Chapter 5: The Unlocked Door
The unlocked door was a louder silence than any lock had ever been. Elara stood frozen, her hand halfway to the iron handle. It was a test. It had to be. Vorlan's wintery eyes seemed to watch her from the very shadows, waiting for her to make a mistake, to prove her disloyalty by fleeing.
But where would she go? Back to the crumbling Scriptorium, a known fugitive? The Spymaster's reach was longer than any alley. Kaelen's act, whether one of trust or treachery, had thrown her off balance more effectively than any threat.
Her gaze fell on the scroll detailing Lord Serek's ruin. The baron's daughter. A life she was supposed to twist with a few strokes of her pen. The hollow feeling from the Braylon forgery echoed inside her. She couldn't pay that price again. Not so soon.
But she had promised Kaelen the document by tomorrow. A promise made from exhaustion, now a looming deadline.
Driven by a new, desperate purpose, she turned away from the door and back to her parents' journal. She had to find another way. There had to be a loophole in the magic's brutal arithmetic. She pored over the fragile pages, her eyes straining in the lamplight, searching for anything about mitigating the cost, about borrowing power, about anything other than self-cannibalization.
She found a passage, cryptic and faded:
"The novice sacrifices the self, for the self is all he knows. The adept learns to channel the weight of the world. A memory is a drop of water. But history is a river. The echo of a thing, the memory held by a place, an object... this too can hold intent. This too can be ink."
An echo of a thing. An object.
Her eyes darted to the tarnished silver coin on her desk. The one Kaelen had left, the one that had given her that fleeting, foreign memory of a woman's laughter. It wasn't just a threat. It was a key.
Hesitantly, she picked it up. It was cool in her palm. She focused on it, not on her own mind, but on the coin itself. Who had held it? What had it purchased? What memories were soaked into its metal?
She laid a fresh piece of parchment down. She would write the first line of the damning letter, the one that would begin the baron's daughter's false testimony. 'My dearest Papa, I cannot in good conscience proceed...'
But instead of reaching for a memory of her own, she clutched the coin tighter, pouring her focus into it, demanding it give up its story to fuel her lie.
A jolt, sharper than before, shot up her arm. A cacophony of sensations flooded her—the smell of salt and fish, the feel of coarse rope, the bitter taste of fear. A sailor's memory. The coin had been payment for a passage, a desperate escape. The memory was strong, visceral, and utterly not hers.
The ink on the page shimmered, a deep, liquid black that seemed to suck in the light. The letters settled with a profound finality. She felt a wave of exhaustion, but it was a physical tiredness, not the soul-deep hollowing of before. Her own memories remained intact.
She stared, breathless. She had done it. She had used the coin as a conduit, a battery. She had forged a lie without breaking herself.
The triumph was short-lived, tainted by a new, insidious fear. If she could pull memories from objects, what else could she do? And what had she just taken from that coin? Had she erased that sailor's desperate flight from the world?
---
Kaelen did not return that day. The unlocked door became a silent torment. She expected him at every moment, his face hard with accusation or cold with disappointment. But the hours stretched on, empty.
She used the time. She practiced, using the coin to write a few more harmless lines. Each time, the same jolt, the same flood of foreign sensation, the same physical drain. She was a thief, but she was stealing from ghosts, not from her own future.
When the door finally opened late that night, it was not with Kaelen's quiet precision. It was pushed slowly, hesitantly.
He stood there, still in his street clothes, smelling of night air and cold stone. He held a small, linen-wrapped package. His expression was unreadable, but the rigid control was gone, replaced by a deep, weary tension.
"You're still here," he said. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of profound surprise.
"You left the door open," she replied, her voice quiet.
"I know."
They looked at each other across the room, the unspoken question hanging between them.
"Why?" she asked.
He didn't answer immediately. He stepped inside, placing the package on her desk. "I had to report to the Spymaster. Then I had to… verify something. About Lord Serek." He ran a hand over his face. "The assignment. It's more complicated than Vorlan let on."
Elara's senses sharpened. "How?"
"The marriage alliance… it's not just about money. The coastal baron has a small fleet. Serek wants to use it to run blockades, to trade with the forbidden islands. The Spymaster doesn't want to stop him. He wants to control him. This letter isn't to discourage Serek. It's to make him desperate, so he has no choice but to accept Vorlan's 'help'."
The plot deepened, becoming more tangled and sinister. They weren't correcting flaws; they were creating dependencies.
"I brought you this," Kaelen said, nodding to the package.
Elara unwrapped it. Inside was a small, rustic loaf of bread, still slightly warm, and a wedge of hard cheese. Simple food. Honest food. Nothing like the elaborate meals served in the tower.
It was a peace offering. An apology. A recognition of her humanity.
"Thank you," she whispered, touched in a way the gold coins could never achieve.
"The document?" he asked, his eyes finally meeting hers, searching for the truth.
"It will be ready by morning," she said. And for the first time, the promise didn't feel like a sentence.
He nodded, a look of what might have been relief flickering in his grey eyes. He turned to leave, pausing at the doorway. He didn't look back.
"Lock it behind me," he said softly. "The corridors aren't safe at night."
Then he was gone.
Elara stood, listening to his footsteps fade. She picked up the warm bread. Then she looked at the silver coin, now a vessel of stolen memories, and the half-finished letter, a weapon of political manipulation.
Kaelen was starting to see the cracks in his world. And she was learning to wield a magic that could tear it all down. Their fragile, unwanted partnership had just become the most dangerous thing in the Spymaster's tower.