As the morning sun cast a warm glow over the recovering Imperial Spire, a grand structure adorned with brass gears and intricate steamworks, a distinguished figure made his way through the cobblestone streets.
Archivist Coeus Grace, known as the Whelm of Records and Knowledge, cut a striking figure in his meticulously tailored white tuxedo, the black lapels contrasting sharply with his ethereal white hair that flowed elegantly beneath his thin, rectangular glasses.
His piercing black eyes held a glint of curiosity as he surveyed the remnants of the steampunk kingdom, which lay in various states of repair after recent devastation.
Beside him walked his unpaid servant, Apollo. Unlike his flamboyant employer, Apollo wore simple, practical attire that blended into the bustling crowd.
As they moved cautiously through the markets, Apollo suddenly turned to Coeus, concern etched on his face. "Are you sure it's wise to be here in the heart of the Imperial Spire? You're a Covenant member, you can't just stroll around in plain sight!"
Coeus waved his hand dismissively. "I've taken measures to conceal my presence. The common folk won't sense the magnitude of my power."
Apollo raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. "Come on, who wouldn't notice a man in a tuxedo sporting unnaturally white hair strolling through the ruins? That kind of attention draws the wrong kind of crowds!"
Feigning offense, Coeus adjusted his glasses and retorted, "My hair is a natural trait, a mark of my illustrious bloodline! It's you who stands out with such loud attire!"
Apollo waved him off. "Whatever. So what are we actually doing here, then? You didn't send me all the way from the capital for a stroll."
Coeus let his fingers trail over a rusted rail as they walked. He spoke with the same careful cadence he used in his records, as if documenting aloud might settle the sentence into permanence. "I have come to retrieve something."
A flicker of recognition lit up Apollo's eyes. "You mean the Fragment of Continuance? The potent vestige left behind by a fallen god?" Coeus nodded solemnly, his expression revealing the gravity of the task ahead.
"But why do you need it?" Apollo queried, incredulity creeping into his tone. "You're already immensely powerful. Isn't it redundant?"
Again, Coeus looked mock-offended. "As an archivist, it is my duty to record the world's history. It's not about gaining power for myself. I just want to preserve our story. I seek to categorize it, to place it into the ledger where it cannot be forgotten or misused. The fragment belongs in record and secure custody."
Apollo's impatience showed. "That sounds like a lot of paperwork for something that could rewrite a kingdom's fortunes."
"It is precisely because of the fortunes at stake that it requires documentation," Coeus said. He paused, then added softly, "Besides, I do feel curiosity, even at my age."
Apollo sighed, clearly weary of the discussion, but Coeus suddenly paused, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the surroundings. Apollo noticed the change and asked, "What is it?"
Coeus looked around, feeling a peculiar emptiness in the air, and a wry smile creased his lips as he admitted, "It's strange, I can't sense the presence of the power at all. Perhaps Kael really is the echo of the thirteen after all, especially if he's truly managed to obliterate the fragment."
Apollo, his expression a mixture of intrigue and skepticism, furrowed his brow. "The echo of the thirteen? I have to confess, I've lived for centuries, and yet, I'm not familiar with this enigmatic thirteen-member you speak of."
Coeus chuckled softly, the sound rich with nostalgia. "Ah, of course you wouldn't know, my dear Apollo. To me, he's not merely a character from long-forgotten tales, he was an old friend, someone dear from a time that feels like an eternity ago, lost amid the swirling tides of time and space."
Apollo leaned in closer, curiosity flickering in his ancient eyes. "An old friend? What was he like? Share your tales, I'm eager to learn about this figure who once walked beside you through the annals of history."
Coeus's gaze softened as he became ensnared by the vivid memories. "He was a brilliant soul, vibrant and full of untamed ambition. Together, we journeyed through realms so wondrous that even you would struggle to believe in their existence. Each moment spent with him was like weaving constellations into a living tapestry of our intertwined fates. But then... time, that relentless thief, tore him from my grasp."
