The walk back from the sanctuary was a journey through a different world. He had left Seraphina at the junction to his own corridor, the unspoken words hanging heavy and warm between them. The air outside her quiet, time-softened room felt thin and sharp again, the sounds of the Sunken Athenaeum harsh and loud. The return to normal time was a shock, a sudden plunge back into a world of deadlines and danger. He was still a man with a death sentence, but he was no longer alone in his cell.
His mind was a storm of tactical calculations. He had defied his handler. He had chosen a side. Now he had to survive the consequences. His fingers found the obsidian charm in his pocket, its surface smooth and cool. It was a useless stone, a prop for a con, but it felt like an anchor. A promise. He was choosing a person over a ledger. The price of that choice was a lie, and now, it seemed, a war on two fronts.
He was halfway to his door when a figure stepped out of the shadows of a side passage, blocking his path. The movement was deliberate, meant to corner him.
It was Lucius Thorne.
The rival Seer’s face, usually a mask of petty grievance and insecurity, was alight with an expression of absolute triumph. It was the look of a man who had just found the final, damning piece of evidence. The look of a man who had won.
— There you are, — Lucius said, his voice dripping with false pleasantry. — I was just coming to see you.
Kaelen stopped. The corridor was narrow, the walls slick with moisture that caught the dim light from the glowing mosses above. There was no way around. He kept his own face a blank slate, the impassive mask of a TAC auditor. He would give Lucius nothing.
— I’m tired, Lucius. Whatever it is, it can wait.
— Oh, I don’t think it can, — Lucius purred, taking a step closer. The air around him seemed to crackle with smug energy. — I’ve been watching you, ‘adept.’ Your little tricks. The Chronoblossom that bloomed like a firework. The reports, so perfectly structured. It’s all too clean. Too… logical.
The accusation hung in the damp air. Lucius thought he was a spy, which was true, but he had the wrong paymaster. Kaelen felt a grim, hollow amusement. He had spent his life worshiping logic, and now it was the very thing that would undo him.
— Seraphina trusts you, — Lucius continued, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial hiss. He was close enough now that Kaelen could smell the cloying, sweet incense that clung to his robes. — She’s a fool. She sees a stray and wants to offer it a home. I see a viper in our garden. You’re no Seer. You’re a Conclave plant.
Kaelen said nothing. He let the silence stretch, a tactic he’d learned during a hundred interrogations. Let the accuser fill the void. Let them expose their own hand.
His silence was a mistake. It was not the reaction of a frightened intuitive, but the cold defiance of a trained operative. It enraged Lucius. The triumph on his face curdled into a sneer.
— You think this is a game? You think you can just walk into our home and—
Lucius’s hand darted inside his robes. He pulled out an object, and the atmosphere in the corridor changed instantly. The air grew thin and cold, the ambient warmth sucked out of the stone. The gentle dripping of water from the walls seemed to slow, each drop hanging in the air for an impossible moment before falling.
It was an Hourglass Shard.
The contraband artifact was a piece of jagged, black crystal, no bigger than Kaelen’s thumb. It pulsed with a sickly, internal green light, a nauseating color like deep-sea rot. It was not the pure, steady glow of Seer artifacts. This was a hungry light. A parasitic light.
— Now, — Lucius hissed, his eyes wide with manic glee, — everyone will see what you really are.
The shard flared. Kaelen felt it not as a sound or a light, but as a physical pressure, a profound cold that sank directly into his bones. A wave of dizziness washed over him. He saw the red digits of his own T-Minus, visible to all, waver and blur. The numbers began to tick down, not by seconds, but in stuttering, greedy fractions. The shard was siphoning his time, drinking the last few precious days of his life. The price for being discovered was not disgrace. It was death.
He stared at the shard, his training battling a rising tide of pure terror. The design. The jagged, unnatural angles. The black, non-reflective surface. The sickening, pulsing green.
It was the same.
The memory hit him with the force of a physical blow. The sterile white of the tribunal room. The confused, pleading face of the weaver. The Head Arbiter’s flat, synthetic voice. And the artifact they’d used for the execution, the one his own flawed data had pointed to. A shard of the exact same design, pulsing with that same venomous green light as it turned an innocent man to a pile of grey dust.
The past was not the past. It was here, in Lucius Thorne’s hand, and it was killing him.
Lucius lunged. He wasn’t trying to talk anymore. He was trying to press the shard against Kaelen’s skin, to initiate a full, irreversible drain.
Panic screamed in Kaelen’s mind, a white-hot siren. But his body, drilled by years of TAC training, moved before his conscious thought could catch up. He didn’t try to block. He didn’t try to fight. He pivoted on the ball of his left foot, his shoulder dropping, his body twisting into the empty space beside Lucius’s lunge. Evasion Drill 3-A: Deflection against a point-blank charge.
Lucius, expecting a clumsy defense, stumbled past him. The Hourglass Shard’s green light painted a greasy streak across the wet stone of the opposite wall. For a split second, the two men were back-to-back.
Kaelen didn’t wait. He didn’t look back. He ran.
He chose flight, a tactical retreat born of sheer terror and a sudden, world-shattering revelation. The price of that choice was leaving an armed, unstable rival behind him, a man who now had proof that Kaelen was not what he seemed. But he had to get away. He had to think.
His boots scraped on the slick stone as he sprinted down the corridor, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. He fumbled with the latch on his door, his fingers clumsy and numb. He threw himself inside, slamming the heavy wooden door shut behind him. The bolt screeched as he shot it home.
The corridor outside was silent again. The only sound was the frantic, panicked drumming of his own heart against his ribs.
