They left Viremoor before the sun had fully broken the horizon. No fanfare. No goodbyes. Just three figures moving north beneath a sky bruised by early light.
The road curled northwest, away from the smoke-stained skyline of the port city and back toward older land. Land that had already asked too much of them once. It was colder now. Autumn had settled in fully, no longer fighting for ground but holding it. The copper-leafed trees that once whispered change now stood half-bare, wind-threaded and brittle. The stubborn hills wore frost in their shadows.
It hadn’t been that long since they last walked this road. But the silence felt different now. Then, they’d been strangers held together by need. Now they were something else. Not whole or safe, but chosen.
The road west of Stonehollow curved like a scar through the earth. Long-healed but never forgotten. Its edges were worn by carts and boots, but it hadn’t seen traffic this deep in seasons. Not unless the travelers wore robes, and didn’t speak to locals.
The hills grew quieter. The air thinner. Past the last old watchpost, the land began to lean wrong. Trees twisted away from the light as if recoiling from some deeper wound. Where sunlight should have touched the leaves, it folded instead.
Crows stopped landing. They watched from high branches, silent and still, heads tilted the wrong way. The closer the trio drew to Paleflow Ridge, the more the world felt peeled back. Not dead, or asleep. Just still. As though it hadn't decided whether to resume or collapse.
They reached the last marker on the third day of travel, just as the sun peaked overhead. A rusted milepost jutted from the earth, stone base cracked and warped. Not by time or weather, but by something else. The discoloration shimmered faintly beneath the frost, like the stone remembered too much and had started to buckle under it.
Silas stepped to the edge of the ridge, scanning what lay ahead.
"This wasn't a cell," he said. "It was a containment site."
He didn't speak like he was guessing. Just naming a thing no one else had wanted to.
"Whatever they put here, it wasn't meant to be studied. It was meant to be kept fed. Kept hidden. Kept alone."
He gestured toward the slope. The breach was visible now. A jagged tear in the ridge face, ten feet high, where the stone had folded outward like it had been peeled open from the inside.
Lottie flicked a pebble from the path. It bounced once down the embankment, and with each bounce its hue changed. It crumbled to dust without ever landing. She stared at it for a long moment.
"Okay," she said. "That's new."
The breach gave off no heat. No glow. Just a hum that didn't touch the ears, low and steady, vibrating through the skin. Something behind the air had drawn breath but hadn't yet decided what language to use.
Septimus adjusted his grip on the warhammer, eyes on the breach like it might flinch if he stared hard enough.
"No one dies for the Church," he said. "Not today. If what's in there is too far gone, beast, man, or something in between, we walk. We burn the whole site if we have to. Then disappear into some other backwater with fewer ghosts."
Silas said nothing at first. His eyes weren't on the stone. They were half-lidded, tuned to something deeper. Not the breach. The hum beneath it. He tightened the straps on his pack, slow and careful.
"If it's shaping pure mana," he said quietly, "then containment failed a long time ago. It's not holding anything in anymore."
He flexed his gloved fingers once, like he was checking for feeling. "It's shaping us."
He exhaled, then added, "I'm not becoming another of their footnotes."
Lottie rolled her shoulder, already fingering one of her weighted iron marbles. She offered a grin, thin and empty of humor.
"Good plan," she said. "Just the right mix of 'burn it down' and 'don't die screaming' I like to start the day with."
She stepped beside Septimus, her voice softening. "If this ends bad... I'm glad it's with you two."
The breach loomed before them. A scar peeled open in the stone, humming low against the teeth. Their reflections warped in its edges, shapes bent but still their own. There was no omen. No sigils sparking to life. Just silence and the weight of knowing that what lay beyond hadn't seen light in years. And might have been better off for it.
Septimus stepped through first. Because he always did.
Just past the threshold, carved into the stone at knee height where it would be the last thing a man saw before descending, someone had scratched a warning. Not engraved. Gouged. The letters uneven, cut by a hand that had already been shaking.
Protect your Spark. Go no further. The Collector lies within. Needs no sustenance. Just your mana.
