Drop One: The Man Who Watched Me Burn

The aether core pulsed in his palm.

It wasn't like holding a machine. It was like holding a heartbeat.

Cassian stared at it in the darkened workshop, where the old lamps flickered and the silence waited like an audience.

He slid the core into the slot at the center of the rift-gate device. The coils drank it instantly runes igniting, glass plates spinning into alignment, the pulse syncing with the room's entire electrical rhythm.

A hiss.

A flare.

Then silence.

Cassian stepped back.

The air in front of the machine folded.

Once.

Twice.

Then peeled open clean. A stable, vertical slit of pale light. This wasn't a burst like before. It didn't scream or collapse. It opened, obedient, precise, humming with restrained menace.

He stepped forward, adjusted the glyph-dial on the side of the console, and spoke softly:

"Merrow. Upper Warrens. Level 4."

The portal shimmered.

A door in reality formed.

He took one last look at the workshop.

Then walked through.

He stepped out into silence.

A soft hum of old aether turbines. The smell of aged parchment and acidic alchemy powders. Candlelight glowed low in half a dozen glass cages suspended from the ceiling. No guards. No alarms.

Just him.

And Dorian Merrow.

The man hadn't aged a day.

Cassian found him at his desk, hunched over a cluster of runed bone fragments, a half-eaten pear turning brown on a silver tray beside him.

He didn't look up.

"Not now," Dorian said. "Unless the city's on fire."

Cassian smiled behind the mask.

"Funny. That's the plan."

Dorian froze.

His head lifted slowly.

Cassian stepped into the light, cloak trailing steam and static. The rift behind him shimmered once and sealed shut with a clean snap of displaced pressure.

Dorian didn't speak for a long moment.

Then:

"…Cassian Vale," he said softly.

Cassian tilted his head.

"Disappointed?"

"No. Just annoyed. I didn't think I'd have to explain myself this early."

Cassian walked forward, each footstep clicking against the old tile. "Explain yourself? You taught me that the act of betrayal is only proof that someone saw value in your trust."

"I also taught you that survival is a form of success."

Cassian stopped in front of the desk. "Then congratulations. You succeeded. I survived."

Dorian looked him over, eyes sharp behind the smudged rims of his spectacles.

"You're different."

Cassian said nothing.

"You've found it, haven't you?" Dorian continued. "The core. The gate. You've made it work."

Cassian pulled a small device from his cloak. The shock blade was sheathed, but visible.

"I made it work," he said, voice cold. "Despite you."

Dorian leaned back. "You were always going to find it. I simply made sure I wasn't between you and the explosion."

"You were in the room when the prototype was switched."

"I didn't switch it."

"But you knew."

Dorian didn't deny it.

Cassian let that hang in the air for a long, quiet moment.

Then he reached into his belt pouch and pulled out something small—a sliver of the original prototype, bent, charred, still humming with old data.

He set it on the desk.

"It would've killed fifty nobles. And me."

"I know."

Cassian's voice dropped. "Then why did you let them do it?"

Dorian reached for the pear. Took a bite. Chewed thoughtfully.

"You needed to become something worse," he said, licking juice from his fingers. "And worse men are made in fire."

Cassian's knuckles whitened.

But he didn't move.

Because Dorian wasn't wrong.

Instead, Cassian stepped back from the desk.

"You'll live," he said.

Dorian raised an eyebrow. "Pardon?"

"I'm not killing you."

"That doesn't sound like the Cassian I used to know."

"It's not." Cassian turned, cloak shifting behind him like a curtain at the end of a performance.

But he didn't leave.

Not yet.

He stepped to the side of the study, eyes dragging across the shelves arcane journals, relic fragments, coiled vials and then to the back wall.

The painting.

Large. Framed in burnished gold. Its oils still vibrant despite the dust: a dreamlike landscape of the Alton Vale during sunset. Impossible light, impossible stillness. Mountains like cathedral spires. The kind of place that never really existed.

Cassian tilted his head.

"Still got it," he murmured.

Dorian's voice came sharp. "Don't."

Cassian's fingers hovered just beside the frame.

"This was hers, wasn't it?" he said. "Not your mother. The other one. The woman with the ring in her voice."

Dorian stood slowly. "Leave it."

Cassian glanced over his shoulder. His voice turned gentle. Too gentle.

"You let them kill me, Dorian. But this? This you kept safe."

His gloved hand slid behind the frame.

A flick of the wrist.

Click.

The glyph-anchored mounts deactivated.

Dorian lunged, too late.

Cassian ripped the painting from the wall.

The canvas flared briefly as protective sigils died, burning a vein of white through the bottom edge like a scar.

"No!" Dorian barked. "You don't understand what that—!"

But Cassian was already walking.

Not toward the rift.

To the fireplace.

He tossed the painting in.

It landed with a hollow thud.

And then the flames rose.

Slow at first.

Then eager.

Then devouring.

Dorian moved to stop it but a flash of steel at his throat stopped him faster.

Cassian's shock blade hovered just beneath his jaw.

Dorian froze.

Cassian leaned in close.

"You don't get to feel loss without consequence."

The fire caught the sky in the frame, eating it.

"You don't get to keep anything beautiful."

He stepped back.

Dorian stood there, paralyzed, as the one piece of his past he'd ever protected crumbled into black curls of ash.

Cassian turned, opened the rift with a flick of his fingers, and walked through the collapsing portal without looking back. Behind him, the flames roared louder and Master Dorian Merrow finally learned what it felt like to burn.