The evening breeze drifted softly through the air as Caelen came to a stop before the Imperial Research & Engineering Directorate. Its grand facade stretched high above him, imposing and silent, like something caught between the world he knew and something far older — something that shouldn't exist yet did.
He turned to Sir Alaric Gravesend, who stood a few paces behind him, straight-backed and ever-watchful, flanked by the elite knights under his command.
"Wait here," Caelen said simply. "All of you."
Sir Alaric didn't protest. He never did. With a firm nod, the Head Commander took his post outside, and his men fell into formation at his flanks, obedient as shadows.
Caelen stepped inside alone.
What met him within those walls was nothing short of staggering.
Biological research. Technological development. Theoretical sciences that humanity was only just beginning to scratch the surface of — disciplines that were barely a breath old compared to the long arc of recorded history, and yet here they were, alive and breathing before him. Strange instruments hummed at their stations. Glass containers held things he couldn't name. The air itself felt different inside — heavier, charged with the quiet electricity of minds at work.
And yet, something about it all made his chest tighten.
He had seen things like this before. Not here — not in this country, not in this life. Back then, behind the walls of Percival's kingdom, in the depths of a place he had no name for other than hell. He had walked past rooms like these without understanding what they were. Without understanding anything, really.
He still didn't. Not fully. But the recognition was there, low and unsettling, like hearing a familiar voice speaking words you couldn't quite make out.
Lady Victoria had already moved ahead, her composed stride carrying her toward the reception desk with the quiet authority that came naturally to someone of her standing — both as a member of the royal family, and as the newly appointed head of the Scientific Research Department, second in authority only to Professor Arkady Mirovich himself.
She inquired after Princess Teslaine. The receptionist responded with visible deference.
Then went to ask her colleagues.
A pause.
Then another.
One by one, the answer returned the same.
No. No. No.
"That's odd." Lady Victoria raised an eyebrow, and there was genuine puzzlement in her expression — the kind that came not from confusion, but from a disruption of expectation. "Teslaine told me just a few days ago she'd be pulling an all-nighter in her personal research room for several days running."
She stood still for a moment, frowning. Not panicked. Not undeterred, either — just genuinely unsettled, which, for Victoria, was saying something.
Then she turned to Caelen, and whatever tension had gathered behind her eyes softened into a confident smile. "You don't have to worry, Caelen. I'll find her. I'm sure of it."
Caelen watched her.
"...I'm fairly certain," he murmured, "that you're the worried one here."
Victoria chose not to dignify that with a response. She rallied the concerned staff members and set off to search the building, leaving Caelen standing in the middle of the floor like a misplaced piece of furniture.
He stood. And waited.
And kept waiting.
And the longer he stood there, the more he began to question why he'd even come in the first place. Reuniting with Teslaine wasn't something he'd had any particular feeling about either way — he didn't dislike the idea, but he hadn't exactly longed for it either. The truth was he'd only agreed to come at all because Lady Victoria had proposed it, and he hadn't had a strong enough reason to refuse.
He exhaled slowly. Shook his head.
I should just leave.
But he didn't.
Because even as the thought crossed his mind, his eyes were already drifting — drawn, almost against his will, into the expanse of the building around him. The instruments. The machines. The half-finished constructions and glowing panels and things he had no language for. Every few steps, something new pulled at his attention, like a hook, patient and curious.
...Fine, he thought. Just a short walk.
He told no one. He simply started moving.
Time passed differently when you weren't paying attention to it.
He wandered deeper into the building than he probably should have — past corridors that grew quieter and darker, past doors marked with symbols he didn't recognise, past rooms that hummed with things he couldn't see. He was sneaking at some point, though he wasn't fully sure when that had started, moving on instinct, keeping to the shadows like old muscle memory.
The awe was a strange thing. He hadn't felt it like this in a long time — that particular child-like wonder at things he didn't understand, things that were simply there, existing beyond his frame of reference. It wasn't entirely comfortable. But it was alive in him, and he let it be.
Then he heard it.
A sound. Low and rhythmic, coming from somewhere ahead — a faint mechanical pulse, steady as a heartbeat. He stopped and listened. The corridor around him was empty. No staff. No knights. No movement at all.
He followed it.
