Gisela did not spare a second glance for the Baron groaning beside the shattered balustrade. The fallen duke, crumpled on one knee, was a far more pressing concern than cracked flags. His pupils, cleared of the beast’s crimson smear, looked dull, his chest hitching behind shredded velvet. The monstrous surge had receded into trembling flesh. He needed the cure, and he needed it before his heart gave out entirely. “Can you walk?” she demanded, not waiting for an answer before she was already pulling him up, his arm slung over her shoulder. He was heavier than he looked, a dead weight threatening to drag them both down. The residual tremor from the cannonade still vibrated through the floor joists, a low shudder beneath their boots. “The west wing,” the duke rasped, his voice dry as chaff. “Unstable. The catalyst... keeps the time-fractures anchored.” “Then we walk,” Gisela said, adjusting her spectacles with her free knuckle. They picked through mortar and splintered parquet left by Aldric's bombardment, turning toward passages warped long before the blast. Pip, clinging to the duke's collar like a damp wad of moss, chittered softly, his claws prickling through the linen. He listed sideways against her ribs, dead weight dragging on her hip. Gisela watched the flags for sudden drops, her mind cross-referencing anatomical plates and cellar maps. The botanical catalyst was their sole counter-agent, tucked inside the corridor the duke had barred from her on day one—the quadrant currently shearing itself to pieces. As they entered the west wing, the air grew thick and heavy, like breathing through wet wool. Colours seemed to shift and bleed at the edges of her vision, and the scent of damp earth and something acrid, almost metallic, filled her nostrils. The corridors here were not merely dark; they were a patchwork of different moments. A single step could take them from a perfectly preserved, elegant hallway of a bygone era to a crumbling, vine-choked ruin, only to snap back to an earlier state. Oak doors appeared and dissolved; wall paintings flickered through harvests and blights in seconds, the limestone humming like a struck tuning fork. “Stay near,” he warned against her ear. “The growth here feeds actively.” He was right. Bioluminescent shelf-caps pulsed along the wainscoting. Stems she had never seen documented in the Lyceum's vaults stretched toward the draft. One specimen, an invasive runner bearing indigo foliage, reached outward with pearlescent margins. She stepped closer, squinting to inspect the leaf venation, academic habit dulling her guard. “Gisela, step back!” he shouted, but a cord fine as silk whipped off the stem, cinching her wrist. A second runner looped her elbow, pinning her sleeve to her ribs. The glossy foliage flattened against her forearm, striking numb and hollow through her marrow. A ledger in her skull snapped shut: the scent of salt spray on her father's cutter, the copper taste of her first glass of wine in Oakhaven, the exact chemical formula for winter-dormancy tea. The recollections went gray, snuffed like candle wicks. “Mnemosyne runner,” the duke choked out, his grip digging into her collarbone. “It consumes recollection. Do not thrash. Resistance draws the root deeper.” Terror, cold and sharp, pierced through her pride. This was a violation far worse than any physical wound. To lose her memories, the very essence of her identity, her knowledge, her ambition… it was unthinkable. He forced his spine straight, feet scraping the grit. With a harsh intake of air, he clamped his bare palm over her forearm just above the green ligature. “Stand still,” he muttered, mouth drawn tight. “Take what comes.” Pale silver leaked from his knuckles, bypassing the dark blight in his blood to meet the parasite's thirst. A shock of foreign images struck Gisela behind the eyes: walnut paneling in a grand nursery, the gold thread of a ducal crest running beneath small fingers, the crisp smell of dry vellum at sunrise. They were clean, early hours of a life uncursed. The stream ripped past her flesh into the green knot. The duke's throat seized, cords standing taut along his neck as his features twisted in silent agony. Gorged, the blue shoots uncoiled and sloughed into the dirt, their sheen dulling to bruised plum. Gisela tripped back against the wall, clutching her bare wrist. The blank spaces remained where her father's boat had been, but beside them lingered the taste of spiced nursery plums and the chill of morning parchment that belonged to him. He collapsed against the masonry, knees folding into dust. His chin dropped, eyes unfocused. “Her voice in the chapel,” he murmured, staring past her boots. “The harbor festival when the ice broke. I cannot... find the names.” Gisela swallowed hard, her throat raw. Her academic vindication seemed suddenly small and vile next to the blank spaces carved behind his temples. “On your feet,” she said, hauling his arm back over her shoulder. She wedged her shoulder beneath his ribs and drove forward. The air grew biting cold. Masonry warped, walls skewing into diamond angles while floor flagstones drifted apart over chasms of dark air. Through a split where a buttress had sheared away sat the prize. Burrowed into the mortar core, shimmering with steady silver brilliance, rested the catalyst. The blossom bore tiered, chalice-like petals of mother-of-pearl and argent. Its thick taproots did not drink soil; they sank directly into the fractured granite, webbing out like pale veins through every neighboring arch. “The Ephemeral Bloom,” the duke said, his chest hitching. “It knits the rupture together. Drinks the foundation's leaking sorcery. The slippage outside... it radiates from this taproot. It pins the masonry, but feeds on the lime.” She saw the root network clearly now: it functioned as a living keystone. Severing it meant pulling the pin from a falling arch. The counter-agent demanded the blossom alive, its sap running warm. Her standing with the Lyceum, her ruined thesis, her restoration in the capital—none of it meant anything if the man holding up her left flank lost his remaining reason. Her fingers hovered above the calyx. The silver petals felt cold as lake ice. She glanced back at him; he gave a brief, ragged nod. Gisela gripped the fibrous stem and tore the bulb clean from the stone. The silver pulse died instantly. A sickening crack shot from the vacant socket down into the foundation pillars. White mortar dust poured over their hair as fault lines tore across the vaulted ceiling, masonry groaning before the first blocks crashed downward.

A Desperate Gamble in the West Wing