Emma Wentworth

Chapter 0.1 — The Long Corridor

In the autumn of 1813, Emma Wentworth was seventeen years old and had never left Tarryford. She and her sister Georgiana attended the Northlake Ball at Northlake_Hall as local guests — the daughters of a Wiltshire family with no particular reason to expect the evening would alter the shape of their lives. It did. The portal in the Long Corridor opened onto a dark realm inhabited by Horrors — squat, headless, fur-covered things with fanged mouths on their torsos — and the expedition to close it cost the life of James_Bennet, a gentleman poet, who was overtaken and consumed during the retreat while the armed men who stopped to cover the withdrawal were killed alongside him.

Emma survived. She and Georgiana walked out with Marina, Jane, and the weight of what they had witnessed. Lady_Honoria_Lyndhurst recruited the survivors and brought them to London, to Hartwell_House, where six instructors drilled them in the skills the Order_of_St_Aelfric deemed necessary for the work ahead. Emma’s cousin Mr. Horatio Fairborn provided a London household at Gough Square. The girl who had never left Wiltshire was gone. In her place stood someone who had seen the impossible and chosen not to look away.

Chapter 0.5 — The Scandal Beneath the Stage

At Drury Lane in December 1813, the investigators confronted something that had taken root in the theatre itself — a time loop, a mirror that remembered, and the lingering presence of Giles_Mercer, the actor whose name would later lead them to the Orphean Society in London. Jane_Radcliffe died there, swallowed by the theatre. Emma survived again, but the experience left its mark. A phobia of theatres settled into her nerves — not a rational fear, but the deep flinch of a body that remembers what it felt in a place where the walls breathed and the performance never ended.

The theatre obsession that would define her in the months to come grew from this same root. What terrified her also fascinated her, as though the horror and the art were inseparable, and Emma could not stop returning in her mind to the stage where everything had gone wrong.

Chapter 1 — London: The Orphean Society

The investigation that followed was Emma’s first full field operation with the Order_of_St_Aelfric. Lord_Percival_Harcourt dispatched the party to find two missing agents — Sir Nathaniel Rooke and Imogen_Bellamy — both connected to the Orphean Society at 43 Grosvenor Street. Emma participated in the raids that followed: the sub-basement beneath the Society building, where Augustus mercy-killed the Choir Below — emaciated, eyeless wretches chained to the walls and humming an endless tuneless song — and the desperate two-pronged assault on Stonehenge on the night of June 12th, where Danforth sacrificed bound prisoners on tuning crucifixes while a servant of Yog_Sothoth began to form overhead. A young farmer boy, barely more than a child, volunteered from the Salisbury pub and died in the assault. Most of the farmers died.

The investigators rescued Rooke, killed Hume and Danforth, and were formally inducted into the Order. Emma was seventeen and had now witnessed a summoning ritual, a mercy-killing, and the death of innocents who had trusted them. The road south to Lyon beckoned, and the letters recovered from the cult pointed to the Societe Harmonique de l’Aube.

Chapter 2 — Lyon

Lyon was where the campaign broke open and the cost became personal. On the road to the Puyrault estate, the party was ambushed by ciimba — zombie children with their mouths sewn shut. It was Emma’s first encounter with them. Augustus was bitten and fell sick. The bodies were burned in the back garden.

The horrors multiplied. At the masquerade soiree at the Maison_du_Corbeau, Emma witnessed a Formless Spawn ritual and a child sacrifice in the hidden chamber. The party did not intervene. They left carrying knowledge they could not put down. At the Orphans’ Hospital, she descended into the basement and found Dr. Carreau mid-surgery on a child — inserting steel rods into the boy’s throat, with five other children in cages. Emma shot Carreau. In the chaos that followed, Augustus was killed by a botched first aid roll from Jacob, and Marina, driven into temporary insanity, shot Jacob dead — two allies killed by their own side in minutes. Georgiana took a cleaver to the shoulder.

The final assault on the Silkweavers’ Guild brought the ciimba again. They charged from the darkness beneath the old guild vaults, and this time Emma fled screaming. The second encounter crystallised into a permanent phobia of children — not a choice, but a fracture in something that would not heal. Marina died in the tunnels, detonating herself with lantern oil and gunpowder to destroy the Chakota. Savarin was killed by the veterans’ volley. The Fourviere ritual never happened. Four allies dead in a single chapter.

