Elara’s job was to sweep up ghosts, but not the ectoplasmic, chain-rattling kind. She dealt in the echoes of decisions, the spectral residue of paths not taken. The city of Veridia was riddled with them. A jilted lover might leave behind a phantom scent of their perfume on a street corner, a scent that would, for decades, make passersby feel a pang of unidentifiable loss. A businessman who chose money over his art might find his office haunted by the faint, maddening sound of a phantom cello, forever playing a single, unresolved chord. Elara was a Mender. She tidied reality.
The call came from the old Wharfinger district, a place of salt-rimmed brick and mournful foghorns. The client, a portly man named Mr. Hemlock, complained of an “ontological stain” on his prized rosebush.
Elara found it in his manicured garden. The bush was magnificent, a cascade of blooms the color of a blushing dawn. But as she watched, one perfect rose would decay to a blackened husk and then, in a blink, rewind itself to a tight bud and bloom again, over and over. It was a pocket of looping time, a causality hiccup.
“A bad breakup,” Elara diagnosed, running a gloved finger over a petal that felt like both silk and ash. “Someone was given these, then the giver took them back, but with regret. The intention is snarled.” She conducted her usual vibe check, a process that felt like tasting the air for emotions. Fear. Resignation. And underneath it all, a deep, pervasive feeling of being manipulated.
Her investigation led her to a nearby garret, home to a painter named Leo. He had a hunted look, eyes that darted as if expecting the very walls to shift. He was handsome in a tragic way, a man whose natural charisma had been curdled by anxiety. He chain-smoked and spoke of his patron, a young aristocrat named Cassian.
“He has this… this way about him,” Leo whispered, gesturing with a nicotine-stained finger. “A sort of uncanny rizz. He makes you feel like the most important person in the world. And then he asks for things. Small things, at first.”
Elara knew the type. She’d seen them before, these scions of old families who inherited a sliver of the deep magic. Not true mages, but dilettantes. Cassian was a classic nepo baby of the arcane world, armed with enough power to be dangerous and not enough wisdom to be safe. He walked with an unearned main character energy, the suffocating aura of someone who believed they were the main character in everyone else’s story.
Leo’s story tumbled out. He and a woman, a violinist named Iris, had been falling in love. It had been gentle, tentative. Then Cassian had appeared, wanting to be their patron. He’d showered them with gifts, with opportunities. And slowly, things began to change.
“He’s been gaslighting me,” Leo said, the modern slang term feeling jarringly perfect for the ancient, magical act he was describing. “I’ll remember having a fight with Iris, a bad one. The next day, I’ll bring it up, and she’ll look at me, confused. Cassian will be there, and he’ll laugh and say, ‘No, Leo, you two were wonderful last night. You finished that sonata, remember?’ And… and I do. I suddenly remember it his way. But the old memory is still there, like a splinter under the new one.”
Elara felt a cold knot in her stomach. This was more than a looping rosebush. Cassian wasn’t just influencing people; he was editing their shared pasts, overwriting reality one convenient detail at a time to insert himself between them. He was manufacturing a new era for them, one where he was the indispensable center of their universe. The relationship between the three of them wasn’t a friendship or a romance. It was a situationship, magically coerced and utterly hollow.
She found them that evening in a gilded concert hall, one Cassian had rented “for inspiration.” Iris was playing, her music technically flawless but emotionally vacant. Cassian sat beside her, his expression one of proprietary adoration. Leo stood in the corner, looking like a ghost in his own life.
Elara watched, unseen, from the shadows of a velvet curtain. She saw Cassian lean over and whisper to Iris. A flicker of confusion crossed the violinist’s face, then smoothed over into placid agreement. He had done it again, a micro-edit to their history. And with that small act of violation, a profound, visceral feeling washed over Elara. It was the ick. The deep, absolute repulsion for someone who could treat another’s soul as a rough draft.
She couldn’t confront him. His magic, clumsy as it was, was a direct assault on the timeline. A Mender’s job was to smooth, not to shatter. A direct intervention could unravel all three of them.
Instead, she focused on Leo. She reached out not with power, but with resonance. She found the splinter he’d spoken of—the memory of the fight with Iris. It was real, raw, and full of the messy, painful passion of genuine love. It was a memory of Iris telling Leo he was afraid, that he was hiding behind his canvas. It was a shard of truth.
Elara polished it. She didn’t change it, she didn’t amplify it, she just… cleared the dust from it. She let its authenticity shine, a tiny beacon in the fog of Cassian’s influence.
In the corner, Leo’s hand, which had been trembling, went still. His gaze sharpened. He looked at Iris, then at Cassian’s hand resting proprietarily on her shoulder. The painter’s expression shifted from defeated confusion to a slow, gathering storm. He hadn’t been magically healed or enlightened. He had simply been given a firm place to stand in his own mind. He remembered. Truly remembered.
Elara slipped away, her work done. She hadn’t fixed the rosebush or erased Cassian’s influence. But she had restored one tiny, vital piece of the past. The truth was now a contaminant in their false little world, a stubborn weed in their manicured garden. It was a small thing, a remnant of a causality he’d tried to erase. And she knew, with the certainty of her craft, that a single seed of truth, once remembered, was a thing that would always, eventually, grow.
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