Page 63 of Aïdes the Unseen

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Mara hesitated. “That may trigger?—”

“I know what it may trigger,” I snapped. “Do it anyway.”

She bowed slightly and stepped out, silent as vapor.

I was alone again with the simulation.

Irina’s light shimmered on the map. Still. Beautiful. Unaware.

She wasn’t Persephone. Not yet.

But she would be.

If the curse didn’t take her again first.

I had to make surethatdidn’t happen.

Berlin,1889

She was a pianist then.Louisa. Hair pinned back with silver combs. Her music filled salons full of air that reeked of cologne and politics. She never smiled at anyone except the children who brought her flowers.

But when I stood outside the concert hall—gloved, expressionless, a man-shaped silhouette—she looked up.

Her hands missed a note.

Shenevermissed notes.

It was her.

That time, shealmostremembered.

Her fingers brushed mine at a private gathering, and she gasped—like something ancient had reached through her lungs. She whispered something in a language she shouldn’t have known: "Aidôs..."

She died two weeks later. A fire in the guesthouse. Charred remains.

Still, she didn’t come to me.

Her soul bypassed the Underworldagain.

Present

I poured myself a measure of something too rare to name and let it burn through the silence. Thanatek had begun as a cover.A false face to hide the real project—Mnemos. A living archive of soulpaths. Every lifetime, every thread, every fracture of a soul echo that might lead me to her.

It had taken two centuries to build the system. A thousand quiet agents. Algorithmic sorcery wrapped in corporate language. We sold grief prediction, yes. We mapped emotional ecosystems.

But the truth?

I was mappingher.

Each life.

Each version.

Irina was the first one in nearly three hundred years to bloom without a false imprint—no false loves, no broken lines.

She was clean. Untouched. And for the first time…

Something was coming with her.

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