Emma carried two phobias out of France — theatre and children — and the knowledge that she had killed a man, watched friends die, and kept walking.

Session 1 — Arrival in Vienna

The party arrived at the Linienwall customs gate on the morning of August 3rd. Vienna declared itself in noise, colour, and complication — church bells, military bands, conversations in four languages. Emma secured four thousand gulden from a letter of credit and settled into the palatial suites at Palais_Kinsky on Am Hof Square. That evening, Lady_Ashworth invited her to her private box at the Burgtheater for Don Giovanni, and Emma accepted, stepping into the social world of the Congress with the ease of someone who had always been comfortable in a room full of strangers.

At the Naturhistorisches_Institut, Dr. Falkner told them everything — the vanishing musicians, the sealed anatomical theatre, the Engine. The horror beneath Vienna had a shape now, and Emma heard it described for the first time in a locked room with the curtains drawn.

Session 2 — The Opera and the Dead Man

At the Burgtheater, Lady_Ashworth identified the faces that mattered, and among them was Baron von Kaunitz — handsome, cold, and watching from across the theatre. He approached during the intermission, seeking an introduction to Emma. His charm was practised and precise, his interest in her unmistakable. Emma told him the party was staying at Palais_Kinsky. It was an honest answer to a direct question, and it handed the Brotherhood of the Open Measure their first solid piece of intelligence about the investigators’ lodgings.

That same night, the Leopoldstadt expedition brought Brenner’s confession — the Engine described in full for the first time, a thirty-foot biomechanical instrument built from living tissue, voices cut from living throats. Emma lost a point of sanity hearing the details. The horror was no longer abstract.

Session 3 — Countess, Salon, and Surveillance

Emma’s honesty continued to serve her. At Countess von Thun’s townhouse, she gave a straight answer when tested — “we’re protecting someone” — and the Countess approved, granting a salon invitation. At the salon itself, Graf Maximilian von Sternberg arrived in full Hussar regalia and made directly for Emma. He took her hand, held it longer than etiquette permitted, and requested a waltz. Emma accepted. They danced in what onlookers described as perfect synchronisation, while Thomas watched with barely contained fury and Varrio had to intervene to prevent an incident. Sternberg returned Emma with a smirk aimed squarely at Thomas. The romantic rivalry that would haunt the Vienna chapter had declared itself.

Kaunitz reappeared that evening, offering to show Emma the Hofburg gardens and noting she was “collecting powerful friends very quickly for tourists.” A calling card with a pressed rose was delivered to Palais_Kinsky — proof that Kaunitz had visited in person. Emma was now at the centre of two men’s attention, one a suitor and one a predator, and neither was simple to manage.

Session 4 — Roses, Wits, and Violation

The rivalry escalated. Sternberg sent elaborate red and white roses to Emma, and Thomas responded by drawing his pistol in the middle of the parlour — an act of possessive fury that Charlotte defused by throwing his gunpowder into the fountain. Kaunitz visited Palais_Kinsky that afternoon and probed Emma directly, offering an introduction to Fraulein Lindqvist and recommending Beethoven’s Seventh with the weight of a threat.

At the Imperial Reception in the Hofburg’s Redoutensaal, Emma waltzed with Thomas — his grip possessive and tight — and then with Sternberg, the roses hanging between them like an accusation. When Beethoven’s Seventh played, the party heard the shape of the Engine beneath the music, and the beautiful became horrible. The evening ended with the discovery that their rooms had been professionally searched. Marina’s notebook was gone. The occult tomes were gone. And on Emma’s dressing table, a single fresh white rose had been placed without a card — Kaunitz’s signature. I was in your bedroom. The violation was intimate and deliberate, and it struck harder than any knife.

Session 5 — Blood on the Graben

Colonel Moreau was assassinated in broad daylight on the Graben — four assailants, no warning, a knife in the stomach. Varrio escaped wounded. Emma was not at the ambush site, but the absence of two chairs at dinner that evening carried its own weight. The campaign’s first permanent character death landed on the party like a stone.

