The name, ‘Professor Lyall,’ hung in the air, a spectral bell tolling in the quiet office. Milosz’s smile, an ingrained reflex, faltered. He saw it then, not just a shared grief, but a shared enemy. Irina’s eyes, usually sharp with challenge, were glazed with something raw. She looked at the last entry on the page, the elegant script blurring under the tremor of her finger.
“Lyall believed in Edicts as conduits, not just sources,” she murmured, her voice a thin whisper. “He theorized that the Constellations were interconnected, that one’s Starlight could be—not just borrowed—but *redirected*. House Valerov called him a heretic. Said his theories were dangerous. Then he died. In an accident.” She spat the last word, a venomous hiss.
Milosz recalled the brass apparatus in his burning village, anchored to siphon starlight down into iron conduits—an engine built not merely to kill, but to harvest.
His Edict stirred deep under his ribs, humming with the reservoir drawn from Oakhaven—a mirror to the Valerov apparatus, drinking celestial fire into his own veins instead of iron.
His gaze snapped back to the present. The draft from the door bit against his collar. Irina was still watching him, her expression shifting from raw grief to something else – a flicker of dawning understanding, as if she’d glimpsed the abyss behind his cheerful mask. He realized he had stood motionless too long, the grin gone slack.
“They’re not just killing researchers, Irina,” Milosz said, his voice a low thrum. “They’re harvesting. They’re siphoning the sparks right out of people.” The words tasted like ash, each syllable a shard of the past.
Irina's brow furrowed as she followed the line of thought. “My mentor, your village… it’s all connected, isn’t it? The ‘accidents,’ the missing people… they’re experiments.” She clutched the ledger page, her knuckles white. “The names on this list… are any of them truly dead, or stripped bare?”
Milosz didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The memory of the fading light in his mother’s eyes, the vacant stare of his father as the Stellarcrux hummed, was a fresh wound. He needed air, needed to move, needed to outrun the echoes. He stood abruptly, the chair scraping loudly across the polished floor. “I need to… check on the party’s rations. We’re deploying to the Mirelands tomorrow.” It was a flimsy excuse, a transparent escape route.
Irina didn't try to stop him. She simply watched him go, her gaze lingering on the door long after he’d slipped through it. Her stare trailed behind him as he turned down the stone corridor of the Bastion.
The training yard, typically crowded with brawling initiates and clashing steel, lay quiet in the waning light. Milosz walked past the practice dummies scarred by countless Edict strikes, past the elemental wards glowing softly in the twilight. He stopped near the massive obsidian monolith at the yard’s center, a monument to fallen heroes. He pressed his palms against its cold, smooth surface, the chill granite steadying his breath. The past felt alarmingly close, the scent of burning wood and ozone still clinging to his phantom clothes.
He closed his eyes, leaning his forehead against the stone. The image of the Stellarcrux, a blasphemous contraption drinking the light of his people, burned behind his eyelids. He intended to find that apparatus, dismantle it, and burn House Valerov's ambitions to ash.
A shadow fell over him. He opened his eyes, expecting a guard, or perhaps Irina, but it was Gavrila. The shield-bearer stood a respectful distance away, his massive frame silhouetted against the last streaks of purple in the sky. Gavrila's scarred features, typically rigid as slate, relaxed with subtle caution. He didn’t ask what was wrong, didn’t offer platitudes. He simply took position beside the archway, scanning the empty gravel. His hand rested on the pommel of his short sword, solid and unmoving.
Milosz watched the big man's posture, wary of the unearned shield Gavrila offered. Genuine solidarity felt like a trap, yet Gavrila asked for nothing, standing guard over a C-rank medic without demanding an explanation.
He watched Gavrila’s stoic profile for a long moment, then looked back at the obsidian monolith, the monument to the dead. His dead. He was not just ruining a reputation; he was dismantling a machine, piece by horrific piece. And the first piece to break was the device that fed Damian Valerov's unearned glory.