The frozen star of sorrow sat in Albrecht's core.
For days, he did not leave his room at the Pilgrim's Respite. The innkeeper's wife, Marta, grew concerned, leaving trays of food outside his door that went untouched. He did not eat. He did not sleep. He sat in the center of the floor, legs crossed, and conducted the most delicate experiment of his life.
The thread of power taken from the Tear was not like other life. It did not integrate. It resisted. It was a knot of pure, divine sadness with the density of a neutron star, and it burned with a cold that threatened to extinguish the chaotic warmth of all the stolen lives within him.
He could not contain it as it was.
So he began to dissect it.
Using the physicist's mind as a scalpel and his own hunger as a crucible, he began to pull the thread apart. He did not try to understand the sorrow—that was an ocean meant to drown mortals. Instead, he analyzed its *structure*. The way it bent local reality. The specific frequency of its despair.
He discovered layers.
The outermost layer was the *emotion*—the raw, psychic broadcast of a goddess's grief. This was what the faithful felt, what crushed the mind and inspired devotion. He could not absorb this. It was poison to his kind of emptiness. So he did something heretical: he *filtered* it.
He took the screaming, dying memories of the bandit leader—the terror and animal pain—and wove them into a psychic dam. He used one kind of suffering to wall off another. The bandit's fear howled as it was shaped and consumed by the divine sorrow, but it held. It created a buffer zone in his psyche.
Beneath the emotional layer was the *temporal distortion*. The Tear existed in a state of permanent "was." It mourned a loss that was always happening. This, he could use. He carefully siphoned this property, not into his core, but into the stored vitality of the cow. The dumb, placid animal life became a battery charged with slow, mournful time. He felt a section of his inner reservoir grow heavy and viscous.
Deeper still was the *causal anomaly*—the tendency for effect to precede cause near the Tear. This was pure, unstable potential. He guided this into the sharp, greedy consciousness of Orval the merchant. The part that always sought advantage. Let it chew on paradox.
Layer by layer, he disassembled the divine thread and stored its properties in the compartmentalized lives he had collected. It was like distributing a lethal radiation dose among many shielded containers. Dangerous, but manageable.
By the morning of the fourth day, the frozen star was gone. In its place was a new, terrifying architecture within him. His inner world was no longer a simple pool of stolen power. It was a partitioned vault, a psychic prison holding fragments of a god's mourning, each cell guarded by the screaming soul of a sinner or the brute force of a beast.
He opened his eyes. The room was the same. The world was not.
He could now *feel* the flow of time like a sluggish river. He could see the faint, ghostly afterimages of actions not yet taken—Marta's hand reaching for his doorknob an hour from now, a sparrow that would land on his windowsill at noon. The causal distortion was a low hum in his teeth.
He stood. His body felt impossibly heavy, yet precise. He had integrated a fundamental weight into his being.
He ate the cold food left outside his door. Flavor was a distant memory. Everything tasted of dust and ozone.
He had to move. The festival was approaching. He had the keys to bypass the Wardens. He had analyzed the Tear's metaphysical structure. Now he needed the physical means to extract it.
Lord Maxton's advance gold was still mostly untouched. He used it to commission a tool from a disreputable alchemist in the smog choked artisans' district, a man known for catering to unconventional clients.
The workshop smelled of sulfur and vinegar. The alchemist, a gaunt man named Kael with stained fingers, listened without blinking as Albrecht described what he needed.
"A container. Not to hold a liquid, but to hold a... state. A condition of localized reality. It must be inert to divine resonance, non reflective to temporal energies, and capable of being sealed in a way that creates a perfect ontological void inside."
Kael tapped his teeth with a blackened nail. "You speak of binding a concept. Not an object."
"Yes."
"It is possible. With the right materials. A vacuum sphere of alchemical glass, lined with powdered lead from a blasphemer's tomb. The seal... a mixture of mercury, nightshade essence, and the wax from a candle that burned at a suicide's deathbed. It will be expensive."
"Money is not an issue. How long?"
"Three days. And I will need a... sample of the environment you wish to contain. To tune the vessel."
