He stood alone on a deserted canal dock, a ghost who had forgotten how to run. The forward momentum that had propelled him through the shadowed corridors of the Sunken Athenaeum had bled out, leaving him hollow and still. The air was cool and thick, heavy with the smell of damp stone and the sweet, green scent of decay that clung to the black water. This was his lowest point, a place beyond calculation.
The only light came from his own wrist. The desperate, critical red of his T-Minus painted the slick stones around his feet and cast a bloody, wavering reflection in the canal. He stared at the flickering digits in the water, the numbers that spelled out the last three days of his life. It wasn’t a clock. It was a judgment. He was confronting his own mortality, and it looked like a stain he couldn’t wash out.
He had no mission. He had no allies. He had no future. The thought was not a panic, but a quiet, methodical inventory of ruin. He had failed the Temporal Audit Commission by refusing to be their assassin. He had betrayed the Aevum Seers with every breath he took in their city. And the Cog-Mind Conclave, the true enemy, had already discarded him as a spent tool. He was a traitor to all sides, an anomaly to be purged from every ledger.
The consequences of his actions were absolute. The Conclave would take his home. Veridia would be bled dry under the guise of stability, its people’s time harvested like grain, and he was the one who had unlocked the gate. He had been so focused on the single, personal stain of the weaver’s death that he had missed the entire conspiracy being woven around him. He was an enemy to all, and most of all, to himself.
Then came the final, crushing realization, the true whiff of death that had been chasing him for years. His quest for redemption had been a lie. It was a selfish, pathetic illusion. He hadn’t wanted to atone for the weaver; he had wanted to erase the black mark from his own file. He had craved the return of his status, the restoration of his years, the clean slate that would let him forget the man who had turned to dust because of his ambition. It was never about justice. It was about cynical self-preservation, and he had followed that broken logic all the way to the bottom of this lightless canal.
His hand, shoved deep in his pocket, closed around the obsidian charm. It was just a stone. Smooth, cold, and utterly inert. It offered no pulse of light, no hum of hidden power. It was a dead thing, a prop for a part he could no longer play. The illusion was shattered.
A fit of rage, cold and pure, seized him. It wasn't hot or loud. It was the clean, silent fury of a diagnostic engine recognizing its own catastrophic design flaw. The anger wasn't for Seraphina or Lucius. It was for the system he had worshipped and for the fool who had served it. His hand tightened on the cracked TAC data-slate, the last token of that old faith.
He pulled it out. The device was heavy in his hand, its smooth metal case cool against his skin. The hairline fracture running across the Commission’s seal seemed to glow faintly in the red light from his wrist. It was the scar from his first failure, the one that had set him on this path. He was about to give it a matching wound.
He smashed the data-slate against the stone pier.
The sound was a sharp, ugly crack of plastic and metal giving way. It wasn’t enough. He raised it again, his arm a piston of focused despair, and brought it down with all his weight. And again. And again. He wasn’t just breaking a tool; he was performing an execution. He was destroying his last link to his old identity, shattering the ghost of the man who believed a clean ledger could make a soul clean. The price of this choice was his past, every scrap of it, ground into the damp stone.
The screen, which had survived his disgrace, finally went dark forever. He stopped, his chest heaving, his knuckles scraped raw against the pier. The slate was a ruin of splintered circuits and dead glass. His old self was gone. He had hit rock bottom.
The mist swirled over the black water. A single drop of condensation ran down a rusted mooring ring.
