The Collectors had not retreated. The metallic screech of their stride circled the shop like knives being whetted against stone. Inside, Elias and Arthur crouched in a tomb of darkness, but the brass watch was a traitor; the black fluid within pulsed with a sickly light, and with every throb, the "Melody" grew louder, clawing its way into Elias's mind.
It was a warm tune, delicate and flowing—and that was the core of the horror. In Etheridge, every sound was abrasive, mechanical, and jarring. This melody was so alien to the city's decay that it felt like an antibody attacking Elias's very sanity.
"Get it out of here, Arthur," Elias hissed, his voice trembling with an uncharacteristic edge. "This is no memory... it is an emotional virus."
"I cannot," Arthur replied, the clatter of his teeth audible in the gloom. "The Collectors are not hunting the watch; they are hunting the 'Echo.' The moment you touched it, the melody became a part of you. If I leave with it now, they will stay... for you."
Elias clamped his eyes shut. He tried to employ the "Venting Techniques" he had mastered as a merchant to flush the tune out, but the bastions of his mind were crumbling. With every musical note, he saw flashes of the impossible: a blue sky, not leaden. Winds stirring the leaves of trees, not the soot of engines. Confusion flared in his chest—a burning, disorienting hunger for a world he never knew.
The screeching outside stopped abruptly.
A silence followed, heavier than the noise. Then, the familiar stench of scorched oil vanished, replaced by a biting scent—the smell of ozone that precedes a lightning strike.
"They've found the breach," Arthur said, retreating toward the back shelves, knocking over empty vials in his wake.
The wood of the door began to erode—not by force, but by "Grey Decay." The Collectors possessed the harrowing power to drain the "Time" from solid matter, forcing it to age and collapse in seconds. The first one entered: a being terrifyingly tall and gaunt, draped in tatters that seemed woven from smoke. It had no face, only a mask of obsidian crystal reflecting Elias's own paralyzed terror.
The Collector extended a spindly, elongated hand toward Elias's chest. It didn't want his physical heart; it wanted to tear out the Melody that had nested in his consciousness.
In that instant, something snapped. Instead of surrendering to the agonizing fear, Elias felt a survival instinct he had never experienced—a volcanic eruption of Rage. His mind, an "Emotional Zero" for years, suddenly exploded with the torrent of sensations the melody had unlocked.
Driven by a feral impulse, Elias snatched a vial of "Deep Bereavement" from his counter—the distilled grief of a widow—and smashed it. He hurled the contents directly at the Collector's crystalline mask.
The sorrowful Aether exploded in the air. To a human, grief is a feeling; to a Collector, it is pure venom. The creature staggered, emitting a sound like glass shattering from within. The crushing weight of the grief interfered with its "Collection Logic," paralyzing it in a state of sensory overload.
"RUN!" Arthur screamed, kicking open a hidden hatch in the floorboards.
Elias cast one final, lingering look at his shop—at the life he had spent selling the crumbs of other souls—and leaped into the abyss. As he fell, his mind was not on survival, but on the melody, which had begun to warp into words. A woman's voice, ancient and soft, whispered in his skull:
"Never forget... the cold is merely the absence of fire, and the fire always hides within the ash."