Apollo nodded, understanding the profound sorrow in Coeus's words. "Time can be a merciless force, can't it? It steals away those we cherish, leaving us with only echoes of laughter and fragments of shared moments that fade like whispers in the wind."
Coeus's smile returned, albeit tinged with longing. "Yes, but if Kael truly embodies that echo, there may yet be a chance for me to reclaim a piece of my distant past."
Apollo turned his head, "So what now? You poke through a ruin that nearly killed half a kingdom, pull up fossilized magic, and make some notes?"
Coeus dusted off his gloves. "No. I've seen all I needed to see."
Apollo stared at him. "…That's it? We walked into the kingdom of the Imperial Spire, risking getting vaporized or arrested, and now we're leaving?"
Coeus shrugged lightly, as if they'd merely stopped by a market stall. "What more would you like me to do? Take a souvenir? A broken cog? A loose gear? A piece of melted brass for your shelf?"
Apollo's eye twitched. "I thought we were doing something important. Like, recovering world-shaking power, or at least inspecting what was left of it!"
"It doesn't matter," Coeus replied, adjusting his glasses. "The fragment is destroyed. The record ends here. Kael has already changed the narrative." Then, noting Apollo's still-visible annoyance, he sighed. "Very well. You look as though your soul has been denied something vital."
"My soul was denied a purpose for coming here," Apollo muttered.
"How tragic," Coeus deadpanned. "Come, then. There's a restaurant near the upper tram line. I wonder if their delicacies have changed in the last thousand years." He paused thoughtfully. "I recall their dumplings being quite acceptable."
Apollo blinked. "…You dragged me into a broken kingdom just to leave immediately, but now we're staying for lunch?"
"You're hungry," Coeus said simply. "And I am curious. That is how civilization advances."
Apollo groaned but gave in, shoulders slumping. "Fine. Let's eat. But you're paying. And don't say anything about my appetite being 'anomalous' again."
Coeus laughed, soft, elegant, and maddeningly pleased. "Then follow me, dear Apollo. History waits for no one, but lunch may still be salvaged."
The restaurant was all warm light and brass fittings, a small oasis of civility clinging to the Spire's battered edge.
Steam curled from bowls, and astringent spice scented the air, waitstaff in soot-streaked aprons moved with polite efficiency.
Coeus set down his chopsticks and, after a careful inhalation, allowed himself a tiny, delighted hum.
"Remarkable," he said, tone oiled with surprise. "They've refined the dumpling dough. After a thousand years, it retains a delicate chew I did not expect."
Apollo blinked, then laughed out loud, part incredulous, part pleasure, as he forked a piece and chewed. "It's… bloody good," he admitted, eyes bright. "You were right. This—this is the best thing we've had all day."
Coeus smiled, a thin, pleased slice behind his glasses. The two leaned into the simple ritual of eating, steam fogging their speech in comfortable bursts. Around them, the restaurant hummed with ordinary life, until it didn't.
The cutlery in a neighboring booth hung motionless mid-air, a hand caught on the arc of a spoon.
A server halfway through a bow froze, eyes open and glassy. The lamplight stalled in a suspended shimmer. The conversation at the following table was truncated into a single, held exhalation.
For a beat that stretched like pulled taffy, every motion in the room halted, except for those of three figures seated at the far corner.
Marcellin Voss, Whelm of Guilday, sat with the ease of a man who belonged to no rulebook.
A painted smile was fixed to his face, a clown's white and crimson curved ink, but the mask did not sit inert.
Its painted grin flickered and flexed with a craftsman's subtlety, the curve of lips sharpening, smoothing, the eyes rimmed with painted laughter that could turn sardonic in a breath. He had the mask up now, the smiling paint catching the light like a promise.
Apollo made a strangled sound, half-choke, half-gasp. "Marcellin? What are you doing here—? Don't tell me you're after the fragment too!"
