A draft, sharper than the subterranean vault's chill, seeped into Janek’s skin. The last line of Zosia’s somnolent cipher pulsed, a beacon in the glowing script: *“The ultimate tether is not an object, but a reflection.”* He reached out, fingers brushing the brittle page. The parchment felt rigid, then suddenly warm, like sun-baked slate. The lantern flame flattened, plunging the cellar into momentary shadow before snapping back with a glare that bleached the room of color. Sounds became muffled, distant. Milena’s whispered gasp, Dr. Nowak’s urgent, unheard warning. Janek felt a wrenching sensation, as if his consciousness were being peeled from his body, stretched thin across time. His breath caught, a cold knot in his throat. The musty smell of rotting paper vanished, replaced by the astringent tang of chlorhexidine and something metallic, like copper pennies on the tongue. He was no longer standing. He was running. His legs pumped with an unfamiliar, frantic energy, the soft soles of thin shoes slapping against polished linoleum. The corridors of the sanatorium stretched out, long and orderly. Not the crumbling, disused ward he knew, but a functional hall hushed by sickness. Through Zosia's eyes, he saw a blur of white-clad nurses, patients bundled in thick wool shawls, faces etched with a melancholy that pulled at his own chest. His chest. *Her* chest. A searing anxiety, not his own, tightened around his ribs, a desperate urgency to reach… somewhere. He rounded a corner, ribs rattling around a rapid, foreign pulse. In a brass door plate, he caught the blur of a young woman's pinned hair and strained, bloodshot stare—a fragile contrast to the calm miniature painted inside the silver pendant. “*Not fleeing*,” a thought, Zosia’s thought, echoed in his mind, “*I’m running to the apse. To finish it.*” He burst through a pair of heavy oak doors, into a vast, high-ceilinged room. It was a consecrated hall turned working space, though it looked more like a ransacked chapel. Scorch marks marred the stone floor, dark against lighter patches where something had been dragged. At its center, a complex array of chalk marks and sigils, partially smudged, covered the flagstones. A few flickering oil lamps cast long, dancing shadows, painting the scene in chiaroscuro. And there, in the center of the swept floor, was a cot. A small cot, pushed into the corner, almost hidden by a tattered privacy screen. A child’s cot. A small, frail boy lay upon it. His face was pale, almost translucent, his dark hair a stark contrast to the white pillow. His chest rose and fell with a shallow, uneven rhythm. His eyes, though closed, seemed to twitch beneath their lids, as if tormented by a dream. A name, whispered on the wind, resonated in Zosia's mind, a name that felt like a lifetime of sorrow: *“Kaspian.”* The Gloom Weaver was there. Not as a solid form, but as a chilling aura, an oppressive weight that pressed down on Janek, on Zosia. It coalesced around the sickbed, an oily sheen of violet and ash seeping into the boy's skin, twisting his mouth into a grimace. It pulsed with a terrible satisfaction, drawing sustenance from the boy’s lingering fear, from the profound sorrow of his illness, from the helplessness of the sister watching him waste away. *“Too late,”* Zosia’s thought, a scream without sound, tore through Janek. *“It has him.”* The sight was horrifying. The entity wasn’t just feeding; it was *binding*. Its tendrils of smoke knit into the child's chest, turning the boy into an anchor not for Zosia, but for *itself*. The boy was not a victim in the traditional sense; he was a conduit, a vessel, through which the Weaver could maintain a physical presence, a permanent foothold in this world. Zosia staggered, her knees threatening to give way. The lines of salt, the diagram, the silver case meant to contain the entity—it was all useless. Its prey was not a transient target, but her own flesh and blood, already weakened by consumption, already steeped in the very sorrow the Weaver craved. Her regret wasn't for the broken wards. It was for the boy. For every cough that racked his small frame, every feverish night she’d spent by his side, every promise she’d made to protect him, now shattered. Her failure wasn’t in trapping the creature; it was in failing to shield her brother from its monstrous hunger. The Weaver, sensing her despair, contracted its smoky coils around the cot. A low rumble in the masonry rattled the floorboards. Then, a new resolve, cold and sharp as winter air, settled in Zosia's mind. She couldn’t save Kaspian directly. The Weaver was already too deeply entrenched. But she could save him from being completely consumed. She could make herself the bait, the primary anchor, a more substantial feast to distract the beast. She looked at the silver pendant clutched in her hand—the trinket Janek had handled, the mechanism he had unlatched. It wasn’t a cage component, not truly. It was a failsafe, a last, desperate resort. An object meant to partially divert the binding, to trap *a part* of the Weaver with *a part* of her. It would become her cage, her eternal echo, if it bought the boy even one clear sunrise. With a jagged gasp that tore through Janek’s ribs, she raised the silver oval like a shield. The vault darkened further, the remaining wicks sputtering in their oil. And then, a blinding flash of violet light, a silent scream that resonated only in the deepest parts of Janek’s soul, and the sensation of being violently torn apart. He gasped, slamming back into his own body, the smell of dust and old paper filling his nostrils. The basement. The lantern light was steady now, though the air smelled of burnt grease. Milena leaned over him, her face drained of color. Dr. Nowak gripped his shoulder, her touch surprisingly firm. “Janek, what was that?” Milena whispered, her voice trembling. “You… you weren’t here. Your eyes were blank.” He could still feel the residual ache, Zosia’s suffocating grief, the phantom taste of copper. His hands trembled, clenching and unclenching. He looked at the journal page, at the diagram that had been a map, then a trap, now a window into a century-old tragedy. “Her brother,” Janek managed, his voice hoarse. “Zosia’s regret wasn’t for herself. It was for Kaspian. The Gloom Weaver had him. She drew it into *herself* to spare him.” He looked from the journal to the open case, then to Milena. “The true lock… the ‘reflection’… it’s not an object. It’s a person. It’s her kin.” Dr. Nowak tightened her mouth. “If the Weaver is still tethered to Zosia, and she gave herself to spare the boy…” She trailed off, glancing toward the dark stacks of shelves. The dragging chains sound returned, louder, closer. A faint, acrid smell, like ozone mixed with despair, wafted through the cramped space. The growl intensified, a visceral vibration through the stone floor. It was no longer outside. It was inside the room. The Gloom Weaver was here, drawn by the surge of regret it had just witnessed, hungry for what Janek had unknowingly stirred. And if Kaspian was the true tether, the real ‘lock’ for the entity, a human anchor long since passed… what did that make Milena, a Mrozek, a descendant of Zosia, and now marked by the Weaver’s touch, researching its very history?

The Last Regret