The source was a door, slightly ajar, its iron edge catching the dim light. Beyond it, the sound was clearer — a soft, repeating bip, like something alive but not quite. Caelen pushed the door open slowly.
The room behind it was massive, and absolute chaos.
Scraps. Mechanical parts. Loose wiring in tangled heaps across the floor. Contraptions half-assembled or wholly unrecognisable scattered across every surface, as though someone had emptied the contents of an entire workshop into this space and then decided to live in it. It looked like a junkyard. It looked, too, like someone's mind made physical — wild and overflowing and somehow purposeful.
At the center of it, surrounded by the debris of its own construction, sat a strange orb-like device. Its outer casing had been peeled open, exposing the tangle of wires and mechanical components within. At its core, a small red lantern light blinked steadily on and off — dim, persistent, quietly alive.
Bip. Bip. Bip.
Caelen crouched down and leaned closer, studying it. He had no idea what it was. He wasn't sure it was finished. But something about it fascinated him all the same — the economy of it, the suggestion of purpose buried beneath the mess.
He didn't sense the presence behind him until it was too late.
A warm finger — slender, coated in black oil — pressed itself firmly against his cheek.
"Yo." A voice. Sweet, clear, unbothered. "What brings you here, fellow stranger?"
His heart lurched into his throat.
Caelen's reaction was not measured. It was not dignified. It was a full-bodied, completely involuntary scream — a sound that tore out of him before he could stop it — as every nerve in his body lit up at once in blind, animal terror.
He shot upright, spinning around, muscles primed to run or fight or both simultaneously.
The figure before him raised her hands quickly, eyes wide, alarm written all over her face. "WAIT — don't — there's a cable right behind you, DON'T GO THAT WAY —"
He went that way.
His heel caught the thick cable snaking across the floor, and the world tilted. He lurched backward into a stack of assembled parts, which lurched into another, which toppled into another — a cascading collapse of metal and wire and unidentified machinery that came down on him in a slow, terrible wave.
Silence.
Then: the sound of mechanical debris settling.
Princess Teslaine scrambled across the room and dropped to her knees beside him, hauling pieces off his body with both hands, her voice pitched somewhere between panic and urgency. "ARE YOU OKAY?!"
Caelen did not answer.
He lay there, staring at the ceiling, completely and utterly dazed. And drenched. Head to toe, soaked through in thick black oil that had spilled from the ruptured components. His hair, darkened to an inky black, stuck flat against his forehead. His clothes — the layered, expensive, lavishly tailored royal garments that had smelled, not an hour ago, like a warm field of sunflowers, and that were worth more than most people earned in half a year — were ruined. Saturated. Stained completely black, like someone had simply painted over them.
He stared at the ceiling.
He did not speak.
Teslaine, still hovering over him, reached down and took hold of his arm. "Here, let me —"
"Let go of me."
His voice was flat. Quiet. Cold in the particular way of someone who is more embarrassed than actually angry. He brushed her hand aside and tried to stand on his own.
He slipped on the oil-slicked floor and went straight back down.
The flush that rose up his neck and into his face was immediate and total.
Teslaine pressed her lips together. Firmly. Very firmly. Her shoulders shook.
She lost the battle.
The laughter that came out of her was genuine and unguarded — the kind that bends you in half, that makes your eyes water and your stomach ache. She clutched her side and turned away as though that would help, but there was no hiding it. The sound filled the whole room.
Caelen sat on the floor with his oil-blackened hair dripping, face lowered, saying absolutely nothing.
Eventually, Teslaine caught her breath — mostly. She wiped the corner of her eye and extended a hand toward him, palm up, expression settling back into something warm and unhurried.
"Here," she said. "Try standing up this time."
Her eyes were honest. No mockery left in them, just an open, uncomplicated offer.
He took her hand.
Some minutes later, the two of them sat amid the glorious wreckage of the room, Caelen dragging a towel through his oil-slicked hair while Teslaine perched on a nearby crate, watching him with visible amusement she was no longer bothering to conceal.
"I have to say," she remarked, tilting her head, "you're the spitting image of Uncle Adam right now. With the black hair."
Caelen said nothing.
He looked at her, though. Just for a moment. A long, quiet look — the kind that most people would find difficult to hold.
