it felt like the air itself had turned to lead. My breath caught, my throat tightening until it felt like a physical wire was twisting around my neck.
"Five hundred," I croaked, my voice sounding thin. I reached into my coat, my fingers fumbling blindly for the small iron key. "Five hundred gold orens. Aye. Right away, Ser. The... the treasury will square the account. Immediately."
Rhenawedd Lyssene
The Silver Spoon Tavern, Craftsmen Quarter, Maribor
1253
I drew the bone-handled brush through my dark hair, the rhythmic scritch-scratch of the bristles the only sound breaking the quiet of the rented room.
It was remarkable how a city could feel so entirely foreign and yet so suffocatingly familiar all at once. Before this violent, chaotic flight, my entire existence had been bounded by the sun-drenched vineyards, white stone plazas, and fairy-tale excess of Beauclair. I had thought the North would be different. I had thought a Temerian trade hub like Maribor, with its bustling streets, not so dreary skies, and thick, defensive stone walls, would operate on a different set of rules.
It did not surprise me to find that it didn't.
Now that I had spent a few days acclimating to the city, and it's people --both high and low-- watching the silk-clad merchants and haughty aristocrats parade through the upper districts, and the soot stained craftsmen toiling below, the illusion of difference had completely fractured. Beneath the surface layer of northern 'finery' and thick accents, Maribor's classes structured themselves exactly the same way they did back home. High and low society were mirror worlds , no matter which hemisphere of the Continent you found yourself in. The language changed, the quality of the wine fluctuated drastically, but the build of power remained identical.
Power wasn't about just about titles, or the strength of an arm nor was it about the length of a knight's lineage, or the amount of a farmers livestock. It was simpler than that, uglier, and far more transactional.
Power was the art of weight. It was about positioning yourself so completely at the center of a room that everything else was forced to orbit around you. It was about knowing the exact dimensions of what someone else desired--whether it was land, security, prestige, or a crown or even something as benign as a full stomach and a fuller coin purse--and ensuring you were the only hand holding the key to it. Having something someone else desperately wanted was the quickest, most absolute way to show them who truly owned the air they were breathing.
In Beauclair, they wrapped that manipulation in poetry, courtly love, and chivalric vows. They were less subtle about in Maribor, they wrapped it in ledgers, gold orens, and political blockades but the knife was the same. The moment you let someone realize you needed them, you had already handed them the hilt and bared your throat for the strike.
I looked at the heavy silver dagger--Aen'caerme--resting on the wooden vanity beside the copper mirror. The pale light of the morning sun caught the sharp, cold edge of the blade. To challenge destiny. A fine sentiment, but if we were going to navigate this Continent, let alone Maribor, we couldn't just fight fate with steel. We had to learn the local weight. We had to find out what Maribor's elite and peasantry craved, and make them beg us for it.
I was brought of my musings by the clanking of steel on steel, a sound I was beginning to associate with Mathhias, I stopped brushing, the bristles hovering an inch from my scalp.
It was a familiar cadence, one I had gotten used to hearing before we left Dregsdon and he had to take of his armor, but the rhythm was entirely wrong. My ears strained against the quiet of the rented room, tracking the heavy, rhythmic friction of leather and iron moving through the corridor outside. I could hear the distinct, metallic rattle of the armor and the creak of the side straps, but underneath the steel, there was nothing.
I didn't hear the familiar dull thump of leather soles against the timber floors, there wasn't any physical impact striking the boards.
It was as if his armour were walking entirely by itself, propelled forward by a phantom weight while his actual footsteps refused to make a sound. I didn't know this for sure--perhaps it was just the uneven acoustics of the tavern ceiling, or the dampness of the northern air warping the wood--but the sheer, lopsided weight of the noise made the hair on my arms stand up. It sounded fundamentally strange, wrong.
The heavy latch clicked, and the door to our room slowly swung inward.
'He did say he was going to check if his armor was ready...even if it took him a day.'
Matthias stepped through the doorway without saying a word, and for several seconds I simply stared at him, I had never seen him look quite so thoroughly ruined.
