Tidegarde: Lacuna

The Sovereign’s Waltz

The music was a river of strings and horns, flowing through the grand ballroom of the Winter Palace. It carried the scent of beeswax from a thousand candles and the heavy perfume of the court. Gold leaf glittered on the ceiling, catching the light and throwing it back onto a sea of dark green uniforms and silk gowns in shades of sapphire and crimson. Sineus Bielski stood apart from it all, a statue in the tide, his duty a wall between him and the celebration. His work began here, in the noise and the crowd.

He let his gaze drift, but his focus was not on the faces or the jewels. He saw what no one else could: the Memory-Script, the luminous threads of light that wove the world together. Every person, every pillar, every glass of wine was surrounded by a shimmering tapestry of its own history. To him, the ballroom was not a room of people but a forest of glowing, shifting patterns. His purpose was to find the one pattern that was wrong.

He scanned the attendees, more than 300 of them, a task that took ninety seconds of intense, unbroken concentration. He dismissed the bright, steady threads of loyal courtiers and the tangled, anxious knots of those in debt. Then he saw it. Three small, flickering anomalies near the French delegation. They were like smudges on a clean pane of glass, a subtle corruption in the script that spoke of a fabricated identity. His eyes narrowed on a visiting trade attaché, a man whose personal history felt thin, recently written.

A hand touched his elbow, a single, precise tap. Count Valerien Orlov stood beside him, a faint, knowing smile on his lips. Orlov’s eyes flicked toward the attaché, then back to Sineus, a barely perceptible dip of his chin. It was the Sovereign’s Waltz, a silent language of glances and gestures that moved empires. The signal was a confirmation, an order transmitted in less than a second. The target was confirmed. The task was his.

Sineus gave a slight, formal bow, a gesture of acknowledgment that no one else would notice or understand. He was now tasked with neutralization. He turned and moved through the crowd, a ghost slipping between laughing groups and dancing couples. The attaché was heading for a side door, seeking a moment of quiet. Sineus followed, maintaining a distance of ten meters, his steps silent on the polished floor.

The man entered a small antechamber, lined with portraits of long-dead tsars whose own memories had been trimmed and polished by generations of the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle. The heavy door swung shut, muffling the sound of the orchestra. The target was isolated from all witnesses. The operation could proceed. Sineus entered the room, closing the door softly behind him. The attaché turned, a flicker of surprise on his face.

– Can I help you? – the man asked, his Russian accented.

Sineus did not answer. He focused his will, the world of color and sound dissolving into the pure language of the script. He reached out with his mind, not his hands, and grasped the man’s memory. He sifted through the threads of childhood, of education, of false loyalties. It took fifteen seconds to find the cold, hard line of the man’s true mission directive, a memory implanted by Napoleon’s own occultists. It pulsed with a faint, ugly light.

He tightened his mental grip on that single, offending thread. For a moment, he felt the man’s conviction, the belief in his cause. Then, with a thought, he performed the Excision. There was a clean, cold snap, a feeling like a string breaking under tension. The price of the act was a familiar wave of detachment, a feeling of being hollowed out. The agent’s mission memory was severed.

The severed thread of memory, a shimmering filament of purpose and intent, wavered in the air for less than a second. It was a thing of pure information, a ghost of a promise. Then it dissolved, its energy reabsorbed into the vast, silent script of the world, leaving no trace. The work was clean.

The foreign agent blinked. A deep line of confusion appeared between his brows. He looked at his hands, then around the room, as if waking from a long dream. His purpose was gone. His operational capacity was now zero. He was no longer a threat.

– I… forgive me, – the man stammered, his eyes unfocused. – I seem to have lost my way.

Sineus watched him, feeling nothing but the cold satisfaction of a completed task. His emotional engagement was zero. The man was a broken tool, and Sineus was the one who had broken him. He observed as the agent, now just a lost man in a fine suit, fumbled with the door handle and wandered back toward the ballroom, his face a mask of bewilderment.