Emma and Georgiana attended the public student recital at the Vienna Conservatory, where they found Anna near the refreshments — blonde, pretty, nervous. They helped fix her hair, settled her nerves, and befriended her with warmth that was entirely genuine. When Adler appeared and pulled Anna through a side door after her performance, Emma and Georgiana followed to his office. Adler’s charm evaporated in an instant. He half-drew a knife: “I’m afraid I must insist.” They left. Emma had now looked directly into the face of the man who controlled Anna’s fate, and he had shown her exactly what he was.

Session 6 — A Bite in the Dark

The Nightgaunt came at night, crawling down the side of Palais_Kinsky face-first, frost crystallising on stone. It shattered Charlotte’s window with its barbed tail and slashed her before she could react. Emma fired her pistol — the bullet bounced off the oily hide. The creature grappled her and began dragging her toward the window, its wings folding around her in a cold, faceless embrace. Thomas grabbed her and hauled her free. And then Emma bit the creature’s neck.

She tore away a chunk of inky, oily flesh and spat it across the room. The Nightgaunt shrieked and dropped her. Adrien drove his sword through the thing and pinned it to the wall, where it dissolved into black goo. The moment was desperate, primal, and audacious — a seventeen-year-old gentlewoman from Wiltshire fighting a creature from beyond the stars with her teeth. It would define her for the rest of the campaign. Thomas maintained an armed vigil outside Emma’s room for the remainder of the night, and in the morning neither of them spoke of what had happened between them in those frantic seconds at the window.

Session 7 — Whispers, Widows, and Wounded Warriors

Katherine_Ward arrived on Harcourt’s orders, and the party relocated from Palais_Kinsky to the White Ox Inn under assumed names while Brotherhood watchers were shaken through the streets. That afternoon, Emma attended the musical salon at Countess von Thun’s townhouse, where Anna rose to sing and the room changed. Windows vibrated. A wine glass cracked. The bone-deep sensation of something vast and indifferent pressing against the membrane of the world filled every chest. Emma recognised the frequency — it was the Engine’s voice, inverted and complementary, as though Anna were the missing piece the machine had always required.

Afterward, Georgiana saw what Anna’s high collar concealed: dilated pupils unresponsive to light, deep bruising along her throat and jaw, persistent tremors in her hands. Adler materialised and steered Anna away before the conversation could deepen. Emma now understood, with the certainty of someone who had looked into Adler’s eyes at the Conservatory and felt the resonance in Anna’s voice, exactly what was at stake and how little time remained.

Session 8 — The Duel, the Diva, and the Demon

The Grand Masquerade was the evening where everything converged. Emma and Thomas cut across the dance floor toward the refreshments while the intelligence network of the entire campaign operated around them — Katherine mapping service corridors, Georgiana receiving Thurner’s operational packet during a waltz, Varrio charming Countess von Thun so thoroughly she cleared her dance card. Sternberg arrived drunk and demanded a dance from Emma, insulting Thomas’s station in the process. Varrio punched him in the face. Sternberg challenged Varrio to a duel; Thomas took it up with undisguised delight.

When Anna performed, the chandeliers vibrated, champagne rippled, a flute shattered. The party moved the moment the applause erupted. Emma and Georgiana coaxed Anna away from the marble with warmth and charm. Katherine threw her cape over the soprano and she vanished from sight. Adler struck his tuning fork and the stained-glass window exploded inward, sending blue, gold, and crimson shards across the ballroom as two Wachter dropped into the crowd. Emma was at the entrance to the servants’ corridor with Thomas, Anna, and Nell, a second Wachter blocking their only known escape route, when the session ended mid-combat.

Session 9 — The Burning Ball and the Broken Baron

The escape from the Palais_Lobkowitz was chaos and fire. Emma smashed a chair through a ballroom window, opening a route onto the port-cochere roof. Thomas leapt through and caught Anna as she jumped too hard, ending up half-hanging off the edge with the singer dangling above the cobblestones. Varrio set a Wachter ablaze with a torch fashioned from a chair leg, a tablecloth, and leaking cognac. Georgiana hamstrung Adler with a single sword stroke, severing both Achilles tendons. Emma rushed forward to seize the command fork from the fallen Adler — and he drove his knife up under her arm.

The wound was deep and serious, sufficient to cross the Major Wound threshold. Nikolai and Sasha crashed into Adler and pummelled him into submission. The party extracted through broken windows and darkened gardens, piling into a carriage that drove hard for Thaliastraße 12 in the Josefstadt. Emma arrived wounded, carried into the parlour bedroom where Thomas refused to leave her side. The evening had cost her blood, but the fork was in the party’s hands, Anna was free, and Adler was bound in the cellar below.