Lottie crouched beside it. Ran her thumb across the grooves. "This was a final warning," she said. "Someone carved this on their way out. Or tried to."
Septimus read it once. Then stepped past it.
The corridor swallowed them.
The wrongness didn't arrive all at once. It accumulated, sense by sense, like a body cataloguing damage it couldn't yet explain.
The metallic taste came first. Clean and sourceless, settling across the back of the tongue before any other sense registered a change. Septimus swallowed against it. It didn't clear. It wasn't in his mouth. It was in his blood.
Then the bones. He became aware of his jaw. The orbital ridges behind his eyes. The sternum, sitting like a flat stone in his chest. People don't normally feel their skeleton. Here, each bone reported in as though reminding him it was there. As though something in the air was reading him from the inside out.
He reached for the wall to steady himself and his hand arrived late. Not much. A fraction of a second after the intention. His body was slightly behind itself, like a shadow that had lost its footing.
Their torchlight didn't scatter. It tunneled forward in a single, unwilling beam.
The corridor ahead was black stone. Seamless, polished, untouched by chisel or hand. It didn't feel built. It felt revealed. The walls bore glyphs, carved so shallow they almost weren't there. Drifting at the edges of sight, refusing to stay remembered.
Lottie rubbed her arms. The air had gone unreadable. No current, no pressure differential, nothing her hands could parse.
"Something's wrong with the air," she said. "I can't feel it."
"There's nothing wrong with the air," Silas said. His voice had thinned. Not from fear. From attention. He was listening to something none of them could hear. "There's too much mana here."
He brushed his fingers toward a glyph on the wall. Recoiled before they made contact.
"This isn't elemental," he said. "It's older than that. Before any of it became anything." He looked at Septimus. "The Church didn't seal away an artifact. They sealed a source. Something they couldn't destroy. So they distracted it."
Septimus breathed in. Breathed out. The action felt redundant. Not suffocating. His lungs still worked. They just stopped feeling rewarded by it, as though the air carried everything except the part the body actually wanted.
At the corridor's far end stood a doorless arch. But the light didn't spill out. It bent inward. Not illumination. Invitation.
They stepped through.
And for a moment, each of them felt things that weren't theirs.
Not sound or language. Just the raw impression of experience pressing against the inside of the skull. A child kneeling beside a bound priest, the child's hands shaking, the shame so vivid it tasted like bile. A woman's forearms burning as a Totemic script was carved into them, the repetition of it layered so deep it felt like erosion. The reverb of a hammer striking a shard and the wrongness of the sound it made rolling through the chest like nausea.
Then the impressions faded. And the chamber did not welcome them.
It was circular. Too exact. The kind of geometry that made the mind itch. The floor was carved in twelve concentric rings, each of a different substance. Burned steel. Bleached bone. Memory-forged crystal. Some turned slowly. Not by gear or ritual. By thought.
The saturation was worse inside. Septimus felt his molars first, then the plates of his skull, then the joints of his fingers. Each one announcing itself like a roll call he hadn't asked for. His hand moved to adjust the hammer's grip and arrived a half-beat late. He watched his own fingers close and couldn't shake the feeling that he was observing it from somewhere slightly adjacent to himself.
The walls were lined with crystal vessels, cradled in hollow sockets of carved stone. Bone-glass. Mana-scribed. Some glowed. Others pulsed. Inside each one, light moved. Not uniformly, but distinctly. Individually. A rhythm that belonged to someone. The remnant of a Spark that had been taken and stored, pressed into mineral like a flower pressed between pages. The shapes behind the glass were not faces. But the impressions that bled from them were. Grief without a source, rage without a name. The sense-memory of hands that no longer existed, reaching.
Not a sanctum. A larder.
At the center of the room knelt a figure.
He was larger than Septimus expected. Broader. Whatever the man had been before, he'd been built for endurance. The remnants of that frame still held, bones visible beneath skin pulled too tight, muscles atrophied but mapped with intention. Every inch of exposed flesh was covered. Ritual tattoos in Totemic script spiraled from his wrists to his throat, the ink so old it had fused with the scar tissue beneath it. Some lines decorative, others functional. Circuit paths. Conduit channels. The geometry of a body redesigned to move mana the way a canal moved water.
