"GET THAT CASE TO THE EAST CORRIDOR! NOW!"
Henrik barked another order as his voice started slowly giving up on him. It had already been twenty minutes since it had gone hoarse, but Henrik didn't care, if it had already been twenty minutes then it could last ten more.
"Master Vorst, we should leav-"
"We are not leaving." He shoved past the guard and seized the nearest display case himself, dragging it toward the wall. "The Verdant Mask is still intact, the ceremonial set from the third alcove is salvageable, if we can just get to the-"
"Sir—"
"Move."
The guard moved.
There were still artifacts on their pedestals. Still in their cases. Six months of work, still there. which It wasn't over, which meant if he just kept moving, kept directing, kept-
A support beam cracked overhead. A chandelier that had survived the initial chaos chose this moment to surrender, taking a section of the mezzanine railing with it.
Three guards grabbed Henrik simultaneously, pulling him toward the service corridor as he thrashed against their hold.
"The Astrolabe case. Someone get to the Astrolabe case, it's reinforced, it should have-"
"MASTER VORST, PLEASE-" his guards were practically pleading with him now.
But he didn't care.
"I AM NOT LEAVING MY AUCTION!" he snapped, his voice increasingly manic as he broke free of his guards hold to move another artifact.
It had taken six months of work.
SIX MONTHS.
And he would be damned if he let it burn so easily.
"ONE OF YOU GRAB THE JADE STATUES. MAKE SURE THEY GET BACK, THEY ARE WORTH MORE THAN ANY OF YOU!"
"Sir." Thaddeus stepped forward and grabbed his arms with both hands and turned him boldly. "Henrik. Look at me. We have to go. The mechanism-"
"It's-it's just a defense system," Henrik said, his words coming out in an uncertain flurry as he shuffled another artifact across the floor. "It targets the vault breach, not the guests. We're fine as long as we don't-"
The pale light came from nowhere.
It moved in a perfectly straight line across the marble floor, thin as a blade and silent as a held breath, and it passed directly through the guard standing at Henrik's left shoulder.
The man didn't scream. He simply stopped.
One moment he was there.
And the next, he simply wasn't.
And it all came crashing down.
Henrik barely noticed when he dropped to his knees.
The cavern had become unrecognisable.
Fire crawled up silk banners that had taken three weeks to commission.
The gryphon collided with the chimera, its talons raking across the chimera's lion-head.
The 'human merchandise' revolution had reached the main staircase. The clang of broken chains used as weapons accompanied by the screams of people who had decided they had nothing left to lose. Their handlers, apparently, had decided their pay wasn't worth it anymore.
Glass and artifacts and stone exploded outward.
The Ivory Sanctuary was dying around him.
Six months of work.
Gone.
Henrik swallowed hard.
This wasn't just ruin.
This was history.
And his name would be attached to it forever.
Henrik Vorst. The man whose auction became a slaughter.
The man who triggered an ancient defense mechanism, destroying one hundred and forty-seven Pre-Collapse artifacts
The man who accomplished nothing but burning down a national treasure.
….
Then a movement caught his eye.
Someone was walking across the auction floor.
Not running.
Walking.
Like a man taking an evening stroll in his own garden.
Henrik's chest did something strange.
A witness. Someone who had been here at the beginning, who had seen the pavilion before the crowd arrived, who had understood the artistry behind what Henrik had been trying to do.
Someone who might remember it the right way.
Henrik pushed himself to his feet. His legs were unsteady. He didn't care.
"Lord Vel—"
A line of pale light cut across the marble.
Henrik Vorst never finished the sentence.
The mechanism didn't distinguish.
That had always been the Architect's particular philosophy, Verum reflected, stepping neatly over the fading line of light as it completed its sweep. If you were in the room when the alarm sounded, you were guilty of something. Paranoid, perhaps. Accurate, certainly. Verum could attest to that personally, having been guilty of something in this specific cavern on four separate occasions.
Verum knew where the rays of light would sweep. He knew the intervals.
He knew because he had once spent an entire afternoon learning them the hard way and whether he wanted to or not, his body remembered the movements alongside a burst of cold sweat on his back whenever he thought of the moment.