Session 10 — The Fork in the Road

The Engine dreamed back at them that night. Emma stood at the Lainzer Knoll gates and watched Thomas fall — Sternberg’s shot through his chest, Adler kneeling to lift the still-beating heart into a humming brass resonance bowl, Thomas rising hollow-chested with his lips stitched shut in musical notation string, a Nightgaunt folding around her from behind. She woke gasping to find Thomas alive beside her.

Dr Voss stitched and bandaged the knife wound. Emma ignored the twenty-four-hour bed rest advice with polite scepticism. She had already survived a Nightgaunt’s embrace, a knife under the arm, and two years of horrors that would have broken anyone who had less reason to keep standing. The party met Prince Metternich at the Ballhausplatz, presented Adler as a gift, and received a writ of authority that sanctioned the University raid. Vogel was arrested. The occult books were recovered from the Polizeidirektion. Sternberg’s duel was rescheduled to dawn the next morning — pistols, Linienwallgasse — and Thomas must appear.

As the afternoon settled over Vienna, Emma Wentworth remained at Thaliastraße 12, wounded but ambulatory, carrying two phobias and a Major Wound and the knowledge that Caroline_Hartley was inside the University where people were fed to a machine. Five days remained until the ritual. The girl from Tarryford who had never left Wiltshire was now a veteran of four chapters, two countries, and horrors that the polite world could not imagine, and she had not yet turned away from any of them.

Session 11 — The Duelling Ground

The Engine dreamed at her again that night. Thomas stood on the duelling ground and Sternberg’s shot punched through his chest. Adler knelt to lift the still-beating heart into a humming brass resonance bowl. Thomas rose hollow-chested with his lips stitched shut in musical notation string. A Nightgaunt folded around Emma from behind. She woke gasping to find Thomas alive beside her at Thaliastraße 12, and the dream left a residue that clung to her skin like frost.

She was resting at the safehouse under Thomas’s watch when Nikolai and Sasha arrived demanding to know what had become of Adler. The news that he had been handed to Prince Metternich landed hard. Later, Georgiana spotted Thomas and Varrio sneaking out in the pre-dawn dark and woke Emma, and Emma knew before anyone told her where they were going. She armed herself and followed. The knife wound under her arm that Dr Voss had stitched two days ago pulled with every step.

Dawn on the tenth came grey and damp outside the Linienwall gates. Two carriages, a surgeon laying out instruments on the running board without being asked, and the man Emma had been refusing to name standing at one end of twenty paces while the man who had pursued her across four sessions of Viennese society stood at the other. The pistols failed. Thomas missed. Sternberg’s flintlock misfired on a wet pan. Varrio crossed the field and talked both seconds into switching to sabres, and Thomas drove his blade into Sternberg’s armpit and chest in a decisive riposte that mirrored the exact wound Emma herself had suffered at the Lobkowitz. Sternberg went to his knees. The surgeon rushed in. His pursuit was over.

Emma pulled Thomas aside afterward. She told him, with a fury that barely concealed her relief, that if he ever did any of this stupid shit again she would shoot him herself, because she did not want to do any of this without him here. Thomas kissed her. She kissed him back. No declaration, no conversation. Just the grey light and the wet grass and his mouth on hers while the seconds looked away. Four sessions of tension, resolved in steel and silence. The girl from Tarryford who had bitten a Nightgaunt’s throat and taken a knife under the arm and carried two phobias through four chapters had found the person she was willing to stand beside.

Session 12 — The War Council

Emma found Georgiana upstairs clutching the tuning fork wrapped in fabric, and the protective fury that surfaced was older than the campaign and deeper than the supernatural. She told her sister to put it away. Not asked. Told. The same voice she had used when Georgiana stayed up too late reading by candlelight in Tarryford, the same instinct that had driven her to lean over a Nightgaunt and bite through its neck. The tuning fork was doing something to Georgiana. It came to her hand in the night, it vibrated when the Engine ran, and Emma could see the change in her sister’s eyes, a growing preoccupation with frequencies and Latin texts and counter-rituals that pulled her further from the woman Emma knew and closer to something Emma could not name.

