He slammed the door shut, the heavy wood groaning in protest. The bolt screeched as he shot it home, a sound of finality that did nothing to stop the frantic drumming of his own heart. He slid down the rough surface, his back scraping against the wood, until he was sitting on the cold, damp stone floor of his quarters. The room was silent. Too silent. The only sound was the ragged, painful gasp of his own breathing.
He was shaking. Not the subtle tremor of a low T-Minus, but a deep, uncontrollable shudder that started in his bones. The image of the Hourglass Shard was burned into his vision, a phantom afterglow of sickly, parasitic green. He could still feel the profound cold it radiated, a chill that had nothing to do with the damp air of the canal-side room. It was a cold that drank warmth, that drank life.
The past was not the past. It was here, in Lucius Thorne’s hand, and it was killing him.
He had to know. The thought was a single, sharp point of light in the swirling chaos of his panic. He scrambled across the floor to the simple wooden table where his cracked data-slate lay. His hands trembled as he picked it up, his thumb smearing across the hairline fracture that split the TAC’s seal. A symbol of his disgrace. Now, it was his only tool.
He powered it on, the screen flickering to life with a faint smell of ozone. He ignored the mission files, the forged reports, the lies. He navigated with frantic, clumsy taps to a deep, encrypted archive. The one he never deleted. The one that was a monument to his failure.
The case file of the weaver.
The sterile white of the tribunal room filled the small screen. He scrolled past the formal charges, past his own confident testimony. He was looking for a specific appendix. Technical Analysis 7-B: Artifact Forensics. The data scrolled past, cold and familiar. Numbers and wave-forms that had once been a source of pride, now a testament to his blindness.
He found it. The energy signature of the execution artifact. A complex lattice of data representing its unique temporal frequency, its resonant decay pattern, its siphoning efficiency. He had memorized it, studied it, used it to build the flawless case that had turned a man to dust.
His mind raced, pulling the fresh, visceral memory of the confrontation with Lucius into focus. The specific shade of that venomous green light. The precise pitch of the subsonic hum he had felt in his teeth. The unique, stuttering rhythm of his T-Minus as the seconds were clawed away. He overlaid the memory, the raw sensory data, onto the cold, hard metrics from the weaver’s file.
He didn't need to run a full diagnostic. He didn't need an algorithm. He was the algorithm. His mind, honed by a decade of this exact work, saw the pattern instantly. The frequency peaks were identical. The decay curve was a perfect mirror. The subtle harmonic distortions that were the artifact’s unique fingerprint—they were the same.
The signatures were a perfect match.
The data-slate slipped from his numb fingers and clattered onto the stone floor. The price of this knowledge was his composure, what little he had left. It was the last shred of the illusion that he was in control, that he understood the board. That illusion was gone, leaving only a hollow, ringing void.
It was a lie. All of it.
The realization hit him not with the heat of anger, but with the freezing certainty of a final, irrefutable calculation. The mission. The intel from the TAC. The narrative of the aggressive Aevum Seers bleeding his home district dry. It was all a fabrication, a beautifully constructed lie built around a single, rotten truth.
The Seers weren’t the aggressors. They were the target.
And the true predator, the one that had been moving pieces in the shadows for years, was the Cog-Mind Conclave. The faction of pure, dispassionate logic. The ones who saw time not as a current to be guided but as a resource to be harvested. The ones who would never use a messy, emotional thing like a Seer ritual when a clean, efficient piece of hardware would do.
Hardware like an Hourglass Shard.
The whole conspiracy laid itself bare in his mind, a schematic of betrayal. The Conclave wanted to annex Veridia, to absorb its temporal resources under the guise of a stability treaty. To do it, they needed to discredit the Seers, to paint them as reckless and dangerous. So they manufactured a crisis, the temporal bleed in his home, and then they manufactured the evidence to pin it on Seraphina.
Lucius Thorne, with his ambition and his resentment, was the perfect pawn. A little funding, a little flattery, and a contraband artifact to make him feel powerful. He was the Conclave’s inside man, stirring up trouble, ready to be the one who “exposed” the corruption Seraphina was being framed for.
And Kaelen… Kaelen was the tool. The disgraced auditor, desperate for redemption, with the perfect skill set to find the evidence that had been so carefully planted for him. They hadn't just used him. They had read him. They had analyzed his psychological profile—his arrogance, his trauma, his faith in data—and built a trap perfectly suited to his shape.
He had not been a detective. He had been a delivery system.
The weight of his own complicity settled on him, heavy and suffocating. He had done it again. He had trusted the data, followed the procedure, and walked an innocent person to the executioner’s block. He thought of Seraphina’s face in the sanctuary, her quiet confession of fear, her stubborn hope. He had seen her as a victim to be saved, but he was the one who had led the wolf to her door.
He was the ghost in the ledger. The phantom anomaly. The single point of failure that guaranteed the system’s collapse. Everything he touched, he broke. Every system he tried to perfect, he corrupted.
He looked around the small, damp room. It was a cell. He had been in a cell of his own making for years, and he hadn’t even known it. The red digits of his T-Minus flickered in the gloom, a countdown not just to his death, but to the disaster he had helped engineer.
There was only one way to stop the chain of consequence. One final, logical move. He had to remove the variable. He had to remove himself.
