— It’s a trap, — Sineus whispered, the words a puff of vapor in the cold morning air. He saw it all in a frozen, terrible instant. The hope was the lure. The love was the bait. The taut, vibrating thread of intent he had seen on Pyotr was a leash, and the master holding it had just pulled it tight.
Pyotr’s face, etched with genuine concern, crumpled in confusion. — Sineus, what are you talking about? There is no—
The world did not explode. It compressed. From the shadowed archway behind Pyotr, a wave of absolute silence rolled across the courtyard, a pressure that made the ears ache and the air feel thick as water. It was not an absence of sound but the presence of a void, a focused, weaponized nothing. A direct mnemonic blast, aimed not at the body, but at the soul. It moved with the speed of thought, a shimmering distortion in the air, a spear of pure oblivion coming straight for Sineus.
There was no time to think, only to react. But Pyotr, his mentor, the man of slow rituals and careful archives, moved with a speed Sineus had never seen. It was not the trained grace of a soldier but the clumsy, desperate lunge of a father shielding his child. He threw himself sideways, his frail body colliding with Sineus’s chest, shoving him off balance. The price of that simple, selfless act was absolute. Pyotr took the full force of the attack meant for Sineus.
Sineus stumbled, his boots scraping on the wet cobblestones as he fought to stay upright. He saw the blast hit Pyotr. There was no light, no sound, only a flicker. For a fraction of a second, the old man’s memory-script, the luminous tapestry of his entire life, flared with impossible brightness and then was simply… gone. Not cut, not torn. Annihilated. The threads of his consciousness, a lifetime of memories and choices, snapped all at once, becoming a cloud of useless, severed filaments that dissolved into nothing.
Pyotr’s momentum carried him forward a single step. He stopped, standing perfectly still in the center of the courtyard. The exhaustion and fear were gone from his face, replaced by a serene, placid emptiness. A small, gentle smile touched his lips. His eyes, once full of weary wisdom, were now as vacant as a winter sky. He was a husk, a perfect, breathing shell from which the person had been scooped out, leaving only the smiling mask behind.
He collapsed. Not like a man who had been shot or struck, but like a puppet whose strings had all been cut at once. His body folded in on itself, a heap of brown cloth and brittle bones on the cold, damp stones. As his hand struck the ground, the silver Lodge signet ring, the symbol of his life’s work and loyalty, slipped from his finger. It spun on the uneven cobblestones, a flicker of silver in the grey morning, before clattering to a stop beside his still hand.
A psychic shockwave, the after-blast of the annihilated memory, radiated out from where Pyotr fell. It struck Sineus not as pressure, but as a needle of ice-cold fire plunging into his right hand. The pain was exquisite, a sharp, crystalline agony that shot up his arm. He looked down and saw, for a horrifying instant, the skin of his hand turn translucent, a web of shimmering, geometric patterns glowing beneath the flesh before fading back to normal. The pain remained, a deep, throbbing promise of a permanent cost.
— Sineus! Move!
Alessandro’s voice was a lifeline in a drowning sea of horror. The Italian was already firing his pistol into the shadowed archway, the loud cracks of the weapon a brutal intrusion into the courtyard’s unnatural quiet. He was not aiming to hit anything; he was laying down covering fire, creating noise and chaos. He grabbed the collar of Sineus’s coat, hauling him backward toward the cover of the ruined wall.
— Now! — Alessandro roared, shoving him.
Sineus’s legs obeyed before his mind did. He scrambled backward, his gaze locked on the fallen form of his mentor, the empty smile, the glint of the lost ring. He had to leave him. The thought was a fresh wound. To leave him was to abandon him, to ratify the desecration. But to stay was to die. He turned and ran, the grief a physical weight, a stone in his gut.
They fled the monastery, plunging back into the muddy fields, their boots sucking at the wet earth. Sineus did not look back. He could not. The image of Pyotr’s empty smile was burned into his mind, a memory icon of his own failure. Every bond he had ever trusted had been a weapon used against him. His mentor, his Lodge, his own history. All of it.
Hope was gone. It had been a brief, warm flicker in the cold expanse of the war, and now it was extinguished, leaving only the ash of grief and the chilling certainty of the trap. He was alone, truly alone now, his last link to the man he used to be lying broken on the stones of a ruined monastery. He ran, his breath tearing at his lungs, the crystalline pain in his hand a steady, rhythmic pulse reminding him of the price he had just paid.
The grey sky wept a cold, thin drizzle. The world smelled of mud and decay.
There was nowhere left to run. There was no light left to guide him.
