Prologue
“Yes, Uncle Arthur. The direct debit for the broadband went through on Tuesday. No, you don’t need to restart the router again; the little flashing amber light just means it’s updating the firmware.”
Chloe Mercer wedged her phone between her shoulder and her jaw, grimacing as she used the sleeve of her waterproof windbreaker to wipe a fresh smear of brown, peat-heavy rainwater from the screen of her tablet. The tablet was currently running a diagnostics suite for six local-network rigs, and every drop of moisture on the capacitive glass made her stomach clench with cold, professional fury.
“Well, your Auntie Brenda said the wireless was emitting a high-pitched humming yesterday evening,” Uncle Arthur’s voice crackled through the speaker, thin and distant over the thumping bass of a bad folk band three fields away. “She unplugged it at the wall. Said it was giving the parakeet a migraine.”
“It’s a passive-cooling plastic box, Uncle Arthur. It doesn’t have vocal cords. Just leave it plugged in, please.”
“Right, right. Well, we saw your postcard from Brighton back in April. Lovely picture of the pier. Your aunt put it on the fridge behind the milk calendar. You’re eating properly, aren’t you? Not living on those powdered energy drinks again?”
“I had a banana and an oatmeal flapjack at ten, and I am currently surrounded by thirty food trucks selling pulled pork at highway-robbery prices. I am entirely nourished.”
It was an efficient half-truth. She had skipped lunch to debug the local area network for the tabletop pavilion after the organisers had dropped the master hub into an uncovered ditch, and her total caloric intake for the day consisted of seventy milligrams of caffeine and half a bottle of tap water. But Chloe had learned at nine years old—when the solicitors had finished parcelling out her late parents’ modest estate into neatly managed trust funds—that polite, minimal reporting was the quickest way to conclude a domestic transaction. Arthur and Brenda were decent people who remembered her birthday with twenty-pound gift cards and sent Christmas cards depicting snowy robins, but they viewed her life as a bizarre, unintelligible series of glowing screens.
“Good, good. Well, Brenda says don’t catch a chill. The television weather fellow said Sussex is due an absolute soaking.”
“Understood. Love to Auntie Brenda. I’ve got to clear the server rack before the rain hits. Bye, Uncle Arthur.”
Chloe tapped the red icon with the knuckle of her index finger, took a single, measured breath to reset her blood pressure, and shoved the phone into the zippered internal pocket of her cargo trousers.
The Midsummer Living History & Arts Festival was an operational catastrophe.
To Chloe, who lived in a clean, elegant universe of algorithmic logic, predictable state-machines, and tidy compilers, this soggy field in West Sussex was a physical manifestation of chaos theory. The event director—a frantic man in an un-ironed linen smock who kept losing his walkie-talkie—had hired her to oversee the digital infrastructure for the gaming and interactive history tent. It was supposed to be three days of easy freelance cash: thirty pounds an hour to baby-sit a dozen demo stations, keep the tournament brackets running for a regional card game, and earn enough surplus liquidity to pay her server-hosting fees while she finished the beta build of her own tactical role-playing app.
Instead, the event logistics were crumbling in real time.
The drainage channels along the perimeter had clearly been dug by someone with an active grudge against Euclidean geometry. Chloe stood at the edge of the crushed-gravel path, her light hazel eyes narrowing behind the black rectangular frames of her glasses as she tracked the water flow. The runoff from the catering meadow was bypassing the culvert entirely, pooling directly beneath the sub-floor of the main electrical riser.
Idiots, she thought with clinical detachment. Absolute amateurs. She whispered pushing the thin frame of her glassess up the smooth bridge of her dainty little nose.
Without her glasses, Chloe’s world dissolved into a soft-focus smudge—she had spent twelve hours a day staring at pixel grids since she was fourteen, burning her distant vision down to an unhelpful blur that couldn’t reliably distinguish a bollard from a golden retriever past ten paces. But with her lenses shoved firmly up the bridge of her nose, her analytical brain categorised the disaster with ruthless clarity: one loose tarpaulin, three frayed extension leads, and a festival director who ought to be indicted for gross negligence.
A sudden, savage crack of thunder rattled the fillings in her molars.
The clouds overhead—a bruise-coloured mass of violet and suffocating slate—burst open like a punctured water-main.
Within thirty seconds, the sawdust walkways were churned into porridge. Shouts and shrill screams went up across the field as tourists scattered in all directions, abandoning wicker baskets and half-eaten pasties. Chloe didn’t run; she calculated the shortest vector to dry timber, tucked her tablet into its waterproof neoprene sleeve, and pulled her hood tight over her dark hair.
