The Room She Left Behind
Cassian climbed slowly, hand on the rail, boots slick with rust.
The hatch to the workshop hissed open above him, spilling warm light from the coil lamps he'd jury-rigged in his first week here back when he still thought this place was just ruin and salvage. A skeleton where genius came to rot.
Now he stepped into it like a cathedral.
And saw everything.
He paused just past the threshold.
The room hadn't changed but he had. His mind, newly sharpened by revelation, began pulling threads that had always been there quiet, buried, waiting.
His gaze flicked across the space.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The table he used was misaligned. By exactly 1.7 degrees. Just enough to shift its center of gravity toward the back corner.
That corner held nothing.
Nothing in a room where every inch was packed with scrap, coils, stripped conduit. Emptiness meant intent.
He moved toward it, eyes narrowing.
The wall behind the void had discoloration faint brass etching beneath layers of black smudge. He ran his gloved fingers across the surface.
Not etching.
Fretwork. Hidden glyph-circuitry.
Inactive, but wired. Buried beneath.
He looked up. The overhead piping sagged slightly; only above that corner.
He snapped back.
No, not sagging counterweighted.
He followed the pipe visually to the support brackets; standard issue except one had a rivet made of rose-gold. That alloy wasn't used in structural elements. It was, however, used in aether-tempered triggers.
Cassian tilted his head, calculating.
He reached under the table, felt along the underside edge until his fingers brushed something warm.
He pressed it.
A click. A soft hiss. Then the corner wall shimmered.
No gears moved. No dramatic reveal. The circuitry merely phased, and then—faded.
And left behind a mark. A simple one, etched into the metal:
"C.V. — Look Closely."
His breath caught.
Not because of the message.
Because of the handwriting.
It was his.
Except he'd never written it.
He ran a thumb along the groove. The carving was real. Done with a soldering stylus. But the signature was impossible.
He scanned the room again, faster now, letting his mind break free.
His focus tunneled.
The toolbox always shut tight. Never opened, because he hadn't needed what was in it.
He opened it now.
Inside: not tools.
Memory lenses.
Spell glass fragments designed to record—and hide—moments.
Cassian slipped one over his right eye, adjusted the dial. It buzzed softly, aligning with ambient aether. The lens shimmered.
And then he saw her.
Not fully. Not vividly.
Just a flicker.
A woman moving through the workshop not like a noble, but like a mechanic. Sleeves rolled, hair bound back. She was adjusting something on the wall-rewiring it.
Cassian turned toward the same wall in real time.
Behind that panel: a mirror coil. It hadn't worked since he arrived. He assumed it was corroded.
He opened it now.
Inside: not corrosion.
A folded schematic.
He unfolded it slowly.
It was… a map. But not of the workshop.
Of him.
Layered overlays, neural grafts, spinal weaves, memory partitions. In the margins, she had written notes:
"Keep the emotions gated. Let the mind lead. If he ever finds this. He's strong enough to handle the whole truth."
Cassian stared down at the last line.
"He'll want vengeance. Don't stop him."
His throat tightened.
He sat at the table.
She had known. Known he would come here. Known he would find it.
This was never a workshop.
It was a primer.
A forge not for machines; but for him.
And every broken part, every useless gear, every smudged coil… now read like a code.
She'd hidden messages in the mess signal patterns in scrap piles. Designs in the rust.
He stood again. Began moving from piece to piece.
Here: a crushed capacitor with its core replaced by a memory pearl.
There: a child's toy automaton, except it was wired not to function, but to mimic his speech patterns from early development.
She'd recorded him.
She'd studied him.
And she'd loved him—in her way. Not through lullabies or silks or stories. But through design. Through attention so precise, it bordered on madness.
The coil-light above dimmed as he stood in the center of the room.
His mind reeled.
Not from grief.
From activation.
The room around him was no longer static.
It was alive. It was him.
And buried in every wire and wall was a message older than betrayal:
"Remember what you are."
Cassian Vale stood still in pain.
He didn't move. Didn't blink. Just breathed. Slowly. Because if he breathed too quickly, the weight of it might crush him where he stood.
His mother had carved her love into solder and steel.
His father had turned him into a weapon with a smile and a signature.
Everything had been constructed. Engineered. Monitored.
He had been engineered.
He staggered back a step, hand gripping the edge of the worktable. His knees buckled; not from weakness, but from the sudden, wrenching realization that he'd never had a childhood. No "first word" that wasn't part of a test. No tantrum that wasn't logged and studied. No nightmares that weren't measured against neural stability charts.
The memories flooded in now, snapping into new focus.
His mother's voice—calm, clinical, always ending conversations with: "Very good, Cassian. Log complete."
The way his tutors reported to her, not the Duke.
