The following morning brought no sun—only a gray glow that seeped into the narrow alleys of Backlund. The city stirred in a hush, as though waiting for something it could not name.
Lucien moved through the crowd like a ghost cloaked in flesh. His secondary identity as Jareth Wolfe continued to serve its purpose, and now another layer was being woven: an identity that would live and die in darkness, unregistered, unknown even to Elise.
The mask of Miran Dusk, forged from Church archive loopholes and corrupted citizen registry data, became real that morning.
Miran was a whisper. A fixer who solved that which official channels could not touch. He would serve as Lucien's shield in coming weeks—a vessel for the things Lucien could not afford to trace back to either Lucien or Jareth.
He left a briefcase beneath a bench in the eastern plaza, timed to be retrieved by a handler from one of the underground information exchanges. Inside were two files: one documenting the mirror ritual he'd found, the other containing a false lead—bait for anyone tailing him. He didn't know how many eyes were on him, but it was safer to assume the number wasn't zero.
He'd also deposited a second package—more subtle in intent—at a tailor's shop he'd used once as a White Room student to craft a performance identity. Inside, a single cufflink engraved with a glyph known only to one person: the man who had once trained him to lie without speaking. Lucien needed to know if his old handlers were still alive. Or still watching.
Elsewhere, Elise sat beneath a vine-covered archway in the university gardens, a rare pocket of silence. Her notes were filled with disjointed impressions—names, feelings, diagrams that made sense only when viewed from the edge of sleep.
She had begun hearing echoes when alone. Not voices. Not whispers. Just... impressions.
Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she remembered a room with no walls and no ceiling. A place of sterile lights and voices that never raised their volume. The White Room's legacy was not one easily left behind.
Yuki's mind, half-anchored in the present and half in memories that slipped away before she could touch them, wrestled with the sensation of being incomplete. But with Lucien, something tethered her. He was not warmth, not comfort—but structure. A constant that reminded her who she had once been.
She no longer questioned whether she loved him.
She questioned only if that love was still hers, or something remembered.
And now, she felt something changing in him. A subtle shift. His gaze lingered longer. His pauses between questions grew more deliberate. Lucien hadn't said anything, but she suspected that he'd noticed the gap in her memories—especially the absence of one specific book.
He hadn't asked about it.
Which only meant he was thinking about it more than ever.
That night, Lucien found himself standing before a sealed door in the underbelly of the city—one not marked on any modern map. His analysis led him here: beneath a forgotten chapel, hidden behind false masonry.
He placed a gloved hand on the sigil etched into the stone.
It pulsed.
Not with magic.
With memory.
The sensation was alien. It felt like reaching into an old coat and finding a letter you'd never written but still recognized.
Lucien stepped back and murmured an incantation in a voice that wasn't his. A voice he'd heard only once—long ago—in a room full of broken glass and silence.
The door opened slowly, not with a creak but a sigh. Inside was darkness that didn't threaten but waited.
He stepped in.
The chamber was round. The walls were covered with texts, mirrors, old mechanisms—some rusted, others strangely clean. At the center, a statue. Or rather, a mirror shaped in the rough form of a humanoid. Its face was blank.
He approached cautiously.
When he stood before it, he caught no reflection. Only fog.
A single phrase appeared across the surface like breath on cold glass:
"Who watches the one who remembers?"
Lucien's heartbeat didn't change. But his mind raced.
He whispered into the mirror. "That depends. Who erased the ones who do?"
There was no answer.
Just a second phrase:
"Knowledge makes gods. Forgetting buries them."
He didn't flinch. He simply nodded once.
"Then let's start digging."
To be continued...