Chapter 223: To Ask Questions
The underground workshop around her dissolved.
For one suspended instant, it was replaced by another chamber—larger, brighter, lit by flickering torches that sent trembling shadows across the stone walls. Metal rang against metal. The air smelled of oil, heated iron, and smoke.
Her father stood bent over a great machine, his sleeves rolled above his elbows as he adjusted something deep within its heart.
Without looking up, he let out a soft laugh. "Hand me the wrench, Aveline."
She froze.
He knew she was there.
Slowly, he straightened and turned toward her. The same gentle smile. The same warm eyes.
"My little Aveline," he said with a chuckle. "Come to inspect Father’s work?"
Her lips parted. She wanted to answer yes. But that was not why she had been there. Somewhere beneath the rush of the memory, another thought flickered through her mind.
Theron.
She had wanted to ask about Theron. She had wanted to know where he had gone.
The vision shattered.
Aveline stumbled backward, clutching her head as her heartbeat thundered in her ears.
"...Father..."
Her voice trembled.
"What... are these memories?"
Then another thought struck her so sharply that it made her breath catch. She had gone there, after Theron left. That meant...
She gone there looking for her father just before they died. What had really happened that night?
She sank to the floor and pressed her palm against the cold stone beneath her.
A memory snapped into place.
Steel flashing... Her mother falling... That pool of blood.
Her throat tightened.
But beneath her hand, something shifted. The floor moved.
"Wait for me here, Aveline!" her father had shouted, panic roughening his voice. "Do not leave!"
Above her, the sound of metal clashing rang out again and again.
Her heart pounded harder.
Was this the memory from the night her father died?
If so... Was she standing in her father’s secret laboratory?
But she remembered ending up beside her mother.
How?
Did I run away?
Did I cause their death?
Or... Was it because of this machine?
Aveline jerked out of the memory and looked around the underground chamber with wide, frightened eyes. No matter how many times she looked at it, she knew this was not the machine her father had built.
It resembled it. The gears... the framework... the principles behind it...
But it was different.
Lucien had built his own version.
"So... where did Father’s machine go?"
Her thoughts drifted back to Willowgrave Manor.
During those miserable years, when she had been treated worse than a servant, she had wandered every forgotten corner of the estate simply because there was nowhere else to go. She remembered discovering an abandoned stone basement beneath the manor, cluttered with broken furniture and rusted scraps no one considered worth keeping.
There had been no machine.
Had it been moved?
Or...Was there another chamber still hidden beneath the house?
The questions crowded her mind until she rose absentmindedly to pace. As she did, one of the golden stones slipped from her pocket.
*Clink*
It bounced once across the stone floor.
Aveline bent to retrieve it, turning it over between her fingers as she continued circling the strange contraption.
She barely noticed what she was doing. Her thoughts remained with her father. With Theron. With the night everything had been taken from her.
The bumpy stone rolled across her fingertips.
"...Ah."
It slipped.
*Clink*
The glowing crystal struck the metal frame before dropping neatly into the empty housing at the machine’s center.
The very space Lucien had called the space for the...
"...energy source."
For a heartbeat... nothing happened. Aveline let out a small sigh of relief and stepped forward to retrieve it.
Then a deep metallic groan echoed through the underground chamber.
*Thunk*
A deafening sound echoed through the chamber as the machine lurched to life.
One gear turned.
Then another.
Golden light coursed through the channels carved into the metal, spreading like veins beneath its surface. Shafts began to rotate, pistons rose and fell, and the entire contraption let out a deep, rhythmic hum that seemed to vibrate through the stone walls themselves.
Aveline’s eyes widened.
The machine had awakened.
Footsteps thundered down the staircase. "Leveret! Is that you?"
Lucien nearly stumbled the last few steps.
His wild eyes darted from the glowing machine to the empty housing where the golden stone now rested.
For a heartbeat, he simply stared.
Then he burst into laughter.
He stood motionless, his amber eyes shimmering with unshed tears as he watched the machine come alive. The rhythmic turning of its gears echoed through the chamber, and for a long moment, he could only stare.
"It works..." he whispered, his voice trembling with wonder. "After all these years... it works."
It was not the triumphant cry of a genius celebrating his invention.
It was the quiet relief of an old man who had finally managed to finish a promise he had carried for decades.
He turned to Aveline, his face brighter than she had ever seen it. "How did you do it? What did you change?"
Aveline looked from him to the stone. Her heart was still racing.
"I... didn’t." She swallowed. "It slipped from my hand."
Lucien frowned in confusion before looking into the glowing chamber. "The stone..."
Only then did Aveline truly understand what had happened. She had always known this particular stone was different. It shone brighter than all the others buried beneath the laboratory.
Hamilton had changed after swallowing a fragment of it.
Now...
It had awakened a machine that Lucien had spent decades trying to complete.
Without thinking, she pressed a hand against her pocket, feeling the remaining golden stones hidden inside.
What are these things...?
They nourished those strange creatures. They powered impossible machines.
What kind of energy did they contain?
And if they were this valuable... Why had they been abandoned for so many years?
Lucien was still examining the machine with childlike wonder when Aveline spoke.
"...Old man."
He turned.
Her blue eyes searched his face. "Am I related to the woman you called Leveret?"
His smile disappeared.
"I..."
"Do I have the Caelvaris family blood in me? Am I your granddaughter?"
Silence filled the underground chamber.
Lucien’s amber eyes softened, and she saw something she had never imagined seeing in the old eccentric genius.
Guilt.
"What happened to Leveret?" Aveline asked quietly. "And how am I connected to all of this?"
She took a hesitant step toward him.
"I know you know."
Her voice trembled ever so slightly.
"I don’t want half-truths anymore. I want the truth."
There was no accusation in her voice.
Only a young woman who had spent her entire life piecing together fragments of a past that everyone else seemed determined to hide from her.
If Lucien answered... She would ask him about her father... about the machine... about the night her parents died.
About everything.
Because she could no longer bear living among mysteries that belonged to her own life.