"Hope, in the vocabulary of the desperate, is not the opposite of despair. It is despair's most dangerous form — the one that keeps you moving."
Seris had a system.
Everything in her life was a system — not the systems of people who impose order because chaos frightens them, but the systems of someone who has learned that without structure, the weight of everything becomes too heavy to carry alone. She organized information. She organized resources. She organized her time with a precision that left no gaps where certain kinds of thinking could take root.
The gap she had not been able to close was the question of her mother.
Luceo learned this on a Thursday in the fourth week of his Spire enrollment, when he made the fifteen-minute walk to Ardenveil and found Seris in a back room of an Unmarked safehouse, surrounded by documents she was not supposed to have, reading them with the focus of someone who has read them before and keeps hoping the words will change.
She heard him at the door — her Aether sense was sharply developed, particularly for things she trusted — and closed the documents without startlement.
"You're early," she said.
"The afternoon technique sessions were cancelled. A Gold Cohort student caused structural damage to the third training hall." He sat. "How are you?"
"Functional," she said.
She says that word the way other people say fine — technically accurate, structurally evasive.
"The documents?" he asked.
A pause. She looked at the closed folder.
"Procurement records," she said finally. "From the Order of the Sunken Chain. Three years old." Another pause. "They transferred twenty-three Hollowed cultivators from Varenith Province to a facility called the Pale Hold. Government research facility. Primarily Pantheon-adjacent." She was very carefully stating facts rather than feelings. "My mother was one of the twenty-three."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Are the records recent enough to tell you if the facility is still—"
"Still operational. Yes. The most recent document is fourteen months old." She looked at her hands. "She's alive. Or was."
"Seris."
She looked up. Her composure was intact, in the specific way of someone who practices composure daily because the alternative is unmanageable.
"Don't," she said.
"I wasn't going to say anything comforting," he said. "I was going to say: the Pale Hold. What do you know about it?"
Something shifted in her expression — the relief, briefly visible, of someone who has been offered practical engagement instead of sympathy.
"Not enough," she said. "It's north of the Veilmount range. Allegedly a cultivation research facility but the Unmarked have a word for it — extraction site. They take Hollowed cultivators and—" She stopped.
"They use the cultivation," he said. "Without the cultivator's cooperation."
"The Pantheon needs Aether sources they can control," she said flatly. "Sanctioned bloodlines are loyal but limited. Hollowed cultivators often develop affinities that don't appear in the registered bloodlines. Novel affinities are useful for certain kinds of research." She had rehearsed this framing — the clinical language that kept it from becoming something she couldn't handle. "They don't kill them immediately. That would waste the resource."
There it is. The thing that drives her. Not rage — she has absorbed the rage into something colder. Purpose. The most dangerous fuel.
He looked at the documents.
"Can you locate it precisely?" he asked.
"Within a fifty-mile radius. I need more." She looked at him. "I have more time here than you do. The Unmarked network is useful, but limited — they operate in the spaces the Order isn't watching, which means they're mostly watching the spaces the Order watches." She leaned back. "What's your progress?"
He told her, efficiently, the facts of his four weeks: Grey Cohort placement, Elder Theron's sessions, the incident with Caelum and the Gold students, the controlled Void technique that he'd managed to project.
She listened with complete attention, asking precise questions. The questions told him things about what she understood — she was tracking his development with the focus of someone who has staked something significant on where it leads.
"The absorption you described," she said. "You collapsed a formed technique by opening the fracture. How large was the draw?"
"Small. I barely felt it."
"It will scale," she said. "As the core develops — as the Void-shape stabilizes — the absorption capacity will increase proportionally. In theory, Void cultivation doesn't hit the same ceiling as conventional affinity because it doesn't generate from a finite source. It absorbs from whatever is present."
"In theory," he said.
"In theory," she agreed. "Since no one has done it successfully in three centuries, we're somewhat in experimental territory."
Somewhat. A generous description of our entire situation.
"Seris," he said.
"What."
"When I'm strong enough. When the Void is developed enough." He held her gaze. "The Pale Hold."
She was very still.
"You're not obligated," she said, carefully.
"I'm not talking about obligation. I'm talking about what I'm going to do." He looked at the documents. "I have no particular attachment to the world as it currently exists. I have even less attachment to the people running it. If I'm going to acquire enemies — and I am, eventually, this is not a question of whether — I would like to ensure they have earned it."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"That's the most elaborate way anyone has ever offered to help me," she said.
"I'm a verbose person," he said. "It's a character flaw."
Something crossed her face — too quick and too complicated for a single name. It was not quite a smile but it was what smiles are made of, the raw material of warmth in someone who has learned to ration it.
"I'll find the Hold's location," she said. "You focus on the Spire. The cultivation progression. The—"
"The politics," he said. "There are things happening in the Gold Cohort that are connected to something larger. I'm not sure what yet."
She nodded. "Vael Ashmore."
"You know her?"
"I know her family. The Ashmore bloodline has held regional military governance for three generations. They're Pantheon-loyalists but there are factions within the loyalty. Her father currently sits on the Aethic Council." She paused. "Watch her carefully. She's not dangerous in the way of people who want to hurt you. She's dangerous in the way of people who are trying to figure out if you're useful."
Which is, now that I think about it, exactly how I have been approaching her.
"We're all trying to figure out if each other is useful," he said.
"Yes," Seris said. "But some people act on that conclusion faster than others."
✦
The walk back to the Spire through Ardenveil took him through the outer market, where the town's commercial life conducted itself with the efficient pragmatism of a place that exists to serve a larger institution and has made a kind of peace with that function.
He passed a stall selling cultivation primers — texts for foundational Realm theory, published by the Spire's official press — and bought three without reviewing the titles, on the general principle that more information is better than less, and paid with the stipend Elder Theron had arranged.
He passed a temple to one of the secondary Pantheon deities — one of the lesser seven, whose domain he couldn't identify from the exterior iconography, though the architecture communicated the standard vocabulary of sanctioned divine authority: imposing, gilded, designed to produce a specific relationship between the scale of the building and the scale of the person entering.
I have nothing against gods in principle. I have everything against gods who use their divinity as an administrative classification system.
He kept walking.
The Spire rose ahead of him, the beacon pulsing its patient blue. Inside it, Caelum would be at evening meditation, and the Gold Cohort would be receiving their private advanced instruction from the senior masters, and Vael Ashmore would be doing whatever Vael Ashmore did when she thought no one was watching her.
And in his chest, the Void-core breathed in the slow, patient rhythm that he was coming to recognize as its resting state — not absence, not exactly. More like the held breath before something necessary.
You are being assembled. By something. Whether that is design or accident is a question for later. Right now: the Spire. Forward.
He went in through the gate and did not look back.