It was early morning, a long fourteendays since Curator Isadora's death, and up in the far more cramped break room tucked into the eaves of the museum, Preece sat staring at his Sending Stone.

He turned it over in his hand, its dull surface catching the faint, tired light that seeped through the frosted window. It was their custom—his and his wife’s—to talk around this time every evening. But tonight, as he sat there with the weight of the last few weeks pressing down on him, he already knew where the conversation would lead.

And he wasn’t sure he was up for it right now.

Preece turned the small white stone over again in his hand, his fingers tracing its smooth edges. His eyes scanned the room, hunting for some distraction, any excuse to put off yet another inevitable quarrel. But what he saw offered little in the way of refuge.

Other than Harker, brooding silently against the window like some discontented gargoyle, the room was filled with faces he barely recognised, let alone felt inclined to strike up a chat with. And judging by their averted eyes and muttered exchanges, they had no interest in discussing anything as innocuous as the weather.

With no excuses left to cling to, Preece let out a low, resigned sigh and pushed mana into the Sending Stone. A faint hum crackled to life in his palm, and, as always, Braife answered almost immediately.

"Any news?" she asked.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, willing himself to sound steady. "No," he replied, doing his best to bury the weariness under his words. "Nothing new since we last spoke."

"But the Security Services are still there? In the museum?"

"There are a couple of junior officers floating about," Preece said. "But none of them seem particularly keen on talking to us, to tell the truth. They're just going through the motions now, like it's all a formality."

"So they'll confirm it was an accident then?"

"In the absence of any other evidence, what else can they do?"

Because that was the key, wasn’t it? No matter how much noise the Auditor had made about Isadora being dead before the sarcophagus lid had crushed her, there was nothing concrete to back it up. It was all just words, whispers in a building already filled with shadows and secrets.

His thoughts flickered back to the day Inspector Wyst had arrived, all bluster and bravado. The man had filled the museum's reception like a hurricane in a tea shop, booming orders and puffing out his chest as if sheer volume alone could untangle the mystery.

But for all his noise, Wyst had brought no answers—just the same hollow reassurances that this was nothing more than a tragic accident.

Nothing to see here.

Move along.

He had not taken the situation as presented to him all that well. "What the hell do you mean you all wiped your memories!"

Preece had flinched, but he wasn’t alone. The entire staff rippled under the force of Inspector Wyst’s roar. If Arkola themself had been perched at the top of the Celestial Temple, they'd likely have heard it.

Preece assumed the vitriol was aimed squarely at Director Nuroon, but at that volume, it hardly mattered. Everyone in the vicinity was getting scorched.

"I would ask you to lower your voice, Inspector," Nuroon had replied. Then, with one hand resting lightly behind Wyst’s back, he’d tried to steer the man toward the sanctuary of his office, a smile carved onto his face like it was chiseled from marble.

But Wyst wasn’t having it.

He shrugged off Nuroon’s guiding hand with the same ease he might flick a bug from his coat and spun to face the assembled staff. His glare was volcanic, hot enough to make even the walls sweat.

"Are you all trying to get locked up for obstruction of justice?" he’d yelled. "What on earth possessed you? You don't witness a girl's death and then immediately wipe everything you did for the last twenty-four hours! Who the hell do you think you people are? You’re not gods. You’re not above the law. I'll have the lot of you up on charges for this!"

There it was, out in the open now. Preece glanced toward Harker, who looked like he might actually faint. Even Culloden’s practiced calm seemed to falter, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the edge of a nearby table.

But Nuroon? He didn’t so much as blink. His hands clasped lightly in front of him, his expression so composed it was almost obscene.

"Inspector," Nuroon said evenly, "I assure you, there was no malice in the decision to utilise Cleansing the Canvas. It was a matter of professional necessity, given the volatile nature of the artefacts we were handling. Surely you can appreciate that safeguarding the museum’s—"

"Safeguarding the museum’s what?" Wyst thundered, cutting him off mid-sentence. "Its reputation? Its funding? Because you sure as hell weren’t safeguarding her, were you? That girl is dead, Nuroon, and your lot just erased any chance we had of figuring out what really happened!"

