Not to Learn, but to Remember (Sanctuary)

[Luminar]

When Anton stepped away, Theron did not move much. He stood as though carved from the white stone of the Sanctum itself. The light through the stained glass struck him in long waves of gold and violet, like the world had chosen this moment to mark him. Again.

By while he was composed and still, within, something pleasantly shifted.

The sensations had not been images as he’d half expected. There were no sweeping vistas of past ages, and no broken voice whispering ancient names in his mind. No. It had been feeling. It was like drawing his fingers across the map of his emotional soul drawn out like calligraphy on fire.

Pain. Power. Pride. Fury, yes; strangely, there was fury enough to set the world alight, and hold it there until it begged for forgiveness. But beneath all of it blazed conviction.

He had always known there was a structure within him. Something monumental. Not just belief in something larger, but the quiet, maddening certainty that he was part of what was large. That he was the scaffolding others stood upon. He had never spoken it aloud, never dared give it language, but the feeling had always been there, coiled beneath the surface like a serpent waiting for its name.

Important. That was the word. He did not know who he had been before, but he knew he mattered.

Theron slowly closed his eyes and drew in a steadying breath. The sensation of being seen so clearly and deeply cracked something within him. A momentary fissure in the wall he kept between the man and the mask. But only momentary.

When emotion flared, control was quick to follow, and when his eyes opened again, they were calm. The storm had passed, and all that remained were still waters.

“You are... not mistaken,” he said. “What you touched is not of this moment alone. There are feelings within me I have never earned. Anger with no source. Pride with no cause. And certainty... with no proof. These emotions do not belong solely to the life I remember.”

He lifted his gaze to the far side of the library, to the high windows that wept colored light across the floor. Beyond them, the sun still shone, indifferent to the weight of revelation. The world did not shift. The marble did not crack. But he had changed.

What startled him most was how easily he accepted the notion of reincarnation.

He, Theron, raised in the logic-fortresses that was Di Inferi, whose traditions once excoriated superstition and sang only of science was now contemplating the existence of the soul like a man turning over a stone and finding grubs beneath.

Still... certainty was a seductress. One could be fooled by their own need for meaning, and Theron would not let himself become a slave to untested truths. It could be a hallucination or a projection of unmet desire like some subconscious narrative masquerading as memory.

He turned his head slightly, gaze falling with calculated precision on the man surrounded by books and centuries. Lucien.

Theron didn’t smile exactly, but there was a tilt to his chin. The kind of expression that often preceded one of his more dangerous ideas.

“Fascinating,” he said, letting the syllables bloom like smoke. “A phenomenon worthy of record. But even the most extraordinary of impressions must be verified.”

He took a half-step to the side, casual but intentional, placing himself so Lucien was clearly within Anton’s line of sight.

Theron’s hand drifted outward not fully toward Anton or Lucien, but in a loose gesture that beckoned... invitation. Suggestion.

“Lucien, you’ve always had a fondness for scholarship. It would be… academically dishonest, wouldn’t it, to let this moment pass without corroboration?”

He did not command. He never did. But his voice had that velvet gravity that made refusal feel like a deviation from the natural order.