The roar of the phantom flames was a physical weight, a pressure that sought to crush his name and his time from the world. He was being unwritten. The heat was a memory, blistering his skin though the air was cold. The screams were echoes, ghosts of servants and family trapped in the burning west wing of Bielski Manor a century ago. A sliver of him, the part that was a soldier, knew this was an illusion, a trap. But that part was shrinking, its awareness guttering to less than ten percent. The rest of him was drowning in the past.
He was walking toward the heart of the inferno, a moth drawn to a fire that had burned out a hundred years ago. The trap was perfect. It was a lock that only his bloodline could open, and he had just walked through the door. The ghostly silhouette of the great timbered house, engulfed in flame, pulled him closer. A hot, fraying thread of forgotten history was wrapped around his soul, and it was reeling him in. He was five meters from being completely consumed, his own identity overwritten by the agony of his ancestors.
A shape moved in the periphery of the fire-drenched world. A grey, indistinct form. Alessandro Volpe. The inventor shouted something, but the words were lost in the roar. A hand, cold and real, clamped down on Sineus’s arm. The jolt of physical contact was an anchor, but it was not enough. The psychic tide of the burning past was too strong, pulling him under. He was losing his grip.
Then, another voice cut through the noise. It was not a sound, but a feeling. A memory, sharp and jagged and utterly different from the old, curdled grief of the fire. It was Alessandro’s. It was a blast of cold, clean fury.
— The state took my family's workshop!
The memory was not of fire, but of cold iron and official paper. The smell of hot metal and lubricating grease, the pride of a family’s creation. Then the heavy tread of soldiers’ boots on a workshop floor, the cold finality of a wax seal stamped onto a legal document. The theft of a life’s work, not by a rival, but by the unfeeling machinery of government. It was the memory that had forged the revolutionary.
This new pain was a different texture. It was a shard of freshly broken glass against the smothering, hot blanket of the fire. It was real. It was present. It was a pain Sineus could understand, a loss he could measure. He latched onto it, a drowning man seizing a rope. The price of this anchor was Alessandro’s raw vulnerability, a wound torn open and offered as a weapon. Sineus used the shock of it, the sheer, unexpected reality of it, to pull back.
The illusion of the fire flickered. For a moment, the roar of the flames and the shouts of Alessandro’s memory fought for dominance. Then, with a sound like a thousand panes of burnt glass shattering at once, the trap broke.
The sensory whiplash was absolute. The blistering heat vanished, replaced by the damp, penetrating cold of the Ashen Tract. The roar of the inferno collapsed into the profound, unnatural silence that saturated the blighted land. The sickening orange-black sky was gone, and the uniform, joyless grey pressed down once more. Sineus gasped, stumbling forward and falling to his knees in the fine, cold dust. The air was thin and tasted of decay. He was back.
He and Alessandro stood alone in the grey waste, both breathing heavily, their exhalations turning to white mist in the cold. A migraine hammered behind Sineus’s eyes, the familiar backlash of a violent psychic disruption. Alessandro was pale, his jaw tight, his eyes wide with the shock of his own desperate act. He had just ripped open his soul and used it to save his enemy. His ally. His partner.
They stood in the grey landscape, the silence broken only by the sound of their own ragged breathing. The immediate danger was past, but the echo of it remained. A new bond had been forged in that shared trauma, a connection made not of words or promises, but of a wound freely shown.
Sineus looked at Alessandro, and for the first time, he saw the man behind the cynical inventor. He saw the boy who had watched his family’s legacy stolen by faceless authority. He understood the source of the Italian’s rage, the engine that drove his rebellion. It was not a desire for chaos, but a desperate need to reclaim what was lost. Their alliance, once a thing of cold utility, had been reforged.
Alessandro would not meet his eyes. He turned away, his movements stiff, and began a methodical check of his rifle, the scrape of metal on metal a small, familiar sound to ward off the enormity of what had just passed between them. He had exposed himself. He had paid the price of saving Sineus by revealing the one memory that gave him purpose. He had cracked his own armor.
Slowly, Sineus pushed himself to his feet. The dust of the Ashen Tract clung to his uniform. He looked at the Italian’s back, at the tension in his shoulders. The relationship had changed. It was no longer a nobleman and a revolutionary, a master of the occult and a master of machines. They were two men, bound by the wounds they had shown each other. They were equals.
The cold air was still. The grey dust settled on their shoulders without a sound.
The silence of the Tract was a lie.