The clown's head tipped in slow mock-innocence. "No, no, no," he sang, the voice coming muffled and warped through the painted lips as if he spoke from under water.
The mask's smile did not falter. He spread his hands in an extravagant shrug, a flourish of silk and color.
Coeus's fingers tightened on his chopsticks in a single professional motion. He had expected many kinds of intrusion in his line of work, but the sight of Marcellin here, unannounced, settled like a cold pebble in his throat.
Apollo leaned forward, eyes wide and accusing. "You knew he was here?"
Coeus gave the faintest of nods. "I had a notion. I have ways of listening."
He inclined his head toward the clown. "Marcellin. What brings you to a place that pretends to be ordinary?"
Marcellin's painted smile widened, a practiced thing that made the mask's eyes glitter. "Kael," he said simply. The single name landed like a coin dropped in a still pool.
Coeus's interest piqued. "Kael," he repeated. "Possible echo of the Thirteenth. A useful lead, if only a possibility."
"Possibility," Marcellin agreed, and the mask's painted brow rose in a touch of theatrical delight. He leaned forward, the mask's smile settling into something thinner, more intent. "Aurelia Caelistra."
Coeus's eyes, behind the thin glass, sharpened with a historian's hunger. "Caelistra... Harthun Flameborne family? That line's records are tangled with royal patronage. That is—" He looked up, mind already assembling cross-references. "Go on."
Marcellin's voice grew soft, conspiratorial in a way that felt like a stage whisper even across the small, motionless room. "Not the lineage I care for—her Aspect. She bears Remembrance. She reads the past. My informer in the guild confirmed it."
The mask's smile curved almost indulgently. "With sufficient guidance, she can be made to layer past over present."
Apollo's face split into a frown. "You mean, use her to shove memories into someone else? To make him remember what he never lived?"
Marcellin's painted grin sharpened into something far colder than paint should allow. "Yes. Allow her to read our past, our knowledge of the Thirteenth, and she can press it into Kael. Make an echo into an identity."
Coeus's chopsticks stilled in his hand; the Archivist's voice lost the calm edge. "That is monstrous. To force a past upon someone, especially a living child, would be an affront to record and to person. An Archivist's duty is to preserve truth, not manufacture it."
Marcellin's mask turned lazy, bored as if he'd heard the objection one too many times. "Do not moralize at me, Coeus. I have reasons. The world is fraying, sometimes, one must stitch with stronger thread."
Apollo's indignation flared, hot and immediate. "That's cruel. You'd use a girl's mind as a hammer."
Coeus put his chopsticks down with a soft, emphatic clack. "I will not stand by while you rewrite a life."
Marcellin's painted smile flexed into an almost-entreaty, and then, as Coeus's objection hardened, the mask slid into a bored sneer. "Do not barge into my work," he said, and for a heartbeat, the painted eyes seemed to glitter like actual malice.
Then, without further dramatics, without the uproar Apollo expected, Marcellin winked, the gesture carried by paint and craft, and stood. He walked out through the frozen tableau like a man abandoning a stage.
Where he passed, the lamplight resumed its slow arc, the suspended spoon clinked into motion, the server finished his bow and, with no memory of interruption, carried on as if nothing had happened.
Time folded back into itself. Conversation resumed, steam rose, and the soup splatters rippled and sank into the bowls.
Apollo sat staring after the clown's retreat as if the man had been a hallucination conjured by spice.
"Did that just—" he began, voice small.
Coeus's face was as impassive as ever, but something like cold worry lived behind his eyes. He picked up his chopsticks again with the same meticulous care and, for the first time in the meal, did not taste the food.
"Marcellin wants to use Aurelia," Coeus said, quiet enough that only Apollo heard. "He believes he can manufacture a past for Kael from her sight. He intends to force knowledge to weaponize memory."
Apollo swallowed hard. "And you…you'll let him?"
Coeus folded his fingers on the table and steepled them, eyes distant for a heartbeat. "Not let him," he said slowly. "Speculate."