The armor the dwarf had meticulously reworked for him was coated in a layer of black/gray mud. Something much darker had dried in long, ugly streaks across the steel boots. The new deep red surcoat atop the armor was soaked almost to the waist, its lower hem dragging heavily against his iron-shod boots as he crossed the room.
A foul smell entered with him, a suffocating wall of stench carrying the odor of stagnant water. I instinctively covered my nose with the back of my hand, a sharp spike of revulsion hitting me before I could suppress it.
"Gods, Matthias," I said quietly, rising from the vanity as I looked him over. "You smell like you crawled out of a mass grave and then decided to bathe in the gutters for good measure."
Strangely enough, he did not answer my barb. His movements were strangely deliberate, almost mechanical, as though each one required a physical calculation before he allowed his limbs to make it. He reached down and unlatched one gauntlet, then the other, allowing the heavy plates to drop beside the wall with a dull, careless clatter.
Something about that careless thud disturbed me more than the filth. Matthias was always precise with his gear, a habit he picked up from...him, he understood the cost of a good blade and the value of a solid harness. He reached for the straps around his shoulders, loosening them with unhurried, stiff fingers, the links of his chainmail shifting with a heavy, metallic rasp beneath the fouled plates as he removed the pauldrons.
"Matthias," I said again, my voice softer this time, stepping away from the washing basin. "Is everything alright?"
He finally turned toward me, his hands stopped moving, for a long, freezing moment neither of us moved until he removed the helmet, the motion was abrupt, clumsy enough that the gold-painted steel slipped from his fingers the moment it cleared his head. It struck the floorboards with a violent clang, rolling once before settling against the leg of a chair. I flinched at the sharp noise. He didn't even seem to register it.
His eyes were bright red, different from the deep, simmering crimson they became when his hunger was close, the restrained dark hue I had grown accustomed to seeing was entirely absent. Instead, now they were almost glowing with an intense light that seemed to have been pushed violently to the surface. But it was not the color that made the skin on my arms prickle. It was the absolute vacancy behind it.
The dry amusement, the quiet patience, the faint, calculating curiosity that usually defined him had vanished completely. He was looking at me yet it felt as though some part of his mind was looking entirely through me instead, evaluating me not as a companion, but as an obstacle.
For one terrible second, the walls of the rented room dissolved, and I was standing in the forest of Caed Dhu again. The day I had first seen him, that strange, pale glimmering creature feasting on a man, he had those same unblinking red eyes then, like he wasn't looking at a person, but at something lesser.
"Matthias," I whispered, my fingers clenching uselessly around the dagger he had given me. I found myself genuinely afraid that speaking too loudly might snap whatever thin, fragile thread still connected him to the room. "Are you alright?"
Nothing, not even a flicker of recognition. He turned away from me directly toward his violin case.
I watched him cross the room in silence, the lingering stench of where ever he had went followed him like a physical shadow. He crouched beside the case and unlatched it.
His hands were shaking, it was the first time I had ever seen them do that, a slight, microscopic tremor--someone who didn't know him would have missed it entirely--but I had watched those hands perform impossibly delicate movements with blades and buckles. Now, his fingers hovered over the instrument for several seconds before closing tightly around its neck.
He lifted the violin carefully, the bow came next and then he stood.
There was still no explanation, nor an apology or even reassurance to break the suffocating pressure in the room. He simply raised the violin beneath his chin, drew the horsehair across the strings, and began to play.
I knew the piece immediately. It was the same song I had first ever heard from him, that sorrowful melody he had played in that leaning tower, it had almost moved me to tears when I first heard it.
The first note entered the room almost painfully soft, a trembling, fragile cord. Then another followed. Then another. The melody unfolded slowly, sorrowful, restrained, and heavy with a weight that felt entirely disproportionate to the amount of sound vibrating through the small room.
As he played, strangely, the air in the room began to change.
It was thin at first, a faint, glassy shimmer that blurred the edges of the room's modest furniture. But within seconds, a pale, milky mist began to form around his caked boots, rising up his metal shins like smoke. It didn't drift with the currents of the drafts beneath the door; it gathered against his armor, swirling in response to the frantic, unspoken rhythm guiding his bow. The unnatural fog expanded, creeping up his crimson surcoat, wrapping around his trembling hands until he seemed to be floating inside a small, isolated void.