Preece had tried to melt into the background, but the room had no shadows deep enough to hide in from the Inspector’s wrath. His gaze had swept over them, a storm cloud looking for a lightning rod. And when it had landed on him, Preece felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

There was an entertaining few minutes of bluster before, eventually, the combined efforts of Nuroon, Culloden, and Kregg calmed the Inspector sufficiently for him to be led away to somewhere a little political pressure could be applied.

Preece had no idea what was said to him or - perhaps more pertinently - who spoke to him, but when the Inspector finally emerged from Nuroon's office a bell later, he showed much less bombastic frustration about the whole event.

And that, as far as Preece could tell, set the tone for the entire investigation. Auditor Karolen might as well have been shouting into a void with her tale of "a sarcophagus that eats people." No one seemed remotely inclined to take her seriously, let alone acknowledge her accusations of what she clearly suspected was a clumsy, heavy-handed cover-up.

Inspector Wyst, once the roaring bull stomping through the museum’s china shop, had deflated faster than a poorly cast Inflate spell. His team, predictably, followed his lead, their initial energy fading into the dull, disinterested rhythm of people going through the motions. They made all the right noises—asking questions, jotting notes—but their eyes betrayed them. This was just another tick on a checklist, another task to half-heartedly finish before moving on to less politically sensitive things.

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The Security Services agent who’d spoken to Preece hadn’t even bothered with the pretense of taking the situation seriously. If anything, their disinterest bordered on outright disdain.

Every word out of their mouth dripped with the implication that this entire investigation was a waste of time. The official museum line—dismissively branding Karolen’s claims as "the ravings of a lunatic Auditor with an axe to grind"—seemed to have been accepted wholesale, and no one appeared interested in questioning it.

Preece, for his part, kept his head down. He wasn’t about to volunteer anything that might make him the next target of Nuroon’s icy glare or the Security Services' apathy. Whatever had really happened to Isadora, it was clear to him that no one in power wanted to dig too deeply.

"Look, just give me something, mate. I know you can't remember the last twenty-four hours, but you have to know something about the deceased. Anything. I'll take an anecdote at this stage!"

Preece carefully considered his response. He had always prided himself on being deliberate, and now, with Inspector Wyst’s impatient eyes boring into him, that deliberation felt more crucial than ever.

As far as he could tell, he was the only Curator who hadn’t followed through on the command to perform Cleansing the Canvas when the Senior Preservationist had requested it. He still wasn’t entirely sure why he hadn’t. If anything, the nightmares that had plagued him since Isadora’s gruesome death—terrible, vivid flashes of her final moments—made him long for the oblivion the spell would have brought.

But even in that moment back in the staffroom, he’d hesitated.

Something had snagged at the edges of his conscience, sharp enough to keep him from reciting the incantation. The death of his… well, what had Isadora been to him? She wasn’t exactly a friend. An acquaintance? A colleague? Whatever she’d been, Preece had felt—knew, even—that her death shouldn’t be erased, shouldn’t be blurred into the background of the museum’s carefully curated facade. It wasn’t right.

It wasn’t like he was lying about it, either.

No one had asked him directly whether he’d gone through with the memory-wipe. No one had questioned him about what he might have seen or remembered. It said more about the almost cultlike authority Nuroon wielded over his staff that, as far as Preece could tell, he was the only one who had refused the order.

His voice, when he finally spoke, came out even and measured, giving nothing away. “She was… enthusiastic about her work,” he said. “Always ready to dive into something headfirst. You know the type—excited about every little discovery, always trying to find the story behind it. A bit too eager for her own good, maybe.”

He let the words hang in the air, watching as Wyst scribbled them into his notebook..

And then, right there, had been his big chance to tell someone what he had seen.

One-on-one in a locked room with a member of the Security Services, and all it would have taken was for him to give a quiet word to confirm that what Auditor Karolen had reported was accurate and that there was more to the death of Isadora than a simple workplace accident.

But no.

He'd bottled it.

He just couldn't risk it getting out that he'd disobeyed an explicit instruction: he enjoyed this job too much. "I'm sorry, I don't really know much about anything. Isadora, Harker, and I were close, but I don't know anything about her that you won't have heard a hundred times over. I wish I could be more help, but I don't know anything."

