Chapter 59
To Forget… Part 4
[Inter-Gate, "South Dock"]
The water crashed against the rocks with a constant, rhythmic thud, like the slow breathing of the sea. Eilor sat on the wide ledge, legs dangling over the void, swinging them side to side every so often to ward off the numbness. He wore simple clothes, no insignias or adornments, just a shirt rolled to the elbows and trousers worn thin by salt.
He held a fishing rod in both hands. The line stretched out ahead, taut from the wind more than any fish.
To his right, seated on the same ledge though leaning back slightly, was Laios. His uncle. Dressed just as plainly. He'd dug his heels into the stone to keep from slipping and held his rod at a relaxed, almost lazy angle.
Passersby came and went along the stone path behind them: sailors hauling crates on handcarts, merchants in long coats, children shoving each other as they ran toward the wharf. No one paid them any mind. They didn't seem to need it.
This stretch of the South Dock had no railings or tourist signage; just an ancient, worn lip, built before modern reinforcements. The place the old fishermen still preferred to sit.
Laios let out a long sigh, not tired, but satisfied.
He nudged Eilor gently with his elbow.
"You keep moving your legs like that, the fish'll think you're shaking from fear and take pity on you," he said, not looking at him, gaze fixed on the horizon.
Eilor pressed his lips into a smile he tried to hide. He gripped the rod more firmly and stilled his legs… for five seconds.
Then he started swinging them again, slower.
Laios laughed, a short, rough sound that seemed to mix with the salt wind.
Eilor looked at him, head tilted.
The sea continued breathing at their feet.
The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable, but it was… suspended. As if the gazes of Eilor and Laios had gotten stuck on the sea, each lost in their own point on the horizon.
Then, almost in unison, both rods bent.
First a sharp tug; then a stronger one. The tips vibrated. The taut line made a sharp tac—the sound of something alive pulling from below.
Eilor reacted first, lifting his rod with both hands. The muscles in his arms trembled from the sudden strain. Laios, beside him, smiled.
"Don't let go!" he said, planting his feet in the stone.
Both wrestled with the invisible weight of the sea.
But the pull Eilor faced was too much. The rod vibrated once… twice… crack. The line gave way suddenly, snapping with a dry whip-crack that forced him to throw his weight back to avoid tumbling into the water.
Eilor left the rod half-raised, breathing hard, staring at the broken line dangling.
"Tsk…" he murmured, frustrated.
Beside him, Laios didn't let go. He threaded the force from his shoulder to his forearm and pulled with a controlled grunt. The hook broke the water's surface with a small splash, and a medium-sized fish shot upward.
But the momentum was too much.
The fish didn't land in his hands; it flew over their heads, spinning in the air like a piece of wet silver.
Neither Eilor nor Laios got up to catch it. They just tracked the animal's flight with their eyes, still, as if the scene struck them as more funny than urgent.
The scales glittered for a second under the sun.
And then, as it began to descend…
A wrinkled hand, skin rough, fingers thin but firm, appeared from behind and closed its grasp around the slippery body just before it hit the ground.
The fish thrashed in the unfamiliar grip.
Eilor and Laios blinked in unison. They hadn't heard anyone approach.
The hand lowered the fish, and only then did they hear the soft tap of a foot settling on the stone behind them.
The man came fully into view as he leaned forward. He was older, yes, but his body had a firmness, a hidden physicality that seemed better than both of theirs. The fish still fluttered weakly in his grasp, and despite the wetness, his fingers didn't slip.
He had graying hair, long enough to brush his shoulders, stirred by the saline breeze. A strand fell across his forehead as he lowered the fish to examine it, as if assessing size, weight, and freshness with a single glance.
Then he lifted his gaze.
His eyes, clear but weary, met Eilor's and Laios's. There was no judgment in them, only recognition… and a faint hint of irony.
"Quite the therapy session," he remarked, raising an eyebrow as the fish tried to slip between his fingers.
Laios let out a short laugh, almost nasal, as if he'd forgotten how to laugh normally and could only mimic the gesture.
"Well…" He settled the rod between his legs, leaning forward. "They told us this might give us some peace. That maybe it'd help us recover."