Teslaine, to her credit, held it. Then laughed a little awkwardly and cleared her throat. "So," she said, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, "what brings you all the way to Russia, Caelen? Do you have some business with me?"
A pause. Then: "No. I'm here because I requested an audience with my King — specifically to meet with the Chosen Master of Excalibur."
"Ohh!" Teslaine's eyes lit up. "You mean Big Bro Xavier!"
Caelen's expression shifted slightly. "...Big bro? Aren't you two the same age?"
"Sure, but he acts like the older one, so I treat him like it. He's way more mature than me." She shrugged, perfectly at peace with this assessment of herself.
"You don't say," Caelen replied.
"Either way," he continued, "the only reason I'm here right now is because Lady Victoria suggested we meet up again. That's all."
"Oh ho?" Teslaine grinned, chin resting in her palm. "So that's why you somehow managed to find your way into my completely private, totally off-the-map hideout room that not even the rest of the staff here knows about. All by yourself. Just wandering around."
Caelen's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
He turned his face to the side.
The flush was back, faint but unmistakable, and Teslaine watched it happen with the deep satisfaction of someone who has just won an argument without saying a single mean word.
"You don't have to be embarrassed," she said, waving a hand. "I'm not going to scold you. Honestly, I'm more impressed than anything — you made it this far without setting off a single security alarm." She paused, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "I should probably ask Grandpa to increase the inner security after this, though."
Caelen let the silence pass before he spoke again. When he did, there was something more genuine in his tone — the flat performance of indifference giving way to something closer to actual curiosity.
"I should be the one who's impressed, if anything," he said. "I know my control over ethereal energy is practically non-existent — below even a first-year student. But still. How did you approach me like that without me sensing your ethereal energy at all? I felt nothing."
Teslaine blinked. Then she looked faintly pleased in the way someone does when they've been asked about something they are genuinely proud of but have never bothered to brag about.
"Oh, that? It's not that impressive, really." She twirled a finger idly. "I just channelled my aura into my feet — concentrated it there to enhance my movement and dampen the vibrations my body naturally transmits when I walk. And then I shifted its density gradually so that the leakage from my aura was too faint to register as a presence. A kind of... redistribution."
She said it the way someone might describe a habit — casually, without ceremony.
Caelen stared at her.
He had been learning about ethereal energy, about aura and its properties, about the Runes of Eldoria and the stages of the ethereal core. He'd trained under Sir Alaric and elite instructors. Not one of them — not one — had ever mentioned anything like what she had just described. The concept existed in a different category entirely from anything he'd been taught.
He closed his mouth.
Teslaine caught his expression and smiled slowly. A small, satisfied smile. "Still pretty impressive, right?"
"...Yeah," he admitted. Quietly. Without quite meeting her eyes.
"Either way," she said, leaning back and letting it go with easy grace, "whatever the reason you came here today — I'm still glad you did, Caelen. Genuinely."
He looked at her then.
"You said I looked like my father," he said, after a moment. "Were you close with him?"
The brightness in her eyes shifted slightly — not diminished, but changed. Something softer moved through it.
"Very," she said. "We used to cause trouble together every time we were in the same place. Every single time, without fail." She laughed — a real, full laugh — before it faded into something quieter. "He was the kind of person you'd mistake for cold if you only saw him from a distance. Calm, composed, not someone who gave much away. But once you actually knew him..." She shook her head slowly. "One of the kindest men I've ever met. Xavier reminded me a lot of him, actually. Both of them have that same quality — that gentleness underneath everything else."
She was quiet for a beat.
"He was charming, too. Funny in that dry way he had. Thoughtful. Cunning when he needed to be. To me, he was like the uncle I'd always wanted. Like a father figure, when we first met. He always took my inventions seriously — even the stupid childish ones I made when I was little. He'd look at them like they mattered." A pause. "He trusted me. The way Auntie Victoria trusted me. He was always in my corner."
Her voice didn't break. But it lost some of its lightness.
"And yet," she said softly, "knowing everything I know now about my father — what he did, what he took from Adam — I've never been able to fully understand why he never treated me differently. He lost his son. His wife fell ill. His entire family was dismantled piece by piece by the man who was, to me, just... Papa." She exhaled slowly. "He had every reason to hate me. Or at least to be cold toward me. But he never was."
