Page 49 of Aïdes the Unseen
He tilted his head. “Which version of prepared are we discussing? The kind where you rewrite a simulation node to shield her identity… or the kind where you’ve hired a necromancer from Boston to live in the apartment downstairs?”
I didn’t respond. I’d only ever found a necromancer once.
Thales grinned. “That’s what I thought.” Smartass.
This century has made it easier. For the first time in thousands of years, the edges between things had thinned. Not torn—butsoftened. Humanity didn’t believe in us anymore. Not consciously. That had become our greatest advantage.
They trusted their devices, not their instincts. They followed data, not omens. They looked for patterns in everything—until they found one that frightened them, and then they labeled it a glitch.
That’s all Thanatek was, really. A way to control the glitch. We packaged it as predictive grief modeling. Neural-laced AI bereavement therapy. But underneath all of it was the same principle we’d used since before language had rules.
Namesheld power.Memoryshaped reality.Beliefwas a trigger.
And in this era—this exquisite, fragile century—they’d built machines that did half the work for us.
Magic never left.
It just got better branding.
Thales was inspecting one of the old objects on the shelf—a knife, ancient and blackened, with its edge still sharp enough to cut sound. He ran his finger along the flat of the blade, then looked back at me.
“You think the bloom will open this time.”
“It already has.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I saw it,” I said, quieter now. “In the greenhouse. The core flower—Regrowth—opened. Fully. But only when she is alone.”
Thales whistled low. “That’s earlier than expected.”
“It means we’ve passed the first threshold.”
He looked out the window, toward the storm. His posture changed—less casual now. Alert. “So,” he said after a moment, “what are the rules this time?”
“No direct intervention unless she’s endangered.”
“And who decides what qualifies as danger?”
“I do.”
He smiled, faintly. “Convenient.”
We stood there, quiet again.
The city below crackled faintly. From here, it didn’t feel alive—but something close to it. A beast with too many heads, each dreaming of a different future.
“I have sentries in place,” I said. “Networked through Thanatek’s emotional-mapping nodes. If she experiences a moment of recognition—true myth-memory, not just intuition—it will light up.”
“What about the dog?”
“I’ll know more soon.”
He finished his drink, left the glass precisely where it had started.
“I’ll be in Berlin by tomorrow night. There’s movement under the catacombs again.”
“Another gate?”