Eilor, to his right, added nothing. He just nodded silently, once, his head slightly lowered. The movement was small, automatic, as if he didn't yet dare give voice to what he felt. Even with the broken line hanging from his rod, he hadn't bothered to let it go.
The breeze continued to brush against the three of them; the fish thrashed its tail once more, slapping the gray-haired man's wrist. He sighed and lowered it a little, holding it with both hands.
The man looked at the fish again. It wasn't moving anymore: it hung limp in his hand, mouth agape, its glassy eye staring at nothing. The old man frowned with a look of disapproval so natural it seemed he'd worn it his whole life.
"Seriously?" he scoffed, lifting the fish by the tail for a better look. "They recommended fishing after… that? You can't even eat this."
Without waiting for an immediate answer, he extended his arm toward them, offering the fish as if it were the most logical thing in the world.
The gesture was small. Simple.
The reaction was not.
Laios recoiled slightly, just a couple of centimeters, as if the fish had a repulsive aura. His face lost color, turning pale from the jaw upward.
Eilor stiffened instantly. His eyes opened just a fraction—an involuntary, almost painful reflex. The shadow of a memory crossed his expression like a dark flash: a trace of the smell of iron, the slick touch, the soft edge of something dead in his hand.
He shook his head immediately. Once, twice. Quick. Sharp.
Laios mimicked him, but slower, swallowing hard as he averted his gaze from the fish as if focusing on it again might twist his stomach.
"Not…" He tried to say something, but his voice broke halfway and he chose silence.
The gray-haired man looked at them both. He said nothing, but he lowered the fish with a resigned sigh, as if confirming something he already suspected: that the "fishing for relaxation" recommendation had been the worst therapy idea for this pair.
***
[…Devastated Room]
Eilor didn't blink.
He stood there, muscles tense without him knowing it, holding Bairon's gaze with a stillness that didn't belong to him. A rigidity born not from his body, but from a thought that couldn't find a place to land.
For a moment, the devastated room fell silent.
Not the groans of wounded wood, nor the distant snarls from the floor below, could break the pause.
Bairon swallowed.
His throat contracted in a way even he felt was too forceful.
The echo of his own words—your uncle is dead—repeated in his head as if he couldn't quite believe he'd said it aloud.
But Eilor just… was.
Still.
Rooted.
His eyes didn't tremble. Didn't cloud.
He just blinked slowly, very slowly, as if each blink was his brain's clumsy attempt to process the information, give it shape, compare it to what he should feel… without accepting it.
It was the look of someone who'd taken a blow so deep the mind refused to register it to avoid shattering.
His lips barely moved, just a millimeter, a ghost of a word… but nothing came out.
Eli, behind him, stopped moving. Her hands froze mid-air, one on the back of the chair, the other still marked by the pressure of holding his head seconds before. She stared at him, waiting for a reaction… and at the same time fearing the first one that might come. But also with suspicion.
The rest of the group fell silent without meaning to.
The entire room seemed to hold its breath with him.
And there, Bairon understood:
Eilor wasn't not reacting.
An essential part of him was… suspended, as if the news had ripped his feet from the ground and left him hanging between two realities.
That stirred a doubt in him.
"Kaep…" Eli tried, barely a murmur, as if fearing a sound too loud might split him in two. Her hand advanced a few centimeters toward him before stopping, hesitant, trembling in silence.
Eilor lifted his gaze.
Not toward her… but toward a fixed point on the wall, right behind Bairon.
Something immovable, something that couldn't crumble like he could.
His eyes locked onto it as if holding onto that point was the only thing keeping him from sinking.
His throat moved once, swallowing air.
"How…?" he finally asked. Just a single broken, rasped syllable, without force.
Bairon lowered his head for a second. Closed his eyes. Something creaked in his jaw.
It wasn't doubt. It was… weight.
When he spoke again, his voice sounded as if he were lifting something crushing him from the inside.
"It was quick," he began, without embellishment or excuse.
He let out a slow, forced sigh, and continued:
"Our plan…" —the word our scraped like stone on stone— "my plan… was for the three of us to draw its attention. To lure it away from this room and lead it down the hall without losing sight of it. Nothing more. We'd keep it behind us, following. Pressuring it, but not letting it catch up."
Bairon opened his hands slightly, as if mentally replaying the scene.
