The scent of ozone still clung to the air, a sharp counterpoint to the coppery tang of his own disappointment. Borislav’s footsteps receded down the corridor, leaving behind a silence thick with shattered metal and extinguished possibility. Damir knelt by the workbench, not to salvage the fragments of the voltaic sigil, but to retrieve Klyk. Its delicate wings, once a blur of iridescent emerald and sapphire, were now dull and still. A thin, almost imperceptible tremor ran through its antennae as he gently cupped it in his palm. Not dead, then. Merely stunned. The Chancellor’s tantrum had only suppressed the Anima, not destroyed the creature itself. A tiny victory, almost lost in the magnitude of his defeat.
Serafina stood by the door, her back to him, her shoulders rigid. He could feel the turmoil radiating from her, a discordant hum beneath her carefully composed facade. She hadn't left, not entirely. The academy's decree, echoing in Borislav’s thunderous words, was a death knell for his bench experiments, a blunt force trauma to his budding hypothesis. He could not, *would not*, simply abandon it.
He placed Klyk carefully into a padded box set aside for spare components, a temporary sanctuary. “The Anima signature,” he said, his voice flat, breaking the heavy quiet. “Borislav was drawn by the stability, not the magnitude. My method works. It stabilizes the decay. Even a brute like him could sense it.”
Serafina turned, her cerulean irises clouded with a rare hesitation. “He felt the *aberration*, Damir. He felt a manipulation of Anima that defied the tenets of our bloodlines. It was a violation. You heard him. Scurrility. Heresy.” Her voice was low, edged with a tremor she clearly fought to suppress. “They will not tolerate it. They will not allow you to question generations of inherited power.”
“Inherited power that is failing,” Damir countered, rising. “A power that cannot explain, let alone stop, the creeping decay of The Fading. My body is proof. Yours will be, eventually. If it hasn't started already.” The words were a calculated barb, aimed at the heart of her fear, a necessary cruelty. He needed her to see beyond the dogma, to acknowledge the raw, terrifying truth.
Her jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the smooth skin of her cheek. She did not deny it. The shared silence hung between them, a fragile bridge forming over the chasm of their inherited rivalry. “What do you intend to do now?” she asked, her gaze sweeping over the wreckage. “He has forbidden you. Threatened you with exile.”
“I will find another path,” Damir stated, his voice devoid of doubt. “Borislav may forbid experimentation, but he is unable to forbid archival study. The library's holdings are vast. The Volkov family vaults even more so. There must be records of the blight, observations, anything that predates the current dogma. If my hands are bound, my intellect is not.”
He left her standing amidst the ruins of his lab, a silent acknowledgment of their fragile truce. His destination was the Chronos Vaults, the sanctuary's ancient repository, a place rarely visited by the living save for the most arcane scholars. Its towering shelves of vellum and aged leather rested in a dusty, hallowed silence. Today, that silence felt like a shroud of complicity.
The Vaults hummed with a low, ambient Anima, a faint, lingering echo of the countless hands that had touched these texts. The air was thick with the scent of aged paper and dried ink. He navigated the labyrinthine aisles, ignoring the neatly categorized historical texts and ceremonial scrolls. He sought something specific: anomalies, deviations, anything that might hint at a pattern, a precursor to the blight. He spent hours, sifting through arcane medical treatises, genealogical records detailing ancestral frailties, even obscure accounts of arcane droughts that had plagued Krayina centuries ago. Nothing.
Frustration gnawed at him, a familiar, acidic taste. He was looking for scientific data in a world that valued poetic flourish over empirical observation. He needed a Rosetta Stone, a way to translate the flowery language of Anima into the precise lexicon of neuroscience.
Finally, his search led him to a small, overlooked alcove marked ‘Personal Effects – Restricted Access’. The air here was colder, the Anima signatures almost imperceptibly muted. He recognized the Volkov sigil etched into the heavy, unadorned wooden door. Family archives, within the Collegium’s greater collection, reserved for sensitive personal histories.