Albrecht had anticipated this. He had prepared a small, silver locket. Inside was not a physical sample, but a psychic impression—a sliver of the temporal distortion he had stored within himself, pressed into a wisp of fog captured at dawn. He handed it over.
Kael took the locket, held it to his ear, and his eyes widened slightly. "Ah. I see. Three days."
With time to wait, Albrecht turned his attention to the final variable: the human element. The Festival of Founding would see the Cathedral packed with thousands. Security would be both tighter and more dispersed. He needed to know the precise movements, the schedules, the moments of distraction.
He began to frequent the taverns and scribe halls near the Cathedral barracks. He did not ask questions. He listened. He bought drinks for off duty guards and junior clerics. He used the merchant Orval's gregariousness and the knight Tristan's familiarity with their culture to blend in. He learned.
He learned that on the day of the festival, the Knights Exemplar would form a living cordon around the Sanctum, but their captain, Ser Valerius, would be leading the procession of the Blessed Veil through the city. A ten minute window where command would be delegated to a less experienced lieutenant.
He learned that the choir of the Sanctum, whose constant singing was part of the ward matrix, would pause for exactly three minutes at the solar zenith to receive a collective blessing. The wards would be at their weakest ebb.
He learned that the High Septon himself would be in the central nave, channeling power to bless the masses, his attention fully external.
He pieced together a mosaic of ritual and routine. A path of shadows through the light.
On the evening before he was to collect the container from Kael, he took a different kind of walk. He went to the wealthy district, where Lord Maxton's city mansion stood. He did not approach. He observed from the shadows of a grand oak across the street.
The mansion was opulent, lit from within by dozens of crystal lamps. He saw figures moving behind leaded glass windows. He focused his newly attuned senses, stretching out the thread of temporal distortion he carried.
He saw flickers. Not of the past, but of *potential futures*. A man with a hawkish face and cold eyes (Maxton) holding the Tear's container, his expression not of reverence, but of triumph. Then another flicker: the same man screaming as the uncontained sorrow of the Tear erupted, washing over him, leaving an empty, weeping shell. Then another: Maxton handing the container to a hooded figure in a room lined with strange, non Euclidean diagrams.
The visions were unstable, contradictory. The Tear's power made causality slippery. But the message was clear: Maxton was not the end user. He was a middleman. And he was playing with forces he did not comprehend.
Albrecht felt no loyalty to the man. A transaction was a transaction. But it was good to know the buyer's probable fate. It simplified things.
The next day, he collected the container from Kael.
It was beautiful in a sinister way. A sphere of flawless, dark violet glass about the size of a grapefruit, resting on a stand of black iron. Inside was absolute vacuum—a perfect nothingness. The seal was a circlet of pale, waxy metal that sat around the sphere's equator. When closed, Kael explained, it would create a null field. Within that sphere, no physical or metaphysical law would apply. It would be a pocket of unreality.
"It will hold your concept," Kael said, his voice hushed. "But be warned. Opening the seal inside a strong field of ordered reality... the equalization will be violent."
Albrecht paid him in gold, took the sphere wrapped in black velvet, and left.
His preparations were complete. He had the knowledge. He had the tools. He had the path.
He returned to his inn room for the final night. He laid out his dark clothes, the resonance sigil from Irian, the null sphere container. He sat once more on the floor.
He turned his attention inward, to the vault of partitioned powers. He began a slow, careful process of consolidation. He did not merge them. He arranged them. He positioned the bandit's terror barrier at the forefront of his mind. He set the cow's time laden vitality in his limbs, ready to move with deliberate, unstoppable slowness. He placed Orval's paradox tainted cunning in his forethought. And he let the cold, sorrowful weight of the Tear's essence settle in his center, a ballast against the coming storm.
He was no longer just a thief. He was a walking anomaly. A curated catastrophe.
He looked out the window at the Cathedral, its spires lit against the night sky by their own inner grace. Tomorrow, it would be the center of a kingdom's joy and devotion.
He would walk into its heart, take the source of its power, and walk out.
And then he would finally learn what happened when a man who was already dead swallowed a piece of a god.
He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to run the plan one final time, moment by moment, in the theater of his perfect, stolen mind.
The festival bells would ring at dawn.