Straightening his uniform, Sineus turned away from the scene. The faint scent of the man’s sweat and fear lingered in the air, a scent he knew well. He returned to the periphery of the ball, his duty done, the wall of his isolation built one stone higher. He was a guardian, but he guarded from the outside, forever separate from the life he protected.

A Lodge courier, a young man with old eyes, approached him through the throng. The courier’s uniform was plain, designed not to be noticed. He stopped before Sineus and spoke in a low voice.

– Your presence is requested.

A new directive. The summons from his mentor meant the night’s work was not yet over. He gave a curt nod and followed the courier from the noise and the light, leaving the Sovereign’s Waltz behind.

The work was never over.

A Choice Forged Under Fire

The journey from the Winter Palace was a descent. From the river of music and light, the Lodge courier led him through the frozen, sleeping streets of Moscow, past the dark shapes of merchant houses and the skeletal branches of ice-coated linden trees. Their destination was a fur trader’s shop, its windows shuttered, the air around it thick with the smell of cured hides and cold stone. The courier knocked once, a precise rhythm against the heavy oak door. It opened into darkness.

They did not enter the shop. Instead, they went down a narrow flight of stairs hidden behind a stack of bundled pelts. The air grew colder, losing the scent of the city and taking on the clean, sterile smell of deep earth and old secrets. The passage was lit by simple, enclosed lanterns, their light too weak to cast real shadows. After thirty seconds of descent, they reached a single iron door. Sineus placed his palm against its surface. A low hum vibrated through the metal, a silent question asked of his very blood and bone. The lock clicked open. He had been granted entry.

He stepped through alone, the door closing behind him. He was in the archive, a circular chamber lined from floor to ceiling with thousands of wooden boards, each one a captured memory. The air was still and dry, smelling of beeswax and ancient vellum. In the center of the room, Pyotr Orlov sat at a heavy wooden workbench, his back to the door. He was a thin, elderly man, his simple brown cassock worn smooth at the elbows. He did not turn.

Sineus approached the bench and placed a small glass phial upon its surface. Inside, a single, shimmering filament of light pulsed with a faint, captured energy. It was the excised memory of the French agent’s mission, a severed thread of purpose now contained and inert. The operation was complete, but the duty was not. Not until the memory was archived.

Pyotr finally looked up, his pale blue eyes magnified by simple spectacles. His fingers, long and delicate, were permanently stained with the black ink of his craft. He picked up the phial, his touch gentle, as if handling a butterfly’s wing.

– Another one for the library, – Pyotr murmured, his voice a dry rustle of paper. He set the phial aside and picked up a silver-rimmed monocle with a lens of polished obsidian, an Oculus Speculum. He fitted it to his eye and peered at the captured memory-thread. The lens allowed him to see the script of the memory itself, to read the quality of the cut.

Sineus stood in silence, a perfect soldier awaiting inspection. He knew what Pyotr would see. The excision had been flawless, a single, clean cut with no fraying, no psychic residue. The memory’s integrity was 100%. It was a testament to his skill, his control. It was the only testament he cared for.

Pyotr removed the Oculus Speculum and set it down carefully. He gave a slow, weary nod. He took a fresh linden wood board, its surface coated in a smooth, white layer of gesso. From a velvet-lined case, he produced a silver stylus.

– A clean cut, as always, – Pyotr said. He uncorked the phial, and the severed thread of memory drifted out, hovering over the board. With the tip of the stylus, he gently touched the filament and began to guide it, transcribing its complex energy into a spiraling pattern on the gesso. The work was slow, requiring absolute concentration. The memory of a man’s entire purpose was being painted into a prison of wood and chalk.

Sineus watched the process, his mind calm. This was order. This was the preservation of the Empire. A flawed piece was removed, the whole made stronger. It was simple. It was necessary.

– But duty without choice is slavery, Sineus, – Pyotr said without looking up, his hand never wavering. The silver stylus continued its slow, circular path, the shimmering line of the memory sinking into the white surface.

The words were an unwelcome noise, a disruption to the clean logic of the work. Sineus felt a flicker of irritation. Duty was not slavery. Duty was a shield against the chaos of choice. It was a perfect, straight line through a tangled world. He had given himself to that line, and in return, he had been given purpose. It was a bargain he had made long ago.