He pushed the door open. Dust motes danced in the slivers of light filtering through a grimy window. The alcove held only a single, heavy oak chest. Its lid was unlatched, revealing stacks of leather-bound notebooks, their pages brittle with age. He saw the familiar, elegant script of Damir Volkov, his own name, etched onto the spine of the topmost book.
He pulled it out, feeling a strange jolt of connection. This was *him*, in a past life, a separate consciousness. He opened the ledger to a random entry, his eyes scanning the elegant script. The date indicated it was written years before his own arrival in this body.
*“The tremors begin subtly now. A slight tremor in my left hand, barely noticeable, yet persistent. My Anima feels… diffuse. Like water struggling through sand. The healers call it a ‘diminishment of the soul-spark’. My bloodline is strong. This cannot be true.”*
Tremors. Diffuse Anima. A cold dread began to coil in his gut. He flipped through more leaves of vellum.
*“The numbness spreads. My extremities, fingers, toes. A strange lethargy, a profound exhaustion that no amount of rest can cure. My memory falters. Names. Faces. Even the simplest incantations feel… distant. As if trying to grasp smoke.”*
Numbness. Lethargy. Cognitive decline. These were not vague symptoms of magical blight. These were precise, clinical descriptions. He knew these symptoms. He had studied them, fought against them, watched them ravage countless minds on Earth. He turned another page, fingers trembling with a fear that transcended his habitual clinical detachment.
*“The atrophy is undeniable. My muscles waste. My voice, once resonant, now a whisper. The healers whisper of a ‘corruption of the core essence’, but offer no remedy. Only tonics for sleep, for comfort. I see the pity in their eyes. Soon, I will be a ghost, tethered to a failing vessel. My legacy, reduced to a hollow shell.”*
Muscular atrophy. Speech impediment. Terminal decay. This wasn't some mystical, ephemeral blight. This was a neurological disease. The very same progressive neurodegenerative disorder he had spent his life researching on Earth. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS. Motor neuron disease. He had arrived in an alien world, only to find the same insidious enemy, disguised in the language of sorcery. The Fading was not a magical curse. It was a biological one. And his own new body was already experiencing the early stages.
He heard soft footsteps behind him, light and deliberate. He didn’t need to turn to know who it was. The scent of jasmine and the subtle hum of potent Anima were unmistakable.
“I thought I might find you here,” Serafina said, her voice softer than he’d ever heard it. He finally turned. Her eyes, usually so sharp, held a vulnerable, almost haunted quality. She looked at the open journal in his hands, then back at him. “What did you find?”
He closed the notebook slowly, the leather cool against his palm. “A diagnosis,” he said, the word tasting like ash. “Not an arcane one.”
Serafina stepped closer, her gaze lingering on the worn cover. “My grandmother… she suffers from The Fading. Her tremors began five years ago. Now, she barely speaks. Her light… it flickers.” Her voice was barely a whisper, thick with uncharacteristic emotion. “My mother… she has begun to complain of a perpetual coldness in her hands. A dull ache.”
He watched her, seeing past the noble heiress, past the intellectual rival, to the terrified daughter. The shared vulnerability created a sudden, unexpected intimacy. The clinical detachment he wore like a shield felt momentarily porous.
“The healers have no answers,” she continued, her voice gaining a quiet intensity. “Only platitudes. I have been… observing. Discreetly. Comparing the progression in various bloodlines. It seems… more aggressive in those who draw heavily on their Anima. Like a tax, draining them faster.” She looked at him, her cerulean eyes now holding a different kind of fire. “I have been doing my own investigation. Away from Borislav’s gaze. I refused to accept that there was no pattern, no reason for this decay.”
An unexpected alliance. A genuine meeting of minds, forged not by ambition or rivalry, but by a shared, desperate terror. This was not the Serafina Kovalyova who had condemned his heresy. This was someone else entirely. Someone equally desperate for answers.
“Where have you been looking?” he asked, a rare flicker of hope igniting within him. “What have you found?”
She hesitated for a moment, glancing towards the alcove entrance, as if Borislav himself might materialize. Then, she leaned in, her voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial murmur. “The Fading is worst… near the Collegium’s heart—the Anima Well. And Borislav forbids anyone from approaching it.”