Apollo blinked. "Speculate?"
"What happens if Aurelia's Remembrance is used as a lens, rather than a window," Coeus went on, voice low, careful. "Remembrance records what was. But perspective colors what is seen. If Marcellin feeds his knowledge of Michael into her sight, she will not simply reveal raw memory, she will reveal it through his angle, his choices, his obsession. Memories themselves are stubborn, they persist. But the way they are framed, the emphasis, the gaps, those are malleable."
Apollo frowned. "So you mean, everyone in the Covenants has a different take on this Michael fellow?"
"Precisely." Coeus's fingers tapped once. "Twelve minds preserved whatever they thought important. Each recorded the Thirteenth with bias, political, aesthetic, and doctrinal. Those biases are invisible unless you examine how the memory was archived. If Marcellin then layers his interpretation atop Aurelia's Sight, she might coax out a Michael shaped by Marcellin's priorities. The facts might be the same, the identity need not be."
Apollo's confusion hardened into bluntness. "Why does that matter? A past is a past."
Coeus's eyes sharpened. "Because a past that is fed to the living is not simply history, it is a script. If Marcellin imposes his script, he does not bring back a man, he manufactures one that fits his needs. Michael, as we remember him, could become Michael as Marcellin needs him to be."
Silence pooled between them. Apollo put his chin in his hand. "So are you going to stop him, then?"
Coeus's face shifted, an old ledger closing and opening again. He had the look of a man weighing entries in a book he did not want to close. "I am conflicted," he admitted at last. "There are things in my past I would trade everything to retrieve. Friends lost to time haunt me like footnotes. If an echo of one could return…"
He shook his head once, the motion small and private. "And yet the Archivist's oath, our duty, is to the truth. To preserve what was, not to invent what should be. If Marcellin manufactures Michael according to whim, that is not reclamation. It is forgery."
Apollo pressed his lips together. "So what will you do?"
Coeus's answer was measured, practised. "I will watch. I will quietly gather records and allies. I will not allow a person's mind to be overwritten without protest. But I am also not naive. Marcellin is not reckless. He will not walk into such a thing without preparation, and he will not fail without contingency. If he acts, I will be ready to intervene, but I will not be the first to strike in anger. That would make me what I most fear being another forgery of my own principles."
-
The lane to Veyron's townhouse smelled of wet stone and wood smoke.
Lantern light pooled against the eaves as Kael followed the headmaster up three shallow steps and through a door that closed with a polite, final click.
Inside, the house felt lived-in, like old books: shelves, a single clock that never quite kept perfect time, a scattering of maps with pencil marks and smudged corners. A low fire turned stew into a slow, forgiving heat.
Veyron moved with the ease of a man who had arranged his world to comfort others.
He poured broth into a shallow bowl and set it before Kael, ladling it with a patience that seemed almost ritual.
A tray carried bread, a small plate of pickled vegetables, and a wedge of hard cheese, nothing extravagant, but steady and honest.
Kael ate. Not hurried, not starved, simply present. He watched the steam rise from the bowl and listened to the small household noises, the ticking clock, the spoon against ceramic, the faint settling of wood in the hearth.
When Veyron spoke, Kael glanced up, attentive if quiet.
"Once, when I was young," Veyron began, "a student tried to tether a raincloud to his sleeve. Wanted the weather for his morning wash." He chuckled softly. "The sleeve survived, but only because the cloud took pity."
A quiet puff of breath left Kael, almost a laugh, almost not. He shook his head, amusement warming the edges of his expression for a brief moment before settling back into calm.
Veyron continued, weaving stories into the air like gentle currents: complaints about the academy's endless paperwork, forms with signatures sharp as teeth, an account of a moss-maned beast he'd glimpsed upriver at dusk, a memory of chasing the scent of rare spices through a night market that no longer existed.
Kael didn't offer full stories in return, but he wasn't absent either.