– True honor is a choice forged under fire, – the old man continued, his voice soft but firm. – Not the unthinking swing of a blade, no matter how sharp.

Sineus’s gaze remained fixed on the Memory Icon. He saw Pyotr’s words as the sentimentality of an old man who worked with the ghosts of the past but no longer faced the threats of the present. Honor was mission success. It was a threat neutralized. It was the quiet hum of the lock granting him entry into this room. The rest was philosophy, and philosophy did not stop armies. His adherence to his function was total.

The last of the shimmering thread sank into the board. Pyotr lifted the stylus, the transcription complete. The agent’s memory was now just a complex, silent pattern, indistinguishable from the thousands of others that lined the walls. The archivist blew gently on the surface to set the memory, then placed the finished icon into an empty slot on the rack. The mission was officially closed. The agent was forgotten.

Footsteps echoed from the passage. Both men turned as the iron door opened and another Lodge courier entered. This one was breathing hard, his face flushed from the cold and haste. He carried a leather dispatch case, its seal marked with the insignia of the western front command.

– Urgent, from Smolensk, – the courier said, his voice tight. He handed the case to Pyotr.

Pyotr took the case, his brow furrowed with concern. He broke the wax seal, the snap echoing in the silent chamber. He pulled out a single sheet of vellum and began to read. Sineus watched his mentor’s face. He saw the old man’s eyes widen. He saw the color drain from his cheeks, leaving his skin the color of old parchment. Pyotr’s hand, the one that had been so steady just moments before, began to tremble.

The air in the sanctum grew heavy, thick with a sudden, unspoken dread. The scent of beeswax was sharp and cloying.

A new kind of war had found them in the dark.

The Wrongness on the Map

Pyotr’s hand trembled. The vellum sheet, filled with the tight, urgent script of a field agent, shook as if caught in a winter wind. The old man’s face had gone the color of the gesso-coated boards that lined the walls, a flat and bloodless white. He looked up at Sineus, his eyes wide behind his spectacles, and for the first time, Sineus saw not the calm archivist but a frightened man. The scent of beeswax in the sanctum suddenly felt sharp, suffocating.

– What is it? – Sineus asked, his voice low and steady.

Pyotr folded the dispatch with a sharp crackle of parchment. He did not answer immediately, his gaze distant, lost in the implications of the words he had just read. He looked at the thousands of captured memories lining the circular walls, a library of excised pains and forgotten duties. His expression was that of a librarian who had just heard the sound of a lit torch falling among the stacks.

– This is a matter for the Memory Duma, – Pyotr said finally, his voice thin. – An emergency session. Now.

The Memory Duma convened in a chamber of dark, polished oak that smelled of old wood and sealing wax. There were no windows. The only light came from twelve heavy, enclosed lanterns that cast a dull, yellow glow on the twelve men seated around the long table. These were the masters of the Lodge, the guardians of the Empire’s past. Sineus stood by the wall, a silent observer, his presence required but his participation not invited. He was a tool, and tools did not speak at the council of the hand.

The session began, not with the urgent dispatch from Smolensk, but with procedure. A state envoy, a man with a soft body and a voice like dry leaves, delivered a ten-minute report on conventional military movements. He spoke of troop positions, of supply lines, of the number of cannon in a French division. The words were a meaningless drone, a recitation of facts that felt like a history from a different, simpler war.

When the envoy finished, Grigori Levin spoke. He was a senior mnemonic chirurgeon, a man built like a stone block, his face set in lines of unshakeable certainty. His hands, resting flat on the table, were thick and steady. He was the voice of tradition, of caution.

– The reports from the front are troubling, – Levin said, his tone measured, as if discussing a poor harvest. – I propose we begin the fortification rituals for the border cities. Reinforce their mnemonic wards. It is the prudent course.