The main pavilion was an immediate write-off: forty soaked bodies were already jammed into the narrow entrance, exhaling humid steam and spreading mud like wet grout. Her gaze darted toward the eastern boundary, where the canopy of a massive, gnarled yew tree sheltered a solitary, crooked wagon.
Chloe paused, her mental layout of the grounds flagging an error.
That wagon had not been marked on the site survey. It sat on heavy, iron-rimmed timber wheels, its curved walls painted in faded vermilion and tarnished gilt leaf that bore the authentic patina of centuries rather than theatrical distressing. Suspended from the eaves was an iron lantern, burning with an uncomfortably steady amber light that cut straight through the diagonal sheets of rain without flickering.
Unauthorized installation, Chloe noted automatically. Fire hazard. High probability of dry rot.
Another blast of icy rain hit the side of her neck, sending a violent shiver through her shoulders.
Secondary priority. Shelter takes precedence.
She took the timber steps two at a time, ducking beneath the heavy, damp velvet curtain that served as the door.
The silence inside was instantaneous and unnatural.
The deafening hiss of the deluge vanished, cut off as cleanly as an audio track hitting a hard mute. The air inside the wagon was warm, completely devoid of moisture, and carried the pungent scents of beeswax, dried wormwood, and clean metal polish. Underneath it was a distinct, sharp tang that Chloe recognised instantly from her university hardware labs: ozone. The unmistakable electrical charge that preceded a major capacitor blowout.
he was followed in shortly by two other young women accross the threshold..
The first was tall, lithe, and extraordinarily poised despite her sodden state, wearing black leggings and a drenched crew fleece. She stood with her weight perfectly centred, scanning the strange interior with the watchful, disciplined stillness of an athlete.
The other girl had apparently arrived straight from an amateur dramatics catastrophe. She was dressed in an absurdly opulent Renaissance court gown—corseted to within an inch of asphyxiation—with honey-blonde hair plastered to her cheeks and an expression of polite, unadulterated panic.
“Crowded out there,” the girl in the leggings observed quietly, giving Chloe a brief, assessing nod.
“Understatement of the century,” Chloe muttered, her thumb instinctively adjusting the bridge of her glasses. “The drainage system on the south lawn just completely failed. The whole tournament ring is currently an open estuary.”
“I think I saw an inflatable bouncy castle take flight near the car park,” the blonde in the corset chimed in, shuddering as she shook rainwater from her voluminous velvet skirts, spraying droplets across the floor.
Chloe took an involuntary half-step back, her jaw tightening as she calculated the bacterial profile of warm meadow mud mixed with three-day-old festival runoff. “Watch the hem, please. That water is mostly agricultural sludge.”
“Right. Sorry. I’m Selena, by the way,” the blonde said quickly.
The dancer introduced herself with crisp economy as Sonia. Chloe offered a short, functional nod. “Chloe. Logistics and systems.”
“Fools rush in.”
The voice was a low, dry rasp from the shadowed corner of the wagon.
Chloe’s attention snapped to the low counter of dark, polished mahogany. Sitting on an iron-framed stool behind it was an elderly woman whose face looked like crumpled parchment, her hair a dense knot of dull grey, her eyes a pale, milky stone that held an unsettling, predatory intelligence. She wore a heavy green woollen shawl pinned with a silver brooch depicting an ouroboros, but her gnarled, ink-stained fingers were not holding knitting needles.
She was working a chamois cloth over an intricate brass mechanism.
Chloe’s breath hitched.
Her gaming app had required eighteen months of research into historical navigation instruments, astrolabes, and mechanical calculating engines. What sat upon the velvet cloth before this woman defied every known engineering standard of the pre-industrial world.
It was an interlocking astronomical sphere, roughly eighteen inches in diameter, forged from an impossible union of metals—cold blackened iron, tarnished bronze, and mirror-bright silver that showed no oxidation. Concentric brass rings nested within one another with tolerances so microscopic they belonged in a modern clean-room. Etched into the arcs were celestial charts that didn’t match the Northern Hemisphere, surrounded by tiny, razor-sharp Latin script and angular runes. Embedded within the outer rings were three raw, uncut stones: a deep, bottomless sapphire, an icy sea-green aquamarine, and a dark crimson garnet that seemed to absorb the amber lantern light.
