The days following Cecily's death passed in a monochrome haze of grief. The Brentwood house, once filled with the low hum of Lysander's intellectual energy and Cecily's laughter, was now a tomb of silence. Clara moved through it like a ghost, her eyes red-rimmed and vacant. Edmund's broad shoulders were permanently stooped, as if bearing the physical weight of his loss.
Lysander was encased in a different kind of silence. It was not the quiet of sorrow, but the grim, brittle silence of a failed general after a catastrophic defeat. He attended the small, heartbreaking funeral, standing between his parents, his small hand clenched into a fist inside his pocket. He watched the plain wooden coffin being lowered into the cold earth, and he felt nothing but a hollow, resonant certainty. This was the rules of the game. Some pieces were glued to the board.
He did not cry. His tears had been burned away by the fire of his fury, a cold, directed fury at the universe, at the loop, and most of all, at himself. His grief was a luxury he could not afford. It was a weight that would sink him. Instead, he let it harden into a core of solid determination. Cecily's death was not an end; it was a data point. The most painful data point imaginable. It proved the existence of temporal constants. The question was, were they few, or were they many? Was Elara's love a constant? Was his death in 1730? He had to know.
His visits to Finch's laboratory became his anchor, his grim purpose. The alchemist, to his credit, or perhaps to his utter lack of human empathy, never mentioned the death. The laboratory was a sanctuary from emotion, a realm of pure, cold intellect. It was the only place where the memory of Cecily's still, small face did not haunt him every second.
Finch began his teachings in earnest. They were not lessons a child should receive. He spoke of the volatility of quicksilver, the soul of metals, the search for the Azoth. He had Lysander catalogue his experiments in a sprawling, cryptic script. He tested him, not with simple questions, but with practical problems.
"The solution will not clarify. The precipitate remains suspended. What is the error?"
Lysander, drawing on a depth of chemical knowledge that was centuries ahead of its time, would suggest a filtering medium or a change in pH, couching his answers in the language of "principles" and "essential natures" that Finch adored.
He was playing a dangerous double game. He was the brilliant apprentice, soaking up the alchemist's knowledge, while secretly studying the man himself, searching for any clue, any scrap of notes that might relate to his temporal experiment. He sifted through the chaotic piles of parchment, his eyes scanning for words like "chronos," "aeon," "recurrence." He found nothing. It was as if the experiment that had shattered Lysander's life had been a mere footnote in Finch's career, a forgotten side-project.
Meanwhile, the world outside the laboratory continued to turn. The seasons changed. The raw wound of Cecily's death began, for his parents, to scar over into a permanent, dull ache. And Elara grew.
He saw her one afternoon, returning from Elm Street, the stink of sulfur still in his nostrils. She was no longer a small child at the fence. She was standing in the street outside her house, talking with a group of girls her own age, now nine years old. She was taller, her limbs lengthening, the childish roundness of her face beginning to sharpen into the elegant bone structure he knew so well. She was demonstrating something with her hands, a complex gesture, and the other girls were laughing. Not at her, but with her.
A jolt, strange and painful, went through him. She had a life. A life that did not include him. While he was walled up in a alchemist's nightmare, she was growing, changing, becoming. The sight was a physical blow. He had been so focused on his war with time, on his grief, that he had neglected the very thing he was fighting for.
He did not approach her. He felt a sudden, profound unworthiness. He was a creature of death and cycles, tainted by failure and Finch's chemical miasma. She was life, and light, and forward motion.
He retreated, a shadow slipping back into the gloom of his own existence. But the image of her, bright and animated among her friends, stayed with him. It was a new kind of constant, not a fixed point of tragedy, but a fixed point of hope. A reminder of what lay at the end of this long, dark road.
His next meeting with Finch felt more suffocating than usual. The alchemist was in a particularly abstract mood, discoursing on the nature of reality as a grand illusion.
"Perception is a filter, boy," Finch intoned, stoking his furnace. "We do not see the world as it is, but as we are. The unenlightened are trapped in the world of phenomena. The adept seeks to perceive the Noumenon—the true reality behind the veil."
Lysander, his mind filled with the image of Elara's laughing face, found himself speaking without thinking, his guard down. "And what of love? Is that a phenomenon, or part of the true reality?"
Finch stopped, his back to Lysander. He was silent for a long moment. Then he turned, his gaunt face etched with a look of profound contempt. "Love?" he spat the word as if it were a poison. "Love is the most binding illusion of all. It is a chemical reaction in the brain, a trick of biology to ensure propagation. It is a chain that binds the soul to the wheel of suffering and rebirth. To seek enlightenment is to sever that chain."
The vehemence in his voice was shocking. It was the first raw, uncalculated emotion Lysander had ever seen the man display. In that moment, he understood Finch in a way he never had before. The alchemist wasn't just seeking knowledge or power. He was seeking escape. From what, Lysander could not guess. From emotion? From attachment? From the human condition itself? His experiments with time were not just academic; they were the desperate flailings of a man trying to unmake his own soul.
Lysander looked around the cluttered, reeking laboratory. He saw it not as a place of power, but as a prison cell. Finch was as much a prisoner as he was. They were both trapped in loops of their own making, one temporal, one spiritual.
He left that day with a new understanding. The key to breaking his loop would not be found in a formula or a chemical recipe. It would be found in the very thing Finch despised. In the "illusion" of love. In the "chain" of attachment. He had to prove Finch wrong. He had to prove that some constants were not prisons, but foundations. And he had to find a way back to the girl at the fence, before the distance between their worlds became too great to cross. The weight of Cecily's death was a stone in his heart, but the memory of Elara's laugh was a lodestone, pulling him forward. He had lost one battle against time. The war for his future, and for hers, was just beginning.