I took a step backward, my back hitting the edge of the vanity. The temperature in the room plummeted.
Through the shifting tendrils of the vapor, the light scattered. The fog began to bend, creating layers of false movement that made it impossible to fix my eyes on his silhouette. And then, I saw it.
A distortion in the white void, just beside his left shoulder.
It was a flickering image, so faint and translucent that I could barely tell it was supposed to be a woman. It didn't possess sharp lines or a distinct face, it was a silhouette woven entirely out of light and scattered moisture, a pale shadow swaying gently to the cadence of the performance.
With that phantom shape came a secondary sound. A light, delicate accompaniment began to rise out of the fog, weaving perfectly through the strings of Matthias's violin. It didn't carry the physical vibration of wood and horsehair; it was an ethereal, echoing layer, like an instrument being played in an empty cathedral miles away, yet perfectly synchronized with his movement. It was as though someone else--someone made entirely of mist and memory--had stepped out of the ether to play alongside him.
'Who is that?'
I couldn't move or look away. The room held nothing except the physical violin, the ghostly accompaniment, and the tall man in red slowly bleeding his mind into the music to seemingly temper himself. He played as though the melody were an iron rope, and he had thrown one end around his own mind before whatever was howling inside his skull could drag him over the edge.
The melody continued for several minutes before the ethereal harmony began to thin. The light distortion near his shoulder rippled, dissolving back into ordinary moisture, and the secondary music faded into a faint, dying echo.
Little by little, the mist around his boots collapsed, thinning until the golden armor and the ruined red linen emerged from the gloom. Matthias's broad shoulders gradually lowered. The rigid tension in his jaw loosened. His breathing--unnecessary as it was for his anatomy--became slower, deeper, and more measured. His eyes still a brilliant red, now they looked like themselves again. His fingers stopped trembling, the bow left the strings, hanging by his side.
Matthias slowly lowered the violin, after a long moment he opened his eyes and looked directly at me and for the first time since arriving he acknowledged me. "I am sorry, Sylvia, I didn't mean to worry you." he said.
His voice was quiet and with more bite to it then I was used to, but even still I was glad it still had a trace of his usual softness in it. I stepped closer, stopping just short of his shadow. Something about the rigid, fragile way he stood suggested that he needed the remaining distance. The foul, earthly reek of stagnant water still rolled off his chest plate, but I forced my eyes to stay locked onto his.
"Are you alright, Matthias?" I asked, my voice barely splitting the quiet of the room. "What happened to you out there? Did you... did you have to feed on someone?"
He looked away from me, crimson gaze now anchored to the velvet lining of the open case, his pale fingers slowly releasing the neck of the violin.
"Not a person, no..." he murmured, the words flat and clipped. He took a moment to steady himself. "But perhaps a human would have been better... there was an infestation down beneath the South Ward, the slums of this city, a group of six foglets."
He paused, his mind seemingly elsewhere for a moment. When he spoke again, the curt, aggressive rhythm was back in his words, like he was fighting his own tongue to keep the thoughts straight.
He turned his head slowly, his eyes flashing a dark, brilliant red in the morning light. "It is a strange thing," he whispered, his voice dropping into a low register that made the skin on my arms prickle. "Being more monster than man. Down in that dark larder, surrounded by the rotting bones of people and animal alike... the filth didn't disgust me. It smelled sweet. I couldn't... I couldn't stop my own hands. I tore into a dead carcass like it was the most natural thing in the world..." he said.
"I got curious. Greedy, maybe. I wanted to see if my gift would extend to magic if I killed enough of one type of beast." He extended his arm out, waving through what wisps of mist remained, his voice distant. "They see the world so differently. Everything is painted in a continuous, overwhelming thrum. Chaos isn't just an occasional spell thrown by a sorcerer; its a thrumming force that moves through the air, bleeds through the soil and all things--even the dead, ancient stones of this city--echo its resonance. Everything has chaos running through it, even me. It's an ethereal tapestry, an infinite net connecting the world..."He stopped, his hand freezing mid-air before his gaze snapped back to me, the red intensity of his eyes sharpening into something painfully clear.
"...everything but you," he murmured, his voice dropping into a hollow whisper. "I wondered why they went for the horse first back then, in the forest. But now I can sense it. In that fog... you might as well have not existed..."