And from those channels, the crystals grew.
They had been implanted. Now, they had bloomed. Mana shards, the same mineral structure found in any deep-vein deposit, flowering from his skin like quartz from a geode wall. Some were small, barely breaking the surface, catching the torchlight in fractured violet. Others jutted inches from his shoulders, his ribs, the ridgeline of his spine. They grew along the tattoo lines as though the ink had seeded them, following the conduit paths like roots following water.
Each crystal hummed at a slightly different pitch. And inside each one, light moved with its own rhythm. Its own breath.
Its own Spark.
Thirteen shards of black obsidian circled him on the floor. Some shattered. Others still faintly pulsing. His hands rested on the stone. The eyes were open and empty. The mouth hung slack. Whatever had once lived behind that face had burned out years ago, maybe decades, and left nothing behind but the habit of collecting. The original tenant was gone.
But the crystals flickered with life.
A shard near his left collarbone flared. An impression hit Septimus behind the eyes, sudden and involuntary. A woman standing at a lectern, hands folded, the weight of authority sitting on her shoulders like something she'd stopped noticing. Then gone. Another crystal pulsed near the Collector's wrist and Septimus felt the confusion of a younger man, someone who hadn't understood what was happening to him until the mineral had already started to grow.
The impressions didn't come as language. They arrived as weight. As temperature. As the phantom ache of joints that didn't belong to him and hadn't existed for years.
Septimus's grip tightened on the hammer. The heat in his chest, gone. Only purpose now.
"Those bastards," he muttered. His voice sounded like stone breaking in winter. "Look what they turned him into."
He could feel the pull now. Faint, constant, indiscriminate. The saturation in the chamber wasn't ambient. It was directional. Everything pointed inward. Toward the Collector. Toward the crystals. The mana wasn't pooling here by accident. It was being drawn, siphoned, stored. The Collector was still collecting. Not by will. By structure. The conduit channels carved into his flesh still functioned. The Hollowing hadn't stopped the machinery. It had just removed the operator.
Lottie dropped into a low stance beside him, one hand flickering with fire, the other pressed to the vault floor. She registered the pull too. Her flame guttered, leaning inward like it wanted to leave her.
"It's drawing from us," she said quietly. "I can feel my inner flame bending toward it."
Silas didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't have to. Shadow had already begun to coil around his wrist. Slow and deliberate.
"Auralith," he said. "An Aberrant who could shape mana flow directly." He narrowed his eyes at the crystal growths, the conduit scarwork, the ritual geometry of the tattoos. "The Church didn't just use him. They turned him into a laboratory. Fed him Sparks and watched what grew."
A crystal near the Collector's sternum flared. The impression that bled from it was small and formless. A child's panic. Then it dimmed.
"Can you feel that?" Lottie asked. Her voice had dropped. "Every time one of those lights moves, I get someone else's worst day."
"They're what remain of their Sparks," Silas said. "Wisps trapped in the mineral. Still carrying whatever the person was feeling when they were taken."
The Collector stirred. Moved without urgency. Limbs shifting not like muscles but like a body wading through deep water. Or a machine cycling through its next instruction. He rose from the kneeling position the way rust falls from a hinge. Not with intent but with gravity. The crystals caught the torchlight and threw it in wrong directions.
He turned toward them. Because they were the strongest source in the room. The way a plant turns toward light.
Septimus braced himself at the edge of the shifting rings.
"Whatever it was," he said, "it isn't anymore. But those people in there still are."
The floor began to shift. One ring at a time. The outermost turned to brass. Heat rolled off it in waves. Fire-forged, slow-turning. A warning, not a trap. Stay long enough, it burns you. Just like everything else the Totemic Church leaves behind.
Septimus moved first. He didn't speak. He crossed the inner ring, boots scraping across scorched steel. The warhammer followed. No enchantment or theatrics. Just mass. Just motion. Just finality.
He swung low and hard. The hammer struck the Collector's shoulder. Bone cracked. A crystal sheared loose from the impact site and skipped across the brass ring. It shattered against the far wall.