The council members nodded. It was a familiar strategy, a slow and careful process of strengthening a city’s memory of its own loyalty, its own walls, its own history. It was a defense built of belief, but it took weeks. Weeks they might not have. Sineus felt a cold knot tighten in his gut. This was ignorance. This was the price of a system that valued protocol over perception.

His gaze drifted to the large campaign map of the western front that dominated the far wall. It was a masterpiece of cartography, the rivers and forests rendered in exquisite detail. But Sineus saw more. He saw the shimmering Istopis, the script of memory, laid over the land like a second, luminous map. He saw the bright, strong threads of Russian towns, the deep-rooted memory of centuries.

Then he saw the wrongness.

It was a space on the map, west of Smolensk. A space that felt cold. It was not a color, but an absence of color in the script. A patch of psychic silence where the luminous threads of the world seemed to fray into nothing. It was a void, a hole in the fabric of what was. A place where a story had been unwritten.

He tried to trace the source of the cold spot with his mind, to follow the severed threads back to the blade that had cut them. But there were no threads. It was not a clean cut. It was an erasure. The anomaly resisted his focus, a sensation like pressing his hand against a block of ice that did not melt, but simply drank the heat from his skin, leaving it numb.

– The memory-tariff on French wine is another point of contention, – a council member with a thin, grey beard was saying. – Their merchants are attempting to bypass the wards by embedding shipping manifests with false memory-stamps.

The man’s words were a distant buzzing. Sineus’s entire being was fixed on the cold spot on the map. The psychic pressure was growing, a silent scream that only he could hear. The wrongness was not static. It was spreading, a slow, cancerous stain on the Istopis. The threat awareness in the room was zero. They were debating tariffs while a piece of the world was being eaten.

He wanted to shout, to stride to the map and point to the void. But what could he say? That he felt a cold spot? That he sensed an absence? They would dismiss it as fatigue, as the strain of his work. His unique perception, his greatest weapon, was a cage. It isolated him, leaving him to watch the coming storm alone.

He clenched his fist at his side, the leather of his glove creaking. The price of his silence was their continued ignorance. The price of speaking was his own credibility. He was trapped.

The session droned on. Levin’s proposal to begin the fortification rituals was approved. Committees were formed. Reports were requested. The great, slow machine of the Lodge turned its gears, oblivious.

Finally, the meeting was adjourned. The twelve masters of the Lodge rose, their chairs scraping against the wood floor. They filed out of the chamber, their conversation returning to court politics and personal rivalries. Sineus did not move. He remained by the wall, his eyes locked on the map, on the silent, growing void in the west.

The low hum of the lanterns filled the empty room. The air smelled of cold dust and extinguished purpose.

He had to go there. He had to see the void for himself.

The Shrieking Void

He left the empty council chamber, the scent of cold dust and extinguished purpose clinging to his uniform. The wrongness on the map was a splinter in his mind, a cold spot that demanded to be seen. He did not wait for an order. He walked through the silent, subterranean corridors of the Lodge, his boots echoing on the stone, each step a decision. The path led him to a deep vault, to a single, lead-lined door that required two men to open.

The observation chamber was a cold, sterile circle of iron and stone. In its center stood the Chronos Telescope, a complex apparatus of brass, silver, and precisely ground lenses that did not magnify objects in space, but focused on the memory-script of a distant location. A young acolyte, a boy named Pavel with nervous hands and the pale skin of one who rarely saw the sun, stood waiting by the control panel.

– The coordinates from the Duma chamber are set, Your Excellency, – Pavel said, his voice tight. He avoided looking at the telescope itself, as if it were a loaded cannon. – The strain… the masters recommend no more than ten minutes of observation.

– I am aware of the recommendations, – Sineus said, his voice flat. He stripped off his gloves and placed them on the console. The metal of the controls was cold beneath his fingertips. He could feel the low hum of the device, a vibration that seemed to travel up his arms and settle in his teeth.

He began the final calibration, aligning the temporal coordinates to the present moment. The machine whirred, its intricate gears clicking into place. The process took a full 120 seconds, a lifetime of mechanical precision while a piece of the world was dying. Pavel shifted his weight from foot to foot, the sound of his leather soles scuffing the stone floor a small, irritating noise in the heavy silence.

