Prelude to a Heist: Chapter I - The Hunted

 It is cold in the nightmare. 

Salumax is adrift in a river of ice, frozen to the spot. A blizzard howls around him with a thousand voices, peppering his indigo skin with razor flakes. Before him, he sees the tomb again - the sheer wall of crystalline blue, ice upon ice upon ice, and deep within it, the pinpricks of scarlet light that are the eyes of a devil.

The devil speaks to him in a voice like an iceberg cracking, whispers a hundred names that are not his own, until:

"Salumax. Your time is running out. I will find you, scion of my blood, and I will flay your secrets from your head."

---

Salumax jerks awake in his hammock, strung across the rafters in Bertolt's Brewery. He sits up, sees Erith watching him with anxious green eyes.

"Is something wrong?" she asks. She slept in her armour again: sheets of glittering green enamel layered over steel. "Another dream?"

Salumax rubs his forehead. "Another dream," he confirms. He crosses to the window, where the telescope stares out over the slate-grey walls and towering spires of Zeitrich Estate. Beyond it, Gorgarten ranges across the valley, framed against the mountains that loom like a row of shattered teeth. "The Entombed grows impatient. His agents are here, in the city. I'm sure of it."

"They can't have tracked you already."

"They can track me anywhere. They possess a power not of these realms." Salumax looks up at the Iasong, the perennial aurorae woven across the sky like curtains of stardust. Here in Kastalav, they called it 'the Gottlieder,' but it had the same story: the melody of creation, the source of life and magic in the Realms Within, the physical incarnation of the divine strokes that formed the shape of the world. Would that elder power be enough to protect him from the frigid hell in his nightmares?

"Just one more step," he says. "One more step, and we have it. The key to all our ambitions." 

"And what if you can't get it?" Erith asks, a note of uncertainty in her voice. "What could it cost?"

Salumax stares out at the city. He imagines it frozen, fractured, engulfed by a glacier, a baleful glare shining in the ice. 

"Anything."