Mid-Syllable

"You spend your whole life not knowing what you're missing. Then you find it, and the universe decides that's exactly when it should be ripped away. Timing like that takes real commitment."

Sound.

Not the drip. Something else. Something that didn't belong to the cell's vocabulary of silence and water and breathing.

Metal. Footsteps. Voices.

Coming closer.

I couldn't move. Couldn't remember how to move. My body had become a thing I lived inside rather than a thing I controlled. Heavy. Cold. Wrong.

The vial pulsed against my chest.

The footsteps stopped.

The door screamed open.

Light.

Too much. Blinding. The yellow glare of torches or lanterns or whatever they used down here, flooding into the cell like something liquid, something violent, something that hurt.

I threw my arm across my face. Tried to. The arm moved too slowly, arrived too late. The light was already inside my skull, burning patterns onto the backs of my eyes.

Shapes in the doorway. Two. Three. More.

Voices speaking words I didn't understand. The blended tongue—Xylorane. I caught fragments. Sounds that might have been orders. Sounds that might have been names.

Hands.

Hands gripping my arms, my shoulders, hauling me up from the pallet. My legs dragged beneath me, useless, the heels of my feet scraping against stone. The sound was wrong. Everything was wrong. The light and the hands and the—

The vial swung free from my shirt. Caught the torchlight. Glowed.

Someone said something sharp. A question maybe. A command.

I couldn't answer. Couldn't find the words in any language.

They were taking Nelson too.

I heard it more than saw it. The scuffle behind me. The grunt of pain—his or theirs, I couldn't tell. The thud of bodies against stone, of resistance being overcome.

Then a voice. Clearer than the others. Speaking English—old, formal, wrong.

"The Council hath spoken. The Pirate is sentenced. He dies at the changing of the lights."

The words landed somewhere outside me. Took a long time to travel inward. To assemble themselves into meaning.

Sentenced. Dies. Changing lights.

A laugh. Nelson's laugh. Broken and wet and nothing like the cold control I'd heard from him before.

"Of course," he said. "Of course they have."

More sounds. More struggle. Then nothing.

We were moving.

The corridors stretched and compressed.

Too long. Too narrow. The walls pressing in, then falling away, then pressing in again. The dim light made shadows that crawled and jumped and reached for me with fingers made of darkness.

I couldn't keep track. Couldn't hold the turns in my head. Left or right or straight or—it all bled together, all became the same endless tunnel, the same stone, the same hands dragging me toward something I couldn't see.

The vial bounced against my chest with each step they took.

Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.

The only clock I had left.

You are mine, Joel Gibbons.

The voice slid through the cracks in my consciousness. Filled the spaces between thoughts. Wrapped around me like water, like the lagoon, like—

I jerked. Tried to jerk. The hands tightened.

"Arrêtez de—" One of the guards. Annoyed. The rest lost in the fog of language.

I wasn't in the lagoon. I was here. Being dragged. Through corridors that wouldn't end.

But the voice lingered. The sense of something vast watching from somewhere I couldn't name.

Mine.

Stairs.

Up this time. Not down. The guards hauling me between them. My head lolled. Couldn't hold it up.

More stairs. More. The air changing—warmer, thicker, carrying sounds that hadn't existed in the dungeon's silence. Voices. Footsteps. The distant clang of metal on metal.

A door opened somewhere above us. Light poured down the stairwell—not torchlight, something brighter, something that made my eyes water and my head throb.

The guards didn't slow. Kept climbing. Kept dragging.

The corridor was carved stone, smooth under the guards' boots, threaded with channels of light that pulsed along the walls. I'd seen this before. Recognised it dimly through the fog in my skull. The administrative level. The place with the fountain, the murals, the—

People.

Suddenly there were people everywhere. Robes and uniforms and faces turning as we passed, mouths moving, words in Xylorane bouncing off the walls and crashing into each other. Someone stepped back to let us through. Someone else pointed. A child's voice asked a question, high and curious, before being shushed.