The Spark inside escaped. A flicker of light that rose, trembled, then returned to the Fade from within the vault air. As it went, the impression that passed through Septimus was brief and clear. Relief. Not his. Borrowed. The phantom exhale of someone who had been holding their breath for years.
The Collector staggered. Another crystal cracked under its own pulse, fissures threading through the mineral from within. The floor shuddered. The remaining crystals flared brighter, the trapped Sparks reacting to the violence. An impression hit Lottie from above, sharp enough that she flinched. A child's face, not seen but felt. The shape of bewilderment. Then it retreated back into the crystal.
"You broke one loose, Sep," Lottie called down. "The light that came out. That was the Wisp."
She didn't wait for a reply. She dropped low, then launched upward, heat and pressure bursting from the floor like a coiled spring. Her boots caught a ledge eight feet up, out of reach of the spinning brass. From above, she drew the air tight between her fingers until it hummed. Then she let it go.
The pressure bolt struck the Collector square in the chest. Two crystals cracked on impact. From the fractures, impressions flooded outward. A woman's hands gripping a railing. The taste of river water. The particular terror of recognizing a face that should not have been in the room. Each one vivid, each one belonging to someone else, each one lasting only the length of a breath before the Spark behind it escaped the crystal and rose.
Lottie narrowed her stance. Wind wrapped her ankles like armor. "We're not fighting him, Sep," she shouted. "We're breaking them out."
Silas circled wide. He moved with calculation, not caution. Watching the floor, not the body. The rings had rhythm. Sequence. Reaction.
"The ring is not just reacting," he said. "It's adapting. The more we channel, the more it learns."
He vanished into a shadow behind a turning steel ring, reappearing deeper inside the chamber. No rush. Just timing.
The Collector pulsed. Not with effort. With function. The conduit lines across his body flared as the siphon engaged. He moved toward Septimus, one hand raised. Not fast or sudden. Automatic. The air between them tightened.
Septimus felt it. Not a strike. Something internal. Like a thread had been pulled loose from his spine. His limbs faltered. Not from pain, but from something being drawn out. A drain at the center of him. The warhammer suddenly felt heavier in his hand. Not unwieldy. Its true weight. The Collector's body was doing what it had always done. What it would keep doing until every crystal was full or every source was dry.
Around them, the rings began to shift again. Not from command, but from presence. The mana in the chamber was rising. Too many signatures. The vault responded like a vein pushed past capacity. Brass darkened beneath Silas's feet. Obsidian glass took its place. The floor slickened. Not a trap. A side effect.
Lottie's feet skidded slightly on the stone ledge. Even the stone had begun to sweat.
But Septimus didn't fall. His jaw tightened. His fingers curled. Whatever the Collector had taken wasn't enough.
The Collector raised both arms. Two large crystals jutted from his elbows, still embedded, still glowing. Inside them, light spiraled in frantic patterns. The trapped Sparks could feel what was coming.
Septimus moved. No words. No breath. He drove the hammer into the Collector's chest. The blow went through tattoo and scar and hollowed bone. Through crystal and the light trapped within. Through the architecture of something that should have died years ago but kept functioning because no one had thought to shutter it.
Another cluster of crystals tore free. They bounced once, then shattered against the far wall. The impressions hit all three of them at once. A flogging witnessed through the eyes of the man holding the lash. The taste of bread after weeks without it. A door closing on a room that someone would never leave. Each one sharp, each one real, each one gone the moment the Spark that carried it found the air and dissolved.
The Collector's body stuttered. The siphon faltered. Septimus had broken something structural. Not bone. Circuitry.
From above, Lottie called down. "Do that again. Stronger."
The Collector staggered. Blood ran from his arms. Thick, slow, cold and without the breath of life. It pooled beneath him.
Lottie conjured another spiral of wind, tighter this time. Then released it. The blast struck. A ridge of crystals across the Collector's back burst in sequence, like a seam tearing open.
The Sparks spilled out. A dozen at once. The impressions came too fast to process. A marketplace. A child's hand being held. The smell of woodsmoke and the certainty that the house was already gone. They hit the air like sparks from a grinding wheel, layered, overlapping, each one somebody's life compressed into a single sensation. Then finding the air. Then going still. Then gone.
