He left the empty council chamber, the scent of cold dust and extinguished purpose clinging to his uniform. The wrongness on the map was a splinter in his mind, a cold spot that demanded to be seen. He did not wait for an order. He walked through the silent, subterranean corridors of the Lodge, his boots echoing on the stone, each step a decision. The path led him to a deep vault, to a single, lead-lined door that required two men to open.
The observation chamber was a cold, sterile circle of iron and stone. In its center stood the Chronos Telescope, a complex apparatus of brass, silver, and precisely ground lenses that did not magnify objects in space, but focused on the memory-script of a distant location. A young acolyte, a boy named Pavel with nervous hands and the pale skin of one who rarely saw the sun, stood waiting by the control panel.
— The coordinates from the Duma chamber are set, Your Excellency, — Pavel said, his voice tight. He avoided looking at the telescope itself, as if it were a loaded cannon. — The strain… the masters recommend no more than ten minutes of observation.
— I am aware of the recommendations, — Sineus said, his voice flat. He stripped off his gloves and placed them on the console. The metal of the controls was cold beneath his fingertips. He could feel the low hum of the device, a vibration that seemed to travel up his arms and settle in his teeth.
He began the final calibration, aligning the temporal coordinates to the present moment. The machine whirred, its intricate gears clicking into place. The process took a full 120 seconds, a lifetime of mechanical precision while a piece of the world was dying. Pavel shifted his weight from foot to foot, the sound of his leather soles scuffing the stone floor a small, irritating noise in the heavy silence.
— It is not a clean energy source, sir, — the acolyte whispered, unable to stop himself. — The backlash from a direct viewing…
— Your concern is noted, — Sineus cut him off, his eyes fixed on the glowing dials. The calibration was complete. He took a steadying breath and leaned forward, pressing his eye to the main lens.
The world dissolved. The stone walls of the chamber vanished, replaced by the shimmering, luminous tapestry of the Istopis. He saw the memory of the land west of Smolensk, a landscape woven from threads of light. He saw the deep, strong constellations of history that marked ancient forests and the faint, pulsing lines of wagon roads. He saw the clean, ordered work of his own kind, the occasional neat gap where a memory had been excised, a single severed thread removed from the great weave. It was a familiar, manageable kind of damage.
He pushed his perception deeper, toward the cold spot. The mental strain was immense, a physical pressure against his skull. The image swam, then sharpened. He found the source. A French siege unit, their dark blue uniforms stark against the grey snow. And with them, a weapon he had never seen. It was a Lethe Mortar, a heavy siege weapon cast from dull, blackened bronze, its barrel aimed at the sky. It looked crude, brutal.
The mortar fired. A deep, booming report echoed in the psychic silence. A single, hollow iron shell climbed in a high arc, a dark tear against the fabric of the sky. It flew over a small, unnamed Russian village, a place whose memory was a warm, dense knot of light—generations of births, harvests, and simple loyalties.
The shell detonated. It did not explode with fire and shrapnel. It released a shimmering, odorless cloud that expanded in a perfect 500-meter radius, blanketing the village in a silent, iridescent mist.
Sineus watched, his breath held. He expected to see the threads of memory fray, to see them cut and fall away. That was the law of their craft. You could cut, you could damage, you could remove. But you could not unmake.
The threads did not break. They burned to nothing.
Where the cloud touched the Istopis, the light simply went out. Not severed, not damaged. Erased. Annihilated. The warm, dense knot of the village’s history vanished in an instant, leaving behind a patch of perfect, silent, absolute black. A hole in the world.
A shimmering distortion appeared where the village had been, a visible wound in the fabric of reality like heat haze on a winter day. A Lacuna. It was the shape of the erased memory, a three-dimensional photograph of an absence. The sight was a violation, a deep and profound wrongness that made the hair on his arms stand up. The idea of a severed thread was a child’s comfort. This was not a cut. This was a void.
Then he saw it move. The edge of the Lacuna, the shimmering border of the void, began to expand. It crept outward, eating the memory of the surrounding fields, the trees, the very soil. It was consuming reality at a rate of two meters per minute. It was not a scar. It was a cancer.
The psychic shock hit him like a physical blow. The telescope felt like it had become a conduit for the annihilation itself. A wave of absolute cold and nausea washed over him. He stumbled back from the eyepiece, gasping, one hand flying to his head as a spike of pain shot through his temple. The stone floor seemed to sway beneath his feet. The solid world felt thin, a fragile skin stretched over an endless, hungry nothing.
— Your Excellency! — Pavel cried out, rushing to his side. — Sir, are you alright? What did you see?
Sineus fell to one knee, his body trembling. He could not speak. He could only see the spreading black stain in his mind’s eye. The Lodge, the Duma, Grigori Levin with his talk of rituals and tariffs—they were all fools. They were sharpening knives for a swordfight while the enemy was poisoning the ocean.
This was not a war for control of history. It was a war against oblivion itself.
The low hum of the telescope’s cooling system filled the chamber. The air smelled of ozone and hot metal.
He had to go back. He had to make them understand.
