The decision was a cold, hard thing that settled in his gut. A piece of iron. He had to get out. It was that simple. He was the poison in the system, the ghost in the ledger, and the only way to stop the rot was to cut himself out of the equation. He was a catalyst for disaster, and his only remaining purpose was to become inert.
He moved with a grim, silent efficiency that felt like a hollow echo of his TAC training. He packed a small bag. It was a canvas thing, rough and smelling of dust. Inside went a spare tunic, a water flask, and the last of his burner chits—enough for a few days of anonymous travel, if he was lucky. It was the luggage of a man with no destination. The price of this choice was purpose itself, traded for the hope that his absence would be a shield for Seraphina and a reprieve for Veridia.
His fingers brushed against the single-use comms link, the thin black wafer Felix Hayes had provided. It lay on the simple wooden table, a shard of frozen night promising a connection back to a world of cold logic and clean orders. A world that had used him as a weapon and was ready to discard him. It was his last tie to the Temporal Audit Commission, to the life he had clawed for and the reputation he had burned.
He picked it up. It was cool and smooth, impossibly thin. For a moment, he considered just leaving it, another piece of debris in the wake of his failure. But that wasn’t enough. It had to be a choice. A clean break. He dropped the wafer onto the damp stone floor and brought his heel down hard. The device didn’t shatter. It cracked with a dry, unsatisfying snap, like a dead twig. A faint wisp of ozone, smelling of burnt circuits and broken promises, rose from the two pieces. He was officially rogue. He was nothing.
The thought should have been terrifying. It was, instead, a relief.
He slung the bag over his shoulder and pulled open the heavy wooden door. The corridor outside was empty, a long, curving tunnel of living rock slick with moisture and traced with veins of faintly glowing moss. The air was thick with the smell of wet stone and something else, something sweet and floral that always seemed to be on the edge of turning to rot. He moved into the gloom, his soft-soled boots making no sound on the worn stone.
His escape route was simple: follow the lower service canals westward, away from the grand plazas and greenhouse cloisters. The outer canals were less patrolled, their currents more sluggish. They were the Athenaeum’s drains, leading back to the decaying, time-scarred districts of the city proper. Back to a world he understood. He kept to the shadows, a ghost moving through a city of dreams, his head down, his focus narrowed to the next corner, the next bridge, the next patch of darkness.
He was a creature of logic in a world that ran on feeling, and he used that to his advantage. He noted the patterns in the Seer Guard patrols, the way they lingered near areas of strong resonant energy and ignored the quiet, emotionally neutral spaces. He moved through those dead zones, a phantom in their intuitive network. He passed under bridges of woven, living wood and alongside canals where the water was as still and black as polished glass. The fingers of his right hand, tucked into his pocket, found the smooth, cool surface of the obsidian charm. A useless prop. A fraud’s tool. He curled his hand around it anyway.
He was making good time. Another ten minutes and he would be at the old aqueduct, the one that fed into the Veridia spillway. From there, he could disappear. He could become just another piece of human driftwood, his T-Minus bleeding out into the city’s general decay until the Repo Auditors finally caught up with him in some forgotten alley. It wasn’t a good end. But it was his, and it wouldn’t drag anyone else down with him.
He rounded a wide, sweeping curve where a secondary canal fed into the main channel. Ahead, the passage opened into a small, circular plaza he hadn’t seen on any of the architectural schematics he’d memorized. It was one of the Athenaeum’s shifting spaces, a place that existed only when the currents of time and mood aligned. In its center, a single, massive tree with silver bark and broad, waxy leaves drank the dim light.
And beneath the tree, she was there.
The sight of Seraphina Vey hit him like a physical blow. It wasn't an ambush. She wasn't looking for him. She was simply there, in the heart of her territory, doing her job. The plaza was filled with a quiet, controlled urgency. A dozen or so Seers, mostly junior adepts and a few older tenders, were moving through the space, their faces etched with concern. A minor temporal tremor had just passed through, a hiccup in the local flow of time. Kaelen had felt it as a brief, nauseating moment of deja vu, the sensation of his own footsteps echoing a fraction of a second before he took them.
For the residents, the effect was more disorienting. An old woman sat on a stone bench, her expression bewildered, as if she’d momentarily forgotten her own name. Two adepts were helping a man who seemed to be seeing a few seconds into his own past, flinching away from things that had already happened. It was chaos, but a quiet, contained chaos.
And in the middle of it all was Seraphina.
She wasn’t frantic. She wasn’t issuing orders like a TAC field commander. She moved from person to person, her voice low and calm. She placed a hand on the old woman’s shoulder, and the woman’s confused expression softened. She spoke to the man caught in a personal time loop, her words a steady, rhythmic anchor that seemed to pull him back into the present. She was directing the relief effort not with a checklist and a protocol, but with a quiet, resolute presence. She was a leader, holding her community together with empathy and sheer force of will.
She was not a victim. She was not a damsel to be protected by his noble, self-destructive flight. She was a force of nature in her own right, a bulwark against the very chaos he assumed would consume her. The sight of her, so strong and capable, made his plan to run feel not just foolish, but insulting.
He stopped. His feet, which had been carrying him so purposefully toward his own erasure, felt suddenly bolted to the stone floor. The bag on his shoulder was a dead weight, heavy with the stupidity of his own logic. He had analyzed the variables, calculated the risks, and concluded that his removal was the optimal solution. He had treated it like a problem in a faulty gear.
But Seraphina wasn’t a gear. She was a tidal wave. And she was holding it back herself.
To run now wouldn’t be a sacrifice. It would be an abandonment. He was trapped. He couldn’t go forward into the anonymous decay he had chosen. He couldn’t go back to the lie he had been living. He was caught in the space between, a man with a shattered past and no visible future, paralyzed by the impossible truth that the person he was trying to save didn't need a martyr. She needed a partner.