Lottie's expression hardened. Fire in her eyes, her jaw set. "Come on," she whispered. "Let them go."
Silas moved. He briefly met Septimus's eye. Then stepped into the vault's light, coat flaring, posture clean and calm. A line of intent drawn in motion.
Shadows coalesced. A spike of darkness pierced not flesh, but shadow. It pinned the Collector to the floor. His own silhouette held him down.
The remaining crystals flickered. The impressions that bled from them were quieter now. Less frantic. A woman folding cloth. A man watching rain. Small memories. The kind people carry without knowing they're carrying them. The Sparks behind the crystal walls weren't fighting anymore. They were waiting.
Silas stood encased in shadow. The air dimmed around him. Even the vault's glow pulled back, like it knew to stay away.
A crystal near the Collector's throat pulsed. The impression that reached Silas was not a memory. It was recognition. The Spark inside knew what he was. The same classification. The same type. Aberrant looking at what an Aberrant becomes when the Church decides to find out what's inside. Silas held still. He let the impression pass through him without flinching.
Septimus gripped the hammer like it wasn't a weapon. It was a verdict.
The Collector hung motionless. Pinned to the vault floor by Silas's spike of shadow. The crystals still embedded in him flickered with failing light. The trapped Sparks, the ones that remained, pressed gently against their walls. Not fighting. Settling. The impressions that bled from them had changed. No more pain. No more panic. Just the quiet hum of people who had been waiting a very long time to leave, and who could feel the door opening.
The air trembled with power. Septimus stood tall.
The Collector twitched. Once. Then stilled. The body had no will left. But something shifted in the crystals. A consensus. The light inside each one steadied, synchronized, found a common rhythm for the first and last time.
His chest cracked. Not from the spike still holding him, but from within. Each remaining crystal flared, bright and sudden. Not the Collector coordinating. The Wisps within. They stopped pressing against the walls. They pushed through.
Mana exhaled from the body. Everything that remained.
The vault erupted in silence. A pulse without sound, a wave without color. It slammed through the chamber like a second heartbeat. One that didn't belong to any of them.
Septimus staggered as it passed through him. Not from pain. From the weight of it. Every remaining impression released at once. A wrongful execution, witnessed from the scaffold. A woman singing her child to sleep in a room she knew she'd never see again. A flogging that was deserved, and the shame of deserving it. They came and went like a tide, each one belonging to someone, each one finally allowed to leave.
Lottie fell to one knee on the ledge, coughing air that tasted like blood and iron and nothing else.
Silas flinched. Eyes wide for the first time, as if something had reached into his thoughts and shown him the blueprint of what the Church had built here. And what it cost.
The vault shuddered. Walls wept light. Several of the bone-crystal vessels on the walls cracked in sympathy, their own trapped Sparks breaking free in the cascade.
And still. Septimus did not fall.
He blinked once. Then moved. The blow landed just below the Collector's collarbone. Not to break the body. To end the machinery. The impact echoed through the chamber like thunder.
Around them, the rings stopped spinning. Not slowly, or gradually. With a chime, sharp and final. A clock halting on its last second.
The Collector seized. Spine arched, mouth open. No sound came from it. There was nothing inside to make sound. Instead, his body began to crack. Not shatter. Fracture. The frame, emptied of what it had been built to carry, no longer had a reason to hold together.
The last crystals split open. The last of the Wisps rose from their shell.
And as they went, the final impression passed through the chamber. A farewell with no destination. The words came without thinking. Ash to wind, spark to stone.
Then the Collector fell apart. The tattoos. The crystal formations. The body that had been redesigned into a machine and then forgotten about. All dissolved into scattered fragments of light and glass. Each shard humming with faint echoes, the last residue of impressions too small to carry meaning. The Sparks rose and dissipated, one by one, like lanterns released into a windless sky.
Then stillness. No pressure or pull. The siphon was gone. The metallic taste faded from Septimus's mouth. His bones stopped reporting in. His hand arrived when he told it to.
Just the sigh of a breeze through the vault. A breath unheld too long, finally released.