And after that first time the Architect had made sure to be present for the next time he tried.
Verum gave up after his fourth attempt.
And he had given up not because he couldn't break through or because he had gotten sick of the Architect laughing hard enough to choke each time, he had simply retreated because he had other things to do.
He could break in whenever he wanted to.
Definitely.
But watching the other poor souls left in the auction house who had decided they could survive the defense mechanism…let's just say Verum began to understand the Architect's amusement.
A man in a merchant's coat had made directly for the vault doors, apparently reasoning that a triggered defense was also a partially opened defense. He was currently embedded in the eastern wall.
A woman near the artifact displays had abandoned the vault and gone for the loose pieces on the floor instead. The mechanism had clipped her mid-collection.
Verum, meanwhile, was moved through the wreckage the way he did most things, with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had already decided how this would go.
Who would he be if he didn't take advantage of an opportunity that seemed like it was gifted by the heavens themselves?
The first piece caught his eye near the collapsed eastern display corridor: a small obsidian disc, unassuming, the kind of thing a cataloguer might describe as decorative and price accordingly.
Verum channelled a small thread of energy into the bronze ring on his left hand, the shabbiest one, the one that looked like it had been fished out of a drain, sitting entirely out of place among the silver.
'This was the ring number…..two hundred and twenty nine…right?'
The singular thread twisted and turned in the ring as Verum willed it, with impossible precision and a very specific sequence that made the ring gain an imperceivable hum the longer it went on until the disc suddenly vanished with a small sigh from Verum.
It had been ring 229 and he had remembered and adjusted the sequence correctly.
As the disc hovered inside the space of his ring, he paused for a half-second. Materials section, third module, alongside the resonance-adjacent pieces, that was where it belonged. Probably. Or he could put it into the empty first module and decide later. He pushed a second sequence into the ring, shorter than the first, and redirected it to the first module instead.
He could figure it out later, for now there was more ground to cover.
A jade figurine, Pre-Collapse, the seal on its base marking it as belonging to a lineage of artificers that had been extinct for six centuries.
Into the ring.
A set of copper instruments with intertwining symbols that was the result of a century of development.
It was practically begging to be in his ring.
A mutated tulip tree seed that only flowered once a century.
How could he leave it alone when it looked all so sad and lonely?
He stepped over a fallen banner, deep crimson, gold trim, the kind that took three weeks to commission, and kept moving towards where he estimated the Resonance Coil to be.
The Resonance Coil was where he'd last seen it: flung from its pedestal during the initial collapse, resting against the base of the stage in a nest of shattered glass and auction placard. Ornamental Astrolabe. Suspected Navigation Device.
Stopping Verum crouched slowly, and picked it up with both hands and inspected it a moment longer than necessary as an internal smile spread.
'It's been long enough.'
Then he channelled energy into the ring, ran a longer sequence this time, a different module, one he did not use often, one that held only things he did not want to lose, and the Coil disappeared.
With that done, he could return to the task at hand. Stripping the Architect's outer vault of everything worth taking.
Around him, the cavern continued its enthusiastic self-destruction. The gryphon had won its territorial dispute with the chimera and was now lounging across the destroyed seats, casually licking its wounds. The summoning circle in the floor pulsed weakly, the cultists' ambitions reduced to a faint, irregular glow. Somewhere in the eastern corridor, the sounds of the slave revolt were growing more organised, which Verum found quietly impressive given the circumstances.
And so with a final sweep, in which he 'rescued' three more pieces he recognised and one he didn't but took anyway on the basis that anything the Architect had considered worth storing was worth his time to examine.
Then he stepped over the ruins of Henrik Vorst's stage.
The man had built something genuinely impressive here, Verum reflected. The curation had been inaccurate. The presentation had been pompous. The security had been, by any reasonable standard, completely catastrophic, and the decision to open the inner vault had been the single most comprehensively self-destructive call Verum had witnessed in at least forty years.
But the catalogue work had been good.
'Historically productive evening.' Verum thought, 'For at least one of us.'