The faint sting he'd always felt when angry like a second rhythm, trying to correct him. He'd thought it was self-control. Discipline.
It was a failsafe.
Cassian let out a low, ragged breath. He leaned against the table, the spell glass lens still clamped to his eye, showing ghost-images of her flashes of her adjusting machines, pressing her hands flat to the floor as if sealing something beneath it.
And he broke.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
Just… folded in on himself. Head down. Hands in his hair. A silent, brittle collapse.
Because he didn't know what was real.
Not in the world. Not in his memory. Not even in himself.
Was any of it his? The pain? The brilliance? The rage?
Or were they all inputs measured, sculpted, programmed?
His shoulders shook once. Twice.
And then, Calculation.
His mind, splintered by grief, began stitching itself back together—fast. Efficient. A flurry of internal algorithms reorganizing the facts.
He stood.
Looked around.
And began scanning.
Not like a boy looking for answers.
Like an architect looking for weaknesses.
He turned back to the child's automaton in the corner unassuming, head tilted, eyes dulled with soot.
He stripped its casing in twelve seconds.
Inside, the gyroscope was wrong.
Not broken inverted. Deliberately misaligned to encode a signal loop.
Cassian wired it to the coil lamp and set the frequency through the stolen tuner he'd built two months ago.
It blinked once.
Then a soft click from the far wall.
Behind a riveted panel, a hidden relay node activated. A pulse moved through it slow, steady, humming like a heartbeat.
Aether cipher.
His mother had left him an operating system. An invisible framework beneath the rust.
Cassian's hands moved faster now.
He reconnected the circuit to the old wall reader, bypassed the defunct relay, and routed it through the spine of the false memory core she'd built into the table.
It booted.
Projected a glyph into the air above the workbench just a single word:
"BUILD."
Cassian Vale smiled.
His teeth were still clenched. His eyes still burning.
"Alright," he said hoarsely. "Let's build."
Cassian moved like a man possessed; yet every motion was surgical. Controlled. He stripped the table bare with a sweep of his arm, bolts and casings clattering to the floor. The coil-lamp overhead flickered with the sudden surge of aether as he pulled a junction feed from the wall and stabbed it directly into his own board.
He reached into his pocket.
The key.
It had stayed cold for hours, but now his skin to it pulsed once, faint and hungry, as if recognizing that its time had come.
He set it on the table and stared at it.
"Not a key," he whispered. "A seed."
It hadn't just opened the vault.
It was a piece of something much larger encrypted, condensed, compressed into what looked like a shard of crystal and brass. A sliver of theoretical design so dangerous that even the Chain Lords never spoke its name.
Spatial decoupling.
Cassian muttered to himself as he assembled components, his hands outpacing his thoughts:
"Folds... not rips. You don't tear space, you trick it. Two coordinates... one container… perception is the hinge…"
He laid out his tools: solder-stylus, ether-caliper, neural grid etcher.
Then he placed the memory lens back over his eye.
Flashes.
Diagrams.
Moments of his mother working at this very table, drawing impossible lines in the air—shaping theory not yet approved by the Crown's arcana guild.
He took the base of his old prototype; the one that had nearly killed him with its sabotage.
Ripped out the stabilizer.
Inserted the key.
It clicked into place—not mechanically.
Magically.
Aether coiled into it like breath returning to lungs.
Cassian backed up, cross-wired a flux converter, and overlaid three spell glass plates around the core to begin modulation.
The coil turned white-hot, then—
FWOOM.
A ripple tore across the room—not outward, but inward.
Cassian blinked.
There, hovering six inches above the table, was a tear in space the size of a coin.
But inside it—depth. Infinite depth. A corridor of lightless air and mist that twisted at impossible angles.
He walked around it. It did not change.
The tear faced the same direction no matter where he stood.
Cassian's pulse spiked. Not in fear.
In awe.
He reached for a stick of chalk and threw it into the rift.
It vanished.
The rift rippled.
And then—clicked open wider.
A sudden gust of cold air blasted through the workshop. Not from below, not from pipes—but from somewhere else entirely.
Cassian stumbled back as the tear stretched—oval now, a doorway ringed in faint golden glyphs.
The device on the table hummed.
It was a gateway. A portable gate.
Bound not to a place.
But to any place he knew the aether print.
The key was a coordinate anchor.
And he, now, held the master dial.
Cassian looked at the storm of equations in his mind, forming faster than he could speak.
The nobles had built cities in the sky.
He had just built the first door to anywhere.
A dimension-folding rift tethered to his bloodline, stabilized by his mother's seal, powered by the same tech they tried to erase.
He smiled wide, wild, and alone.
"Next," he murmured, "I build a way to aim it."
Because soon he wouldn't need ships. Cassian Vale could appear. Anywhere. Unseen. Untouchable.