The reconnaissance report, the mercenary negotiations, the Bauer interrogation, the forbidden texts study: Emma was present for all of it, absorbing the intelligence, watching the plan take shape. At the Heuriger Zum Rebstock, she sat at a table surrounded by Russian soldiers, Sardinian mercenaries, and a Viennese lawyer formalizing a contract for an assault on a university, and the absurdity of the situation competed with its gravity in a way that would have been funny if Caroline Hartley were not locked in a room at the end of a corridor with a machine that made grown men’s teeth ache. Thomas was beside her. The man she had kissed on a duelling ground two mornings ago, the man she had threatened to shoot if he ever did anything so reckless again. Then the Wächter came through the pergola, and Emma Wentworth, who had bitten through a creature’s neck in a nightgown at Palais_Kinsky, was on her feet before the burning oil finished spreading.

Session 13 — The Assault

The Wächter at the Heuriger was dealt with in the chaos of fire and knife-throws and pistol shots, and Emma had dived under the table when it came through the pergola, which was the correct thing to do when you are carrying a Major Wound and a half-healed knife hole under your arm and someone else has a better angle on the creature’s eyes. Thomas helped her up after, with the matter-of-fact efficiency that had become its own form of tenderness — the man who had kissed her on a duelling ground two mornings ago now helped her off the flagstones with a steadying hand that lingered a half-second longer than strictly necessary, and Emma allowed it, because some things did not require conversation.

At the safe house, Thomas settled her on the parlor sofa with her feet in his lap and kept watch. It was the quietest hour of the evening, and it would be the last quiet hour for some time. Emma watched the room prepare itself for the assault — the weapons checked, the plans reviewed, the faces of people who understood they were about to go into a building that contained something that could reduce a grown man’s mind to fragments — and thought about the Drury Lane Theatre, about the walls that breathed and the performance that never ended, and what a woman who had survived that and survived a Nightgaunt and survived a knife wound under the arm was expected to feel about descending into a sealed anatomical theatre beneath a university. She felt it. She set it aside. She had been setting it aside since Wiltshire.

In the university’s south wing lobby, Emma said “Hi” to the student guards, and the simplicity of it was its own kind of audacity — a pleasant-faced young woman from Wiltshire addressing Austrian university guards with all the uncomplicated cheer of someone who had wandered in by accident and expected to wander back out — while Andrei and Nikolai moved around them through the shadow. The guards were looking at Emma. They did not look at the Russians. The distraction worked, and Emma knew it would work before she attempted it, because she had always understood that being underestimated in the right moment was a skill as reliable as any other.

Herzfeld’s office held the secret passage behind the bookcase, and it was Emma’s hands that found the mechanism, her weight that swung the panel open onto the dark beyond. She had not been looking for it. She had simply been looking at the room the way she always looked at rooms — with the particular attention of someone who had learned, at seventeen, in a theatre in London, that buildings concealed things, and that the things they concealed were worse than what was visible. The shelf moved. The passage descended. And Emma Wentworth, who feared theatres, who had feared them since Drury Lane and feared them again in Vienna, went in first, because someone had to, and the Major Wound was only a wound, and the theatre below was only a theatre, and she had never yet let the thing she feared most stop her from walking toward it.

Session 14 — The Theatre

The theatre was a theatre. That was the worst of it. The tiered seating, the central stage, the performance space designed so that every eye converged on the thing being done at the centre — the architecture was identical to Drury Lane, to every theatre Emma had feared and been fascinated by since December 1813, except that the audience was the Chorus_Dead with their throats flayed open and the performance was the Engine cycling air through human lungs to produce a sound that was not music and not silence but something between the two that pressed against the membrane of the world until the world began to give. Emma looked at it and the theatre phobia and the theatre obsession collapsed into each other like two waves meeting, and what remained was a mania. The music. She could hear the music in the machine, the harmonic structure beneath the horror, and it was beautiful in the way that a fire is beautiful when it is consuming the house you grew up in — undeniable and catastrophic and impossible to look away from.