I couldn't process it. The dungeon had been silence and stillness and the slow drip of water. This was—

Too much. All of it. The light stabbing into my eyes, the noise hammering against my eardrums, the smell of bodies and smoke and something cooking somewhere, the movement, the colours, the—

I squeezed my eyes shut. The guards kept dragging.

The courtyard.

I knew it before I saw it—felt the space open up around me, the air shifting, the echoes changing. Then my eyes opened and the fountain was there, that carved figure with water cascading from her hands, luminescent, throwing light across the paving stones in rippling patterns.

People filled the space. Dozens of them. Officials in elaborate robes clustering near the archways. Guards in grey, their uniforms threaded with that soft glow. Workers pushing carts. A woman arguing with a man in rapid Xylorane, her hands cutting the air. Children chasing each other around the fountain's base until an adult voice snapped them back.

The noise was a physical thing. It pressed against my skull. Made the thoughts I couldn't hold onto scatter even further.

The guards angled me toward an archway on the far side. Different from the one we'd entered. Larger. Flanked by figures in robes that marked some kind of authority.

A commotion.

To my left. Near one of the smaller archways. The sound cutting through the general noise—sharper, more urgent. Scuffling. A voice raised in anger.

I turned my head. The movement cost me something—a flare of pain, a moment of vertigo—but I couldn't stop it. Something in the sound had hooked into me, was dragging my attention sideways whether I wanted it or not.

Another group of guards. Four of them. Five. Bodies in grey clustered around someone, struggling to hold him, their formations breaking and reforming as he fought.

A man.

He threw an elbow. Connected with something. One of the guards stumbled back. The others closed in tighter, grabbing arms, shoulders, hauling him off balance—

But not before I saw his face.

Jamie.

The recognition hit before the thought could form. Something deeper than thought. Something in my bones, my blood, the part of me that had spent nineteen years not knowing what was missing and now couldn't look away from it.

His face was bruised. A cut above his left eye had bled down his cheek and dried there. His clothes were torn, filthy. And his eyes—

They found me.

"JOEL!"

My name. His voice. Tearing across the space between us, cutting through the noise and the chaos and the fog in my skull.

He lunged toward me. The guards caught him—hands grabbing his arms, his shoulders, wrenching him back. But he kept fighting. Kept straining against them. His mouth still open, still shouting—

"Joel—"

I tried to answer. Tried to make my throat work, my mouth form words. Nothing came. Just a sound. Something broken and wet that didn't carry, didn't reach him, died in the space between us.

The guards holding me had stopped. Were looking toward the commotion, exchanging words I couldn't understand. One of them barked an order. The other responded.

And then we were moving again.

Different direction.

Away from the archway. Away from the fountain. Toward a smaller passage on the right, one I hadn't noticed before, one that led—

I didn't know where it led.

"No—"

The word scraped out of me. Raw. Barely a word at all.

I fought.

For the first time since the Éclaireurs had pulled me off the grey mule, I fought. Threw my weight sideways. Clawed at the hands gripping my arms. Twisted, thrashed, tried to wrench myself free—

Useless.

My legs hung beneath me, dead meat, dragging against the stones. My arms had no strength left. I was nothing. A broken thing making broken sounds, being hauled toward a doorway I couldn't stop.

"JOEL!"

His voice again. Further away now. Desperate.

I craned my neck. Caught a glimpse through the chaos—Jamie still fighting, three guards struggling to hold him, his face contorted with something I couldn't name—

A body moved between us. Blocked my view.

Then another.

The archway rose around me. Stone walls closing in.

"JO—"

His voice.

Cut off.

Mid-syllable.

The corridor swallowed me.

Silence crashed back in.

I couldn't see the courtyard anymore. Couldn't see the fountain, the crowds, the commotion by the archway. Couldn't see—

My neck strained. Eyes searching the darkness behind me for something that wasn't there anymore.

Gone.

He was gone.

Or had never been there at all.

The guards dragged me onward.

Stone walls. Dim light. The sound of their boots and my feet scraping and my own breathing, ragged and wet and heavy.

I stopped fighting.

There was nothing left to fight with.