"The idea was simple: lead it outside.
There…" —he took a deep breath— "we'd use last night's storm.
Laios would use his fire to create thick smoke screens from the steam. I'd move inside those shadows, attacking from within. And Hanz would slow the monster with telekinesis hidden in the vapor."
As he spoke, each sentence seemed to tense a different muscle in his neck.
He wasn't recounting a strategy. He was reliving a sequence that hadn't left his head. One that never came to be.
"It was going to work," he added, barely audible.
It wasn't a defense.
It was a fact that had gotten lodged in him like a bone fragment.
But he didn't continue.
Not yet.
Because the part that came next… was the part that forced him to look at Eilor again. And Bairon, for a second, avoided it.
Just a second.
Then he lifted his gaze.
And met those eyes fixed on a point that wasn't him, in a reality where Laios was still alive.
"So…" Eilor cut in, firm, without raising his voice. "What went wrong?"
The question landed like a direct blow.
No tremor, no plea, no rage.
It was pure demand.
The silence that followed wasn't awkward.
No averted glances, no external tension.
It was a functional silence.
Bairon lifted his head.
He took a deep breath, until his chest tightened under the torn remnants of his uniform.
He took a step closer.
"I'm sorry," he repeated.
That second was enough for something inside Eilor to shift slightly.
With a micro-expression at the corners of his mouth, a tiny pull backward, almost invisible—the look of someone holding many pieces about to fall.
"I don't understand," he murmured, lowering his gaze to his own hands as if they weren't his. "He shouldn't have died… What changed?"
He scratched his neck. An automatic, restless movement, as if he needed to verify he was still there, that his body still responded.
Then, without much thought, he sank back into the chair, as if his legs had decided not to support him anymore.
Bairon opened his mouth, perhaps to offer something resembling an explanation, or maybe just a clumsy attempt at words that would be useless.
But Eilor was no longer looking at him.
His gaze was lowered, fixed on a point on the floor, lost in a line of cracks running through the wood.
"He shouldn't have died," he repeated in a smaller, more sunken whisper.
It was a conclusion he kept returning to because no other made sense.
His breathing became shorter, not ragged, just… fragmented.
"But…" His fingers tightened slightly on the edge of the chair. "In the first place… how did he end up going with Bairon to distract the monster?"
The question came from a different place.
Born from pain.
A review.
A desperate attempt to reconstruct the sequence, as if understanding the origin could change the outcome.
And in that instant, the atmosphere in the room changed.
Everyone present felt that question was about to open something bigger.
Those who already suspected something—though they'd have preferred not to—moved their eyes first to Bairon, then to Eli.
A silent, automatic reflex, as if both were key pieces of a puzzle.
The soldier in the blue coat reacted first.
He leaned slightly toward Bairon, glancing around to confirm no one was close enough to hear.
Then, without a sound, he approached and whispered something in his ear.
His expression as he spoke held no urgency.
It held caution.
Bairon didn't respond.
He just clenched his jaw and lowered his chin a fraction.
Across the room, the fire mage exchanged a quick glance with the soldier who used air bullets.
Without a word, both moved.
They slid toward Eli, not obviously, but with calculated steps, as if they were "casually" changing position.
Eli retreated.
Her breathing changed as the two approached.
A shorter exhale, her gaze fixed on Eilor with more suspicion than before.
The last pair—the ones still looking up at the hole in the ceiling, waiting for Teo to come down—took a second longer to process what was happening behind them.
When they did, they didn't move.
They didn't speak.
But their shoulders tensed, and the glance they shot over their shoulder toward the main group held a strange mix of confusion and alertness.
They still didn't understand the full picture.
But they understood something was wrong.
Very wrong.
The expressions across all groups began to shift.
As if a silent signal had passed through the room:
state of alert.
Seriousness.
Precaution.
Contained fear.
And something more…
something Eilor wasn't looking at, but that everyone saw clearly.
Because his words had done more than ask a question.
They had given shape to suspicions several had hidden, kept.
Suspicions they'd never voiced.
Suspicions they didn't know if they wanted confirmed.
Suspicions they didn't know if they should expose while in such dire straits.
But now, thanks to that simple question, they had more basis to doubt.
A new weight settled over the room.
Several gazes fixed on Kaep.