The temporary insanity settled over her like a veil, and through it the theatre resolved itself not as a horror but as a problem of acoustics. The Engine’s resonance was being sustained by something beyond its own mechanism — amplified, directed, shaped by the wooden and stone baffles that lined the theatre’s upper tier like the reflectors behind stage lanterns. Emma saw them because she had spent her life looking at theatres, because the girl from Tarryford who had been terrified of stages had also spent every spare hour studying their construction, their sight lines, their acoustics. The obsession that had grown from the same root as the phobia delivered its dividend in the worst room she had ever stood in. She pointed at the baffles and shouted for Thomas and Freddy to bring them down.

They did. Thomas threw his weight against the nearest panel and it crashed to the theatre floor. Freddy pushed a second. Each baffle that fell punched a hole in the Engine’s harmonic envelope, and Emma directed the demolition with the focused clarity of someone who understood exactly what she was hearing even as the mania made her want to hear more of it. The music was dying. Each panel that fell took a voice with it, and the Chorus_Dead staggered and faltered, and Georgiana’s counter-ritual drove through the gaps like water through cracking stone. The Engine shattered. The music stopped. And Emma stood in the silence that followed with the knife wound still pulling under her arm and the mania draining out of her like water from a cracked vessel, leaving behind an exhaustion so profound it was almost peaceful.

In the courtyard above, the dawn light fell on a party that had survived something none of them would be able to describe to anyone who had not been there. Emma leaned against Thomas and let the weight of his arm settle around her shoulders. Georgiana stood apart, a white streak in her hair that had not been there an hour ago, her left hand catching the light in ways that skin should not. Emma had watched her sister descend into the passage carrying the fork and the cost of using it, and had followed her down because that was what she had always done — followed Georgiana into the dark and refused to let the dark keep either of them. The girl from Tarryford who feared theatres had walked into the worst theatre in the world and read its architecture well enough to help destroy it. The music mania would fade. The Major Wound would heal. The knowledge that she had stood inside a machine made of human bodies and found its weakness by understanding its beauty — that knowledge would not fade, and Emma carried it into the morning with the particular steadiness of someone who has always known that the things she feared and the things she loved were the same thing wearing different faces.

Chapter 4, Session 1 — The Morning After

The phantom music found Emma in the dining room of Palais_Kinsky at dawn. She had been waltzing. She did not remember starting, only that the rhythm was there, insistent and irresistible, pulling her through the steps with the authority of a partner who would not be refused. Her wound had reopened, soaking the side of her dress, and she was humming a melody that no one else could hear, and the hotel guests were staring, and Thomas was trailing after her, begging her to sit down. When gentle persuasion failed, he threw money at the string duet until they stopped, then sat beside her and sang. Army drinking songs. “Bestiality’s best, boys! (Shag a Wallaby),” delivered with surprising resonance and depth, until the phantom music lost its grip and Emma agreed to rest. The mania had surfaced for the first time in daylight. The music from the theatre was still in her, lodged somewhere between the obsession and the phobia, and it came out in waltz time when her defences were down.

The doctor restitched her wound without anesthetic while Thomas held her hand and his voice climbed a register every time she squeezed. A mysterious letter bearing a familiar seal arrived, and Emma read it privately and said nothing about its contents when Thomas asked. Sternberg’s apology, or his farewell, or whatever it was. She folded it away. That evening, Thomas slipped out of a fabric shop with a bag stuffed under his jacket and would not meet her eyes, and in Trieste, bright red as his jacket, he presented her with a Kashmiri wool shawl and explained that it might be cold on the ship since she had been hurt, and that was the entirety of his speech. Emma took the shawl. The girl from Tarryford who had bitten a Nightgaunt’s throat and identified acoustic baffles in the worst theatre in the world accepted a gift from a man who could not say what it meant, and whatever it meant she held it.

Six days of mountain roads, then the Adriatic, then La_Speranza. At dawn, the hawsers came off the bollards, and the harbour mouth passed on both sides, and then there was only open water stretching ahead, flat and blue and empty. Emma leaned against the railing with Thomas’s shawl over her shoulders and the knife wound pulling beneath it and the music still somewhere inside her, waiting. Six weeks to Calcutta. The mania would come and go. The wound would heal or it would not, and there was no surgeon aboard worth the name. The girl who had never left Wiltshire in 1813 was now watching Europe disappear behind her, carrying two phobias and a Major Wound and a shawl she could not quite name the significance of, heading toward a country none of them had ever seen. The phantom music was patient. It would wait.