Page 67 of Aïdes the Unseen

---

Mnemosyne turned. Her eyes were lined with star fire. She studied me, not with contempt, but with the solemn fatigue of one who has seen too many patterns repeat.

“You forget,” she said. “The living must choose to remember. But the dead must choose to arrive.”

“She wouldn’t have refused me.”

“She didn’t,” Mnemosyne said. “But something else did.”

She raised her hand and touched the center of the altar. A soft white shimmer appeared. The fragment. The moment ofher death. Élise, lit by moonlight, red blooming from her side. Whispering something.

I moved closer. Her lips were moving, just once.

“Not yet.”

A refusal.

Not to life. Not to me. But to whatever called her next.

“Where did she go?” I asked, voice low.

“Nowhere we could follow,” Mnemosyne said. “Someone intercepted her.”

“Someone? Or?—”

“The one you don’t like to name,” Charon interrupted. “Even now, you won’t say it.”

“I don’t need to. I can feel his interference.” I clenched my fists. “But is he the one who stole her?”

Mnemosyne frowned. “No. I don’t think so. He didn’ttakeher. He rerouted her. Cut the tether. Turned the riverbed so the soul lost its way.”

That was the trick. Not death. Not resurrection. Disorientation.

“Did he know what she was?” Did he knowwhoshe was?

“He always did,” Charon said. “He was there when she first stepped into the sun.”

Back in the Vault, I paced. Memory was fragile. Myth, even more so. I couldn't afford to lose the thread. Not again.

“Can it be reversed?” I asked.

Mnemosyne hesitated. “Only if she remembers not just who she is—but where she belongs.”

“She’s beginning to,” I said. “She felt something in the greenhouse. She felt me.”

“Then time is short,” Charon said. “Because ifhefelt her too, he’ll come to remind her of their version of the story.”

“And that can’t happen,” I whispered.

The Surface

When I returned to the waking world, the air in my office had gone still.

Mara stood at the edge of the room.

“You went looking,” she said.

I nodded.

“And?”

---