Lottie's voice was quiet. "He's gone."
Silas stood beside the ruin, watching the space where the Collector had been. "No," he said. "He moved on. That's different."
The chamber settled. Dust drifted in slow spirals. The light no longer bent.
Septimus looked to the place where the Collector had knelt. A cell, built to hold something too human to be remembered. A body, redesigned to harvest what made people themselves. And now they had broken the machinery. They had freed the collection.
One day, so would the world.
Septimus kicked the empty crystal husks aside. They clinked and scattered across the vault floor like brittle memories finally allowed to break. Some of them hummed as they rolled, soft notes that sounded like regret. He watched them go.
Then muttered, “I’ve robbed. I’ve killed.” Exhaled a slow, seething breath. “But this feels worse.”
The words dropped heavier than the hammer still in his hand. Heavier than any coin he'd ever taken from a dying man’s pocket.
Silas crouched beside the wreckage. He didn’t touch anything. Just watched how the light flickered through the broken glass, how each fragment seemed to breathe wrong.
“They didn’t just store something here,” he said quietly. “They tried to rewrite something human into a vault. Make it forget what it was.”
He looked up. Eyes heavy. “This wasn’t sin, Sep. This was sacrifice without choice.”
He stood, brushing dust from his coat with the same care someone might give to blood. “That’s what makes it worse.”
Lottie didn’t speak at first. She bent low, picked up a shard the size of a coin. Turned it once in her fingers, then tucked it into her pocket like it was a secret she didn’t want yet, but couldn’t leave behind.
“So they couldn’t bury it,” she said. “So they tried to wear it. Like a badge. Or a threat.”
She brushed soot from her temple. Let out a breath she’d been holding since before the fight even started.
“People like C?” She shook her head. “She didn’t send us here to fix anything. She sent us here so we’d know.”
No one argued. The chamber was quiet now. No pull. No hum. Just dust, settling. They were alive. They were changed. And they’d done it right. Even if it felt wrong.
Lottie stepped up beside him. Eyes dimmer than he’d ever seen them. She touched his shoulder. Not to stop him. Just to remind him she was still there. Her voice was low. Measured. “Let’s get out of here. You did what needed doing… Doesn’t mean you gotta carry the guilt like a medal.”
She nodded toward the broken ring behind them. “Let the vault keep the shame,” she said. Softer now. “We’ll take the truth.”
No one argued. The three of them turned and walked out. No words or ceremony. Just boots on stone. Ash in the air. And silence that no longer hurt.
He didn’t know if what they did would matter to history. But it mattered here. To something that once was human. To the people still breathing beside him. And that was enough for today.
The road back to Viremoor felt longer. Not in distance, but in weight. They didn’t speak much. No need. The fight left their mana thin. Like something had pulled too deep, and the well hadn't refilled yet.
The wind from Paleflow Ridge didn’t follow them. But the silence did. It lingered, not haunting, but heavy. The kind that settles after something sacred’s been disturbed.
When the city finally broke the horizon, Viremoor looked unchanged. Grimy. Crowded. Breathing soot. But their eyes saw it different now. The city greeted them with iron in the air, frying oil in the gutters, and steam coiling from kettles that never stopped boiling.
Life went on. And that was the strangest thing of all. There were no alarms. No guards. But people watched. Something had changed. Even if no one could name it.
Silas brushed past the gates without a word, his shadows longer now. As if he was waiting for something to jump out at them. Nothing did. His shadow stayed vigilant, anyway.
Lottie pulled her cloak tight. Walked beside Septimus with her head high, steps steady. Like she’d been holding them all upright the whole way home.
Septimus spoke first, voice rough and low. “First things first. We find a drink. A hot bath. Then another drink. Then maybe sleep.”
Lottie let out a laugh, sharp, short, and real. “Now that’s the kind of leadership I signed up for.”
She clapped him on the back and nudged Silas forward, guiding them down a narrow street of iron grates and wet cobble, where coal smoke mixed with the smell of bread crust and the scrape of someone half-singing a sailor’s tune in the wrong key.
Silas murmured, “One drink. And the kind of silence that doesn’t echo.”