I startled at that, a cold jolt hitting my chest; a new way that I was different from other people. Another abnormality to add to the heavy ledger of the Black Sun, but beneath the sudden chill of the revelation, a sharper, more immediate realization bit into me.
Matthias would never have said something like that so blithely. He would have been kinder about it. He would have softened the blow, wrapped it in some dry bit of comfort, or at the very least, hesitated before dumping another reminder of my cursed blood onto my shoulders. The fact that he had just blurted it out, raw and entirely unprompted, was evidence enough that those creatures had affected him far more deeply than he was letting on.
I forced the thoughts of what his revelation meant down, refusing to let it take root. That wasn't what was important right now. He was drowning in the residual echo of those monsters; he needed to be anchored. There was a reason he had rushed toward that violin case the moment he breached the threshold; he was desperate for something familiar to hold onto.
"Matthias," I said softly, stepping into the remaining distance until I was standing right beside his armored shoulder, ignoring the sharp stench of the sewer rot. "Is everything alright now? Did... did the playing help?"
He closed his eyes, his broad shoulders hitching. "Yes... I don't know." He replied unsurely. "I was... different before I got here. A bit rude to the ward overseer at the gatehouse. I needed to get out of there. I needed to get back here... to find something familiar."
I looked down at the velvet-lined case, then back up at his pale face. "That song," I murmured. "It was the first one I ever heard you play, back when we started traveling, I like most of all the one's I've heard though you never did tell me what its significance was."
Matthias stared blankly at the dark wood of the violin, a faint, human shadow of a memory softening the hard lines of his mouth. "It was one of the first complex pieces I learned after... after my mother," he said, his voice turning distant, completely stripped of the foglet's sharp bite. "It reminds me of her. although... I don't think she ever actually played it. I suppose I just correlate it with her memory."
I frowned slightly, the image of the pale, watery distortion that had played beside him still vivid in my mind. "Is that whom that illusion was?"
Matthias blinked, his brow furrowing as his red eyes locked onto mine with genuine confusion. "What illusion?"
"When you were playing," I said, my voice measured as I watched the tension ripple beneath his pale skin. "The fog you called, Matthias. It shaped itself, I saw a distortion in the mist right beside your shoulder. A woman, an older woman, flickering like light on water, swaying to the cadence of the strings, and she was playing along, a ghost of a melody playing perfectly alongside you. I thought you were doing it on purpose."
He stared at me, his mouth parting slightly looked around the room, seemingly looking for the illusion with a deeply unsettled bewilderment.
"...I didn't draw on any fog," he murmured. "I was only trying to keep my own mind from fracturing. I haven't really gotten a lead on how these specific abilities manifest under pressure... but that isn't my primary concern right now."
He paused, a dark, heavy calculation settling over his features. The residual, clipped ambivalence was gone, but it was replaced by something far more resigned. He leaned his back against the chair, the links of his chainmail giving a dull, heavy rattle against the wood. "I think I might have to do something drastic before I make a mistake," he said softly.
I braced myself, my hand resting instinctively near the hidden hilt of Aen'caerme. "And that is?"
"I need to break into the morgue."
Author's Note: That's it for this chapter!
Sorry it took so long to get this one out. I made the mistake of working on two stories at the same time, and I actually got pretty far with both of them. The next chapter of my Inspired Inventor snippet is a bit of a tech-heavy one, though, so I might need another day or two to finish editing it properly.
As for this chapter, I'm not completely happy with it. I was trying set up the main confrontation of this arc while trying to show how absorbing the Foglets' memories and instincts made Matthias more animalistic and confrontational, but something about it felt a little strange while I was writing it. It's not really how I'm used to writing Matthias, so there was definitely a bit of a disconnect for me.
I'd really like to hear what you guys thought about it, though, because maybe it worked better than it felt while I was writing it. Also, one of my Patreons suggested the idea of Matthias eventually incorporating illusions into his music player, and I liked the idea so much that I decided to actually use it.
So, if you guys have any ideas, suggestions, or directions you'd like to see this story--or any of my other stories--go, feel free to send them my way. I'm always happy to hear what you guys come up with.