She was still for a moment.
"I still think about that."
Caelen listened to all of it without interrupting. The words settled into the space between them — and something in his expression had changed, subtly, in the way that real things always register on faces before the mind has finished processing them.
A quiet had come into his eyes. Not the usual distance. Something warmer.
"I've only met my father once," he said. "And even then, he was already at death's door. I never had the chance to know him the way you did — to know who he actually was, what he sounded like when he laughed, what it felt like to have him in a room."
He was quiet for a moment.
"But from what you've said... I think he must have known exactly who you were. And I think he chose not to hold you responsible for something you had no part in choosing. Because blaming you for your father's sins would have been wrong, and he knew it."
A pause.
"And so would I," he said simply. "My father didn't hate you. I am his son, and I'm proud of that. The least I can do is live up to it."
Teslaine stared at him.
For a long moment, she said nothing at all. Something moved across her face — surprise, and then something rawer underneath it, something that had been waiting, maybe for a long time, for exactly those words.
"You mean it?" she said quietly. "You don't... hate me?"
"Yes," he said. "I mean it."
Her voice went smaller. "Really? Like, really really?"
The barest trace of discomfort crossed his face. "...Yes?"
It was all she needed.
She launched herself at him.
The hug was fierce and entirely without warning — arms wrapping around him, a sound of pure, unguarded joy escaping her that had no name other than relief. Caelen went rigid instantly, every muscle tensing, his hands hovering in the air at his sides like he had forgotten they were attached to him.
He didn't move.
But he didn't pull away, either.
And in that stillness — in that strange, unplanned moment — he felt it. The same thing he'd felt, once before, standing near that boy Xavier. A purity of feeling that didn't perform itself, didn't ask for anything, didn't hide behind anything. Just there. Just real.
"Since we're here," he said carefully, into the top of her head, "I'd suggest you stop turning your father's name over and over in your mind like a problem you can solve. Our situations aren't the same. Our fathers weren't the same."
She loosened her hold slightly, listening.
"But if you genuinely don't want to give up the name Ashford — then don't. Don't give it up because the world decided it should only mean one thing. Build something new from it. Make it mean something else. Something they'll remember for different reasons."
Teslaine went still.
She was quiet for longer than usual. Then, very softly: "Thank you."
"What?" He hadn't caught it.
"Nothing!" She released him at once, stepping back, and the brightness flooded back into her face like a door thrown open. If her eyes were a little too shiny, she'd already moved on before he could comment. "Now then!"
She clapped her hands together.
Caelen blinked. "Now then what?"
"Now then," she declared, "we establish our friendship properly. Long-distant cousins, official, starting today. I'll be the older one between us, by the way — I'm claiming that role."
"You're the same age as me."
"Irrelevant. I'm more experienced. Anyway—" She ploughed ahead without pausing. "For our newly established bond, there must be a gift."
"A gift."
"A good one," she clarified, looking him over critically. "And given your particular physical situation —" she gestured vaguely at his arm, — "I've decided. I'm going to build you a mechanical arm."
He opened his mouth.
"A custom one," she added, before he could object. "I've never made one before, so this will be a first for me — but don't let that worry you. It's going to be extraordinary. The best one that's ever been made. We might even be able to incorporate it as an Ethereal Instrument one day, if the theory holds."
He closed his mouth again. The refusal had been forming, but something stopped it from arriving.
"And besides," she added, almost lightly — but watching him just a little too carefully — "during all of this, I'll tell you about Adam. Properly. Everything I remember — the stories, the small things, what he was like when no one was watching. You should know who your father was. From someone who actually knew him."
The refusal dissolved entirely.
Caelen looked at her for a moment. Then: "...Sure. That seems worthwhile."
"That's the spirit!"
The joy in her voice was so unrestrained, so completely genuine, that something unexpected tugged at the corner of his mouth.
Her slyness, he thought, watching her. It's not unlike Lady Aurora's.
He didn't say it out loud.
But the warmth of it stayed with him, quiet and steady, as the two of them settled into that impossible, oil-soaked, junk-filled room — and something new, something that had no name yet, began quietly to take root.
And so a new bond was forged — strange in its origins, strong in its foundations, and built, as the best ones often are, on a mess of black oil and the willingness to catch someone before they fall.