The door sealed behind Kiri with a final, hushed sigh, the sound of a vault closing or a tomb being sealed for eternity. The world of rattling pipes and hissing steam was gone, replaced by an absolute, unnerving stillness. The chamber she now stood in was a perfect, sterile cube. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of a seamless, polished white stone that emitted its own soft, internal luminescence, casting no shadows. The air was cool, tasteless, and completely motionless. It was a place devoid of life, of history, of any imperfection whatsoever.
Magus Alaric stood beside her, a stark figure of dark blue in the blinding whiteness. His presence was the only irregularity in the room's perfect geometry. He gestured with a fluid motion toward a single chair in the center of the space. It was sculpted from the same white material, its form elegant and strangely organic, as if it had grown there.
"Please," he said, his voice calm and measured, perfectly suited to the room's acoustics, which swallowed any echo. "Make yourself comfortable. This is your sanctum now."
Kiri did not move. Her boots felt like desecrations on the immaculate floor. Her entire being was tuned to the Framesight, a constant, low-level hum in her perception that was now screaming a warning. She broke the room down, frame by frame, searching for a crack, a seam, a vent, a flicker in the light, anything that could be exploited. There was nothing. The room was a perfect, unreadable void, a white canvas of nothingness.
"Comfortable?" The word felt foreign and bitter on her tongue. "I am a prisoner."
Alaric offered a thin, patient smile. "You are an honored guest. A specimen of immense, unprecedented value requires a suitable environment. Variables like stress, filth, and unpredictability must be controlled for. Purified. Here, you are free from all such distractions."
He walked toward a wall, and as he approached, a large section of it simply shimmered and became transparent, revealing an identical, adjacent room. Inside, a man in simple grey robes sat at a stark desk, his hand moving with robotic precision as he inscribed complex symbols onto a long scroll. He did not look up, his entire world seemingly contained within the task.
"Subject Gamma," Alaric stated, his tone that of a curator describing a museum piece. "He possesses the ability to manipulate the thermal energy within a defined volume of air, up to ten cubic meters. A useful, if somewhat limited, talent. He has been with us for five years, diligently working to refine his control and understanding."
A cold knot tightened in Kiri's stomach. Five years.
Alaric glided to the side, and another section of the wall became a window. This room contained a woman suspended in a lotus position several feet above the floor. Her face was a mask of intense concentration, her body trembling slightly as she maintained a dozen intricately carved crystalline orbs in a complex, orbiting pattern around her.
"Subject Zeta," Alaric continued. "She exerts conscious control over localized gravitic fields. A more complex manifestation. She has been our guest for seven years."
He turned back to Kiri, and his gaze was no longer merely analytical; it was filled with a faint, almost religious awe. "You see, Kiri? We are not jailers or butchers. We are archivists. Curators of the impossible. We seek to understand the very fabric of potential that lies within a select few. And you," he said, his voice dropping to a reverent whisper, "you are our magnum opus. A masterpiece we scarcely believed could exist."
With a casual wave of his hand, the wall turned solid and white once more, erasing the view of the other "guests."
"The preliminary assessments will begin tomorrow," Alaric said, moving back toward the door. "For now, I suggest you rest. Acclimate. Let go of the ghost of your old life. This," he gestured to the encompassing whiteness, "is your reality now."
He stepped toward the seamless wall. It parted without a sound, a perfect, silent incision in the room's skin, and he was gone. The wall resealed instantly, leaving no trace of an entrance or exit.
The moment she was alone, Kiri's calm shattered. She Blinked, appearing instantly at the spot where Alaric had vanished. Her fingers, calloused and stained with the grime of a life he sought to erase, scrabbled against the impossibly smooth surface. She found nothing, not even a molecular imperfection. She Blinked again, a frantic series of short, disorienting jumps that took her to each corner of the room, her hands slapping against the walls, the ceiling, the floor, searching for a weakness. Each surface was cold, hard, and unyielding. A perfect box.
A raw, guttural scream of frustration tore from her throat. It was a sound that had once echoed in cavernous sewers and across rooftops. Here, the deadening walls absorbed it completely, swallowing the fury into their soundless void. She threw herself against the door, pounding on it with her fists until the skin on her knuckles split, smearing tiny, desperate marks of red onto the pristine white. There was no response. No alarm. Just the silent, mocking hum of the room.
Her Framesight, pushed to its limit, began to betray her. The migraine returned, a hot, drilling pain behind her eyes that made the white light feel like needles. The frames of the room began to swim, the perfect stillness becoming a nauseating constant. She was trying to read a book with only one, endless page.
Defeated, she slid down the wall, collapsing into a heap on the floor. She pulled her knees to her chest, making herself as small as possible. The silence was the true torture. It was a physical pressure on her eardrums, a weight on her soul. In the Underspire, silence was a transient, fleeting thing, always broken by the drip of water, the scuttle of a pest, the distant, comforting thunder of the great steam pistons. This was the silence of the grave. The silence of erasure.
This was their true design. This was the gilded cage. Not to break her body, but to break her spirit. To strip away the shadows, the noise, the grit, the very chaos that had forged her, until nothing remained but the raw, polished power they coveted. They wanted to hollow her out and turn her into a clean, efficient instrument.
Time lost all meaning. It could have been minutes or hours later when a different section of the wall, with no warning, simply dissolved. Left on the floor was a tray. On it sat a bowl of bland, beige nutrient paste, a crystal cup of clear water, and a single, perfectly formed red apple.
The apple was the greatest cruelty of all. Its vibrant, organic redness was a violent shock against the sterile whiteness. It was a taunt. A reminder of a world of flavor, of life, of imperfection, dangled just out of reach. It was more manipulative than any threat.
She turned her face away, refusing to look at it, refusing to give them the satisfaction.
Closing her eyes, she retreated inward, away from the white prison. In her mind, she built her Sanctuary. She focused on the memories she hoarded, the Luminous Remnants of a life lived in the dark. The feeling of cold rain on her face in a forgotten alley. The complex, herbal scent of Lysander's apothecary, a mix of hope and decay. The deafening, empowering hiss of a released steam valve. She wrapped these sensations around herself, a cloak of stolen echoes against the chilling void.
And then, a new frame inserted itself into her perception. It was not a memory. It was a conviction. A prophecy written in the code of her own will.
It was a frame of her, standing right here in this room. But her shoulders were not slumped in defeat. Her head was not bowed. She stood tall, her eyes open, clear, and burning with a cold, focused fire. The white walls were not her cage in this frame; they were her canvas. And she was ready to paint them with a new design.
The frame solidified, a beacon in the mental whiteness. A promise. A goal.
The Chronos Guild believed they were studying a power. They were wrong. They were housing a war.
Kiri opened her eyes. The helplessness was gone, burned away by that single, definitive frame. She pushed herself to her feet, her movements deliberate and steady. She walked to the tray, picked up the apple, and polished its gleaming skin against the fabric of her shirt. She raised it to her lips and took a sharp, loud bite.
The crunch was an act of violence in the perfect silence. It was the sound of a seed cracking open. It was the first note of a dissonant symphony.
She was a ghost no longer. She was a seed of chaos, planted in the heart of their perfect order.
And she would wait, with infinite patience, for her moment to Blink.