He gave small, genuine responses, an arched brow, a faint smile, a thoughtful hum.
When Veyron mentioned the moss-maned creature, Kael murmured, "My uncle used to talk about something like that. Said they always run from iron." A small piece of himself was offered, then quietly withdrawn.
Veyron seized neither the detail nor the opening. He simply nodded, as though Kael had told him something as ordinary as the weather.
Later, he asked lightly, "Hot dumplings or cold bread?"
Kael took a moment. "Hot dumplings," he said. "But only if the filling isn't sweet." A sliver of personality, measured out like something precious.
Veyron didn't push for more. He told a story about a ledger he'd once kept, how minor errors compounded into large disasters, and let the warmth of the room do more work than any question could.
That restraint made the silence companionable instead of sharp. Kael felt it slowly, like heat working its way into chilled bones.
He ate another spoonful, slower. He didn't feel watched. He didn't feel demanded. The knot under his ribs eased.
By the time the bowls were emptied and the fire sank low, the quiet between them felt earned.
Kael rose to leave, but lingered a breath longer, not quite comfortable, but not fleeing. "Thank you," he said, the words careful, as if he had smoothed them before speaking.
Veyron's smile creased warmly. "You're welcome. The door is open to you anytime."
Kael stepped into the night feeling lighter, not transformed but steadied, like someone had lifted the weight of being scrutinized and replaced it with something gentler.
The door closed with a soft click behind him, leaving the lamplight to shimmer faintly on the wet street.
It wasn't a revelation or a confession.
It was something modest and human.
A man who expected nothing had given him room to breathe.
The walk home rattled Kael the way cold wind rattled loose shutters—minor, insistent knocks that kept happening even after he told himself to stop listening.
He moved through streets still damp from the day's rain, lanterns making little islands of gold on the paving stones, and let the evening swallow him.
The memory of the stew lingered, warm broth, Veyron's calm voice, the odd, patient ritual of being fed by a man who had once, by the weight of a decision, sent children into a place that nearly tore their lives apart.
Strange to sit at the same table as him, Kael thought. Strange and not unpleasant.He didn't beg forgiveness, he offered steadiness. Dangerous and precious both.
His lodging waited above a cobbler's shop, a small room with a low beam and a single narrow window that looked out over alley roofs.
Compared to the tidy warmth of the headmaster's townhouse, it might have passed for a lower‑ranking noble's spare chamber, a proper bed with a rough but clean quilt, a small writing desk with a drawer that still smelled of cedar, a modest shelf where he kept the few books he'd bought with saved wages.
He'd never pictured himself living like this when his life had been only the damp of the lower quarter and the constant rattle of a workshop.
Marcellin Voss, the man who'd arranged his passage to the Academy, had changed the map of his life more subtly than any spell.
Marcellin surfaced in Kael's mind as a curious, clownish emissary, bright coat, crooked mask, a handful of papers, and a way of talking that made the academy seem possible.
Why him? Why me? Kael wondered, the question folding into others he avoided. He could have reasons the city doesn't dare name aloud.
Marcellin's clown mask came up sometimes in the quiet, jovial, impossible, the sort of person who bent luck into opportunity.
Kael set his satchel down and unpacked with the slow, methodical care he practiced in rituals.
Each item found its place, the tattered notebook, a small carved token from his uncle, a spare pair of gloves.
He thought of Aurelia, Lysandra, and the others. How their faces had been a map of faith when he first arrived at the Academy, and something like a tightness eased at the edges.
I can't unfasten every knot tonight. Some things need time. Some apologies need more than words.
He left the lamp low, slid beneath the quilt, and folded his hands over his chest.
The day had offered odd mercies, a steady hand at dinner, stories that weren't probes, a borrowed peace.
He let the quiet press in, not trusting it entirely but grateful for it all the same. Tomorrow I'll practice again. Tonight I will sleep.
He closed his eyes and let the minor, insistent knocks fade into the dark.
-