Not to Learn, but to Remember (Sanctuary)

[Luminar]

Theron lingered in the liminal space between the present and what had just passed, allowing the silence to steep like a rare tea drawn from the veins of the earth. The moment had not ended when they entered this sanctum—it had only transfigured. Some truths refused to be spoken until the air was still enough to hold them.

Anton had crossed the boundary. That was the first step. The next would require witness.

“Lucien,” Theron said at last, his voice no louder than parchment brushing stone, “the Veil has done something I have never seen.”

He drifted forward now, one hand lightly tracing the edge of Lucien’s reading table, not in idle motion, but as if feeling for the pulse of something deeper—the current that moved unseen beneath thought and light.

“When the Gift awakens, it does so with variance. Some are beset by sound, others by light, by dreams that leave the skin wet with starlight or the tongue tasting the ash of the unkonwn. But this—” He turned, now fully facing the librarian, the light from the stained glass haloing him in crimson and sea-blue. “This was no echo. No mirage. Anton became the man.”

His eyes, shadowed by the arches of his brow, were gleaming with the weight of what he had witnessed. The potential. The power.

“He saw the world not as a painter sees his subject, nor even as a scribe living through the words of another. He was within the skin of a man long passed: feeling, choosing, aching. It was not memory in the way we understand memory, nor prophecy. It was lived experience, foreign yet entirely his. He moved through it as a leaf caught in a stream, not steering the course, yet inseparable from its current.”

Theron’s gaze drifted momentarily toward Anton, as if to confirm the truth of it by mere presence. The young man stood quietly, but Theron could still sense the lingering thrum beneath his calm. A resonance, like the last note of a song echoing in cathedral rafters long after the choir has departed.

“I must confess,” he continued, turning back to Lucien, “that I have pondered long the mechanisms of the Veil. I have written of it. Prayed to it. And yet what I saw today defies even the most obscure texts of the Celestial Codex.” A pause. Then, with subtle reverence: “Anton walked through time, not in the manner of dreaming or prophet or psychic, but as one tethered to a thread drawn from the tapestry itself. And I suspect… he was meant to.”

Theron’s expression grew thoughtful, a soft crease forming between his brows like the page of an oft-read book.

“Have you encountered such stories?” he asked, quieter now. “Not tales of oracles or the haunted, but of transference—of one soul, unbidden, moving through the form of another not their own, yet not entirely foreign? Are there myths, Lucien, buried in the deep shelves, of men or women so chosen by the Veil that time itself opened like a bloom before them?”

He stepped closer, folding his hands behind his back with the grace of one trained in a hundred sacred rituals.

“I believe this is no anomaly,” he murmured. “I think it is the beginning of something we do not yet have language for.”

And then, after a breathy sigh:

“Or perhaps…” his voice gentled, almost lost to the library’s hush, “it is the rediscovery of a truth that always existed—forgotten not by time, but by us.”

He said no more then. The weight of the moment did not require embellishment. Theron’s eyes lifted once more to the stained glass above, where the Ascendancy walked between worlds, clothed in threads of light.

Today, one of those threads had stirred. And the world was changing.