The Brass Nest was still standing. Still warm.
Inside, the barkeep didn’t ask. Just nodded and slid a bottle their way the moment they stepped in. Another brought stew. Thick, black bread, barely soup at all. No one rushed them.
They took the corner booth. The one no one else touched. Low light, high privacy. Septimus sat last. Lowered his warhammer and shield beside the table like setting down a burden that never really left him.
They ate. Lottie raised her glass.
“To surviving things we can’t explain... and drinking until we forget how to.”
Septimus lifted his without looking at it. The motion was automatic. Expected. Not empty, but worn. He drank. Not to forget. Just to feel something warm that didn’t ask anything from him.
The fire was down to coals. The bottle, nearly gone.
Silas stood eventually, papers under one arm, shadow curling beneath the other like a coat that never quite comes off.
“Good night,” he said, and nothing more.
He didn’t wait for a reply.
Lottie stayed. She leaned back in her chair, legs stretched across a second, arms folded like she was holding herself in place. Or holding something back. The firelight curled through her hair. Wild, even now.
He felt her presence, quiet tension that didn’t threaten.
She didn’t look at him when she spoke. “You’ve been quieter than usual, Sep.” Her voice was low. Not pushing. Not prying. “I don’t mind. But I can tell when something’s knotted up behind your eyes.”
She swirled the dregs of her drink, like waiting for them to spell him out. Then she looked at him. Not searching. Just… ready.
“You want to talk about it? Or let it burn slow like the rest of us do?”
Septimus met her eyes. Softened, maybe. A little. “I suppose it depends if you want to hear it.”
Lottie tilted her head. That usual grin, the one that played defense, wasn’t there tonight. In its place was something honest, something bracing. She set her glass down. “Sep… if the words are yours, I want to hear them. Even if they’re half-broken and backwards.”
She was steady. But she knew it mattered, even before he spoke.
He stood. Because if he stayed still, it might all come out wrong. He paced once. Twice. Finally, he opened up. “I lost my entire family. The Aberrant that took down The Copper Kettle… he followed me home.”
The words landed hard, his voice cracked in a way he couldn’t control. “He already took my dad, and he..." Septimus bit his lip, briefly losing his train of thought. "All of them. I was the youngest. I hid under the bed when he came.”
He didn’t explain the footfalls, or the screams, or the silence after. He didn’t need to. But he said it anyway.
“The ground shook with every step. My brothers... they tried. He crushed them. My mother, my sisters... they screamed. Then nothing. Just those steps. Just the two handprints he left, scorched into the dirt.”
He blinked. Fast. Once. Twice. "After that I just... kept moving. Did what I had to. A lot of which I’m not proud of." He stopped. "Then we found Silas."
The words changed, more present now. “Not the same. But close. And every time someone looked at him sideways, I felt it. The same thing my brothers must’ve felt. That urge. To stand up, even when it’s hopeless. To try anyway.”
He clenched his fists. “And then… there’s you.”
He turned. Faced her. Finally sat down again. His voice dropped. “You’re more than family to me, Lottie Loring. You’re… my heart.”
He didn’t say more. Didn’t need to.
Lottie didn’t interrupt. Not once. She went still in a way he’d never seen. No restless foot or deflecting grin. Just stillness. Real stillness. When he spoke of the Aberrant, her jaw clenched. But she didn’t reach for him. Didn’t fill the silence. When he spoke of Silas, she glanced at the stairs. Then back.
But when he said you’re my heart… She blinked. Then let out a breath she might’ve been holding since the day they met. And when she moved next, it wasn’t loud. Lottie didn’t answer right away.
She stood too. Not fast or startled. Just... intentionally. She closed the space between them without a word. Didn’t ask. Didn’t falter. Just laid one hand flat against his chest, fingers splayed, like she was grounding him the way he’d grounded her, a hundred times over.
Her voice, quiet. Certain. “I’m not gonna disappear. Even when I want to. Even when it’d be easier. I’m here.”
Softer than he’d ever heard her, stripped of armor, she whispered. “And you’re not just my heart, Sep. You’re the reason I stopped running.”