His interviewer had rolled his eyes, made a few notes, and then excused himself. Preece hadn't seen him again since.

"I just don't understand why you want to keep working in a place that's so patently dangerous!" his wife snapped, her wheedling tone dragging him out of his spiraling thoughts and back to the present.

"It's a museum, Bray," Preece replied. "Not exactly the front lines of a Forlorn Hope. Let's try to keep a little perspective, shall we?"

"It's a museum where the girl you were fucking died!" she shot back. "So don't you dare act like I’m making a fuss over nothing!"

Preece flinched, a telltale flush creeping up his neck as he tightened his grip on the Sending Stone. There it was, laid bare in her usual tactless fashion—the accusation she’d been dancing around for weeks now, finally out in the open.

"That's not fair, Bray," he said after a long pause. "You know it wasn’t like that."

"Do I?" she countered, her tone icy. "Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you're putting an awful lot of effort into mourning someone you keep insisting was 'just a colleague.'"

A few of the other Curators in the break room darted eyes towards him at that. Preece shrugged and gave the universal sign for 'bitches be crazy', which drew a few snorts of laughter from the now highly attentive audience.

Turning his back on them and trying to cushion the sound from the stone with his thumb, he once again did his best to reassure his wife.

"Look, I've told you again and again that nothing was going on between Isadora and me. I mean, just on a purely practical level, when do you think we would have had the time or energy? I've told you how busy the Director keeps us. I'm either here or at home, and I'm fucking knackered either way."

"I just think none of this would be an issue if you just went and worked for Daddy."

Ah, there it was.

That spectre of unspoken recriminations hovered over every conversation they’d had for months. If only Preece would stop being so damn stubborn and just play the dutiful little soldier, none of this unpleasantness would have happened—or so his wife seemed to believe. She was clinging to that narrative with a tenacity that bordered on the pathological.

So wedded was she to this viewpoint that Preece was fairly certain Braife thought Curator Isadora might still be alive if he’d simply prostituted his soul to her father’s ridiculous Second-Hand Horse empire. In her mind, Isadora’s death wasn’t just a tragedy; it was a divine judgment—a celestial reprimand for his refusal to shuffle papers and haggle over the price of nags.

The idea was absurd, but then, so was much of Braife’s worldview.

The conversation petered out shortly after that, both of them too drained to land any more blows. Preece promised they’d talk at the same time tomorrow. "And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow," he muttered under his breath.

Around him, the break room fell silent as several heads turned his way, their faces puzzled by the sudden theatrical declaration. He ignored them, pocketed the Sending Stone, and leaned back in his chair, letting the weight of the day settle onto his shoulders.

A buzzing sound indicated that break was over, and the Curators began to file out and back down the stairs to the Exhibit Hall. Preece waited for them to go, hoping to catch a few words with Harker's still, silent presence.

So strange was the young man's behaviour in the last sevenday or so that Preece had assumed he must have also refused the request to blank his memory and was suffering with the same sort of nighttime horrors as he was.

However, in the few conversations they had had since, it was clear something else was bothering his friend. He just had not been able to figure out what it was.

For a moment, Preece considered pushing the issue—laying it all out, dragging the ugly truths into the light, and seeing if anything could be salvaged from the mess. But his "chat" with Braife had already soured his mood, leaving his nerves frayed and his patience worn thin. The words he might have said dried up in his throat, leaving him with nothing but a bitter taste and a lingering sense of unease.

Instead, he settled for placing a hand on Harker’s shoulder, a gesture that was meant to be reassuring but felt hollow even as he did it. "Take care," he mumbled, knowing full well the sentiment would ring as empty as it felt.

Harker didn’t respond, his pale, sickly expression frozen in a grimace of silent torment.

Preece hesitated for the briefest of moments, caught between the urge to stay and the pull of the other Curators, who were already moving on. Finally, he turned and left, his footsteps heavy as he followed the others out of the room.

In the days to come, that moment would return to him, unbidden and unrelenting.

Harker’s face—drawn, colourless, and etched with an agony he hadn’t dared voice—would haunt Preece in the quiet hours of the night.

He would replay the scene over and over in his mind, wondering how much of the horror that followed could have been avoided if he’d just stayed, just spoken, just listened. But by then, it would be too late.

Far too late.