The path was clear. Anja was gone. The price was paid. Sineus knelt on the cold stone of the conduit nexus, the Heart of the Artisan pulsing a steady, living rhythm before him. The frantic, metallic rattle in his skull was gone, replaced by a profound and terrifying silence. A void. In that void, a single, heavy tick echoed. The sound of a great clock striking its final chime. He had the time. He would not waste it. He reached into his own mind, not to close the valve he had guarded his entire life, but to break it off its hinges. He would not just absorb the memory. He would pull it into himself.
He opened the floodgates. The torrent hit him not as an attack, but as a homecoming. It was not the weaponized memory of loss he had felt in the cafe. It was the opposite. It was a life. The entire, unedited existence of a man he had never met, a master artisan whose name was lost to the Censorium’s blades. The memory was not a story. It was a physical sensation. The rough, familiar texture of a wood-handled hammer in a calloused palm. The scent of fresh sawdust and hot linseed oil. The quiet, deep pride of a perfectly joined corner, a line so true it felt like a law of nature.
Decades of waking before dawn and working past dusk flooded his consciousness. He felt the ache in muscles that were not his own. He tasted the bitter chicory of a cheap morning drink and the simple, profound flavor of black bread and salted fish. He saw a woman’s face, her name a whisper in the torrent. Elena. She was laughing in the thin sunlight of a Petrograd spring, her eyes crinkling at the corners. The memory was not his, but the warmth that bloomed in his chest was real. It was an impurity he could not purge, a feeling he had only ever known with Lilya.
His own name felt thin. A ghost against the roar of this other life. He was Sineus. He was an inventor. He was the man whose sister was dead. He held onto these facts like a man gripping a ledge over a long fall. The artisan’s joy was a current pulling him away. The weight of a small child, asleep on his shoulder, the scent of milk and clean linen. The tiny, trusting hand curled around his finger. The artisan’s grief for a lost son, a cold, heavy stone dragging him down into a sea of sorrow that was not his to drown in. He fought to remain a vessel, a simple conduit. He could not be the man. He had to be the ground. He had to absorb, not become. The price was the pain. He accepted it.
The Heart of the Artisan pulsed in time with the life pouring into him. Its light softened, the aggressive, weaponized thrum turning into a gentle, rhythmic glow. It was not a bomb. It had never been a bomb. It was a record. A testament. A final, defiant act of remembrance against the coming dark. Wolff had not understood. He had seen a battery and tried to connect it to a gun. He had never thought to ask what the energy was for. It was the energy of creation. The antithesis of erasure.
The final moments of the artisan’s life arrived. The quiet satisfaction of a finished work. The sudden, sharp pain of a blade between the ribs. The surprise. The cold shock. The darkness. But even in that darkness, there was no fear. There was only the memory of the work, the memory of the love, the memory of a life lived. It was a perfect, sealed thing. A final statement.
Then it was over.
The light from the Heart of the Artisan faded. The steady, one-second pulse faltered, then stopped. The living warmth that had radiated from its surface cooled. The intricate, obsidian-like sphere became just a piece of carved stone. Smooth. Dark. Inert. The threat was neutralized. The artifact was disarmed.
A silent, concussive wave of pure presence erupted from the dais. It was not an explosion of force, but of reality reasserting itself. The psychic backlash. The chamber groaned under the pressure. Hairline cracks raced across the stone floor. The high steel walls, which had shimmered with the ghosts of their own making, solidified with a sound like a thousand locking bolts. The latent memories were gone, overwritten by the sheer, undeniable fact of the present.
Captain Valerius Wolff, who had been advancing with his Memory Blade raised, was thrown back as if by a solid wall of air. He was not burned. He was not cut. He was simply… repelled. The force of a complete and whole memory, a thing he sought only to dissect and weaponize, was a power his philosophy could not account for. It was an answer to a question he had never thought to ask. He landed hard, ten meters away, his body skidding across the debris-strewn floor. The Memory Blade flew from his grasp, clattering into the shadows.
He pushed himself to his knees, blood trickling from his nose. His face was a mask of shock and profound, intellectual fury. He had been defeated not by a greater force, but by a greater meaning. He looked at Sineus, then at the inert stone on the dais, and then at the empty space where Anja had been erased. He understood nothing. He scrambled to his feet, his disciplined retreat as precise as his failed attack, and disappeared back into the smoke and chaos of the burning shipyard. He was beaten, but he was not broken. He would report. He would adapt. He would return.
Sineus felt the last of the energy ground through him. The strain was immense. He collapsed onto the cold stone of the dais, his body a wire that had carried a lightning strike. His mind was scarred, fractured, but his own. He was still Sineus. But he was also now a library. A museum of one. He was haunted, not by a ghost, but by a life.
He lay there, the echoes of the battle fading. The silence in his head was no longer a void. It was just… quiet. He could feel the grit of the stone floor against his cheek. He could smell the lingering ozone. He could see the dust motes dancing in the single beam of light from a hole in the ceiling.
Then he felt a warmth at his throat. Faint, but undeniable. He reached up, his fingers finding the simple silver locket. Lilya’s locket. It was glowing with a soft, internal luminescence, a gentle heat that pushed back against the cold of the chamber. It was not a memory. It was a resonance. A key, turned in a lock he did not know existed.
The stone was cool against his skin. The air tasted of dust and victory.
He knew the war was not over, but a battle had been won.