And it was operating.
The gears clicked—not with the smooth escapement of an English grandfather clock, but with an irregular, syncopated tick-tick... tock that skipped beats like an arrhythmic human pulse.
“Incredible,” Chloe breathed, stepping forward on pure, unadulterated engineer’s instinct, her eyes drinking in the gear-train. “The differential gearing on that... is that an Antikythera reproduction? The ratios look entirely non-standard.”
“Do not touch,” the old woman said.
The voice didn’t rise, but the words dropped with the finality of a guillotine blade. Her pale eyes flicked up, skewering Chloe behind her lenses with a gaze that made the back of her scalp prickle with static electricity. “It is not an amusement. It is not for the eyes of sheep. And it is most certainly not for hire or sale.”
“I wasn’t attempting to touch it,” Chloe said evenly, though she took an involuntary half-pace back, her logical brain registering that the ambient temperature around the brass sphere was dropping rapidly. “The gear teeth have an involute profile that shouldn’t exist on an artifact of that age. The manufacturing precision requires—”
“Looking with our eyes, not with our hands!” Selena cut in with theatrical desperation, retreating backward with hands held up placatingly. “Very museum-appropriate. Absolutely understood.”
Chloe watched in silent, mounting horror as Selena’s oversized, soaking-wet theatrical heel caught the loop of a thick hemp guy-rope fastened to the floorboards.
“Selena, freeze,” Chloe commanded, her voice sharp with sudden, analytical panic. “Your anchor foot is caught—”
“Oh, no—” Selena gasped.
The blonde didn’t freeze. Her centre of gravity dissolved. Her arms windmilled wildly, her elbow clipping a tall display stand, which tilted, struck her hip, and hurled her entire velvet-clad mass directly across the low mahogany counter.
“Selena, look out!” Sonia lunged, her dancer’s reflexes kicking in to catch the falling girl.
It was a fraction of a second too late.
Selena’s forearm struck the edge of the velvet cloth, dragging the brass sphere sideways.
The old woman’s head jerked up, her wrinkled mouth opening in sheer, incandescent fury. “You blundering little—”
The astrolabe slid off the polished mahogany and struck the heavy cast-iron brazier resting in the centre of the timber floor.
The sound that followed was not the ring of metal on metal.
It was a deafening, reality-splitting crack that ripped through Chloe’s skull like a high-voltage surge through unshielded copper.
The air didn’t merely flash; the three-dimensional geometry of the room folded in on itself. Blinding rings of violet, deep sapphire, and raw sea-green light erupted outward in a tearing shockwave. The timber walls of the wagon dematerialized, disintegrating into an endless, howling abyss of absolute black and freezing, hurricane-force wind. The floor beneath Chloe’s boots vanished into nothingness.
She was falling.
Sensory data overwhelmed her retinas: stars screaming past in broken parabolic curves, the roar of centuries tearing like dry canvas, and the shattered astrolabe spinning through the blinding vortex as it fractured into three distinct, glowing fragments.
Chloe didn’t scream. Her programmer’s brain—trained to grab the critical error-log before the server crashes completely—fired on pure, unvarnished survival instinct.
She saw the centre of the mechanism tumbling toward her through the light: an intricate, ticking brass jewel embedded with a pale aquamarine compass needle, spinning wildly against impossible celestial markings.
Chloe thrust her arm into the blinding glare.
Her fingers snapped shut around the cold, heavy metal, the jagged bronze casing biting hard into her palm as the internal gears clicked violently against her skin: tick-tick-tick-tick.
Through the howling glare of the void, she caught one final, fractured glimpse: Sonia, clutching a burning crimson ring against her ribs; Selena, tumbling through a tear of deep sapphire light.
And then, cutting through the roar of collapsing space and falling stars, the furious, raspy screech of the old woman echoed across the centuries:
“Oh, bloody hell. Not again!”
Alright this is book three and the final one of the Cursed Relics Series. just a bit of a trigger warning, the hero of this one has dubious morals, he takes it a step beyond what my usual heroes do. Although there is no forced scenes nor do I condone them, but there is coercion, he is after all a pirate in real life, and a criminal, but he does have redeeming qualities lol. There is however only so much decency you can expect from him in the beginning, but he will learn as do all my heroes in the end. And it will take a very special heroine to teach him some much needed lessons. Just wanted to get that out of the way, please read, review and give me your feedback for this and the other books in the series. Hope you enjoy, Happy Reading.