– It is not a clean energy source, sir, – the acolyte whispered, unable to stop himself. – The backlash from a direct viewing…

– Your concern is noted, – Sineus cut him off, his eyes fixed on the glowing dials. The calibration was complete. He took a steadying breath and leaned forward, pressing his eye to the main lens.

The world dissolved. The stone walls of the chamber vanished, replaced by the shimmering, luminous tapestry of the Istopis. He saw the memory of the land west of Smolensk, a landscape woven from threads of light. He saw the deep, strong constellations of history that marked ancient forests and the faint, pulsing lines of wagon roads. He saw the clean, ordered work of his own kind, the occasional neat gap where a memory had been excised, a single severed thread removed from the great weave. It was a familiar, manageable kind of damage.

He pushed his perception deeper, toward the cold spot. The mental strain was immense, a physical pressure against his skull. The image swam, then sharpened. He found the source. A French siege unit, their dark blue uniforms stark against the grey snow. And with them, a weapon he had never seen. It was a Lethe Mortar, a heavy siege weapon cast from dull, blackened bronze, its barrel aimed at the sky. It looked crude, brutal.

The mortar fired. A deep, booming report echoed in the psychic silence. A single, hollow iron shell climbed in a high arc, a dark tear against the fabric of the sky. It flew over a small, unnamed Russian village, a place whose memory was a warm, dense knot of light – generations of births, harvests, and simple loyalties.

The shell detonated. It did not explode with fire and shrapnel. It released a shimmering, odorless cloud that expanded in a perfect 500-meter radius, blanketing the village in a silent, iridescent mist.

Sineus watched, his breath held. He expected to see the threads of memory fray, to see them cut and fall away. That was the law of their craft. You could cut, you could damage, you could remove. But you could not unmake.

The threads did not break. They burned to nothing.

Where the cloud touched the Istopis, the light simply went out. Not severed, not damaged. Erased. Annihilated. The warm, dense knot of the village’s history vanished in an instant, leaving behind a patch of perfect, silent, absolute black. A hole in the world.

A shimmering distortion appeared where the village had been, a visible wound in the fabric of reality like heat haze on a winter day. A Lacuna. It was the shape of the erased memory, a three-dimensional photograph of an absence. The sight was a violation, a deep and profound wrongness that made the hair on his arms stand up. The idea of a severed thread was a child’s comfort. This was not a cut. This was a void.

Then he saw it move. The edge of the Lacuna, the shimmering border of the void, began to expand. It crept outward, eating the memory of the surrounding fields, the trees, the very soil. It was consuming reality at a rate of two meters per minute. It was not a scar. It was a cancer.

The psychic shock hit him like a physical blow. The telescope felt like it had become a conduit for the annihilation itself. A wave of absolute cold and nausea washed over him. He stumbled back from the eyepiece, gasping, one hand flying to his head as a spike of pain shot through his temple. The stone floor seemed to sway beneath his feet. The solid world felt thin, a fragile skin stretched over an endless, hungry nothing.

– Your Excellency! – Pavel cried out, rushing to his side. – Sir, are you alright? What did you see?

Sineus fell to one knee, his body trembling. He could not speak. He could only see the spreading black stain in his mind’s eye. The Lodge, the Duma, Grigori Levin with his talk of rituals and tariffs – they were all fools. They were sharpening knives for a swordfight while the enemy was poisoning the ocean.

This was not a war for control of history. It was a war against oblivion itself.

The low hum of the telescope’s cooling system filled the chamber. The air smelled of ozone and hot metal.

He had to go back. He had to make them understand.

The Chains of Protocol

He did not request the emergency session. He forced it. The doors to the Memory Duma’s antechamber slammed open with a crack that made the junior archivist jump, spilling a tray of ink pots and sealing wax. Sineus strode past him without a word, the cold iron certainty of his purpose radiating from him like a winter chill. The wrongness he had seen through the Chronos Telescope was a physical weight in his gut, a shard of ice lodged beneath his ribs.