Chapter 39
Symond
Moonlight. A shabby mattress. Nails digging into his flesh like claws. The smell of Gerard’s soap, cheap citrus and clove.
“You’ll learn to stop flinching,” Gerard said, drenched in smug superiority.
The pressure on Symond’s back relented for a heartbeat, and he twisted beneath it, hoping to slip free. Futile. Gerard had a grip like iron, and no amount of bucking or twisting was going to change that. He was a goddamn vice.
Gerard leaned in closer, exhaling hot breath against Symond's ear. "It’s alright. Soon, you’ll enjoy it," he whispered, reveling in the power he held over the young man beneath him. Gerard adjusted his position to press himself more intimately against Symond's body.
Despite himself, Symond couldn't suppress his own arousal, and he hated himself for it.
The physical sensations were too intense, too overwhelming.
He tried to ignore the pleasure coursing through him, but every touch and caress Gerard bestowed upon him served as a reminder that he was trapped, controlled by this man who reveled in every moment of their twisted encounter.
“That’s a good boy,” Gerard purred.
Symond’s breath hitched, his mind screaming against the betrayal of his own body, the way his muscles slackened, the way he sank into the inevitable.
It made his stomach churn, a wave of nausea mixing with the bitter taste of shame.
He wanted to shout, to curse, to claw out from beneath Gerard’s weight and never look back.
Instead, he lay there, his body going limp, his eyes squeezing shut as he tried to will himself somewhere else. Anywhere else.
∞∞∞
Symond woke up with a jolt, choking on the stale air of his bedroom.
He sat up, clutching the worn blanket to his chest, trying to chase away the lingering echoes of the dream.
No. The memory. His heart hammered like it always did after nightmares of Gerard.
He ran a shaky hand through his hair, damp with sweat.
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, he reached for the bottle on the floor.
The alcohol burned his throat, a welcome distraction from the other sensations clinging to his skin, the ones that made bile rise.
He leaned his head back, staring up at the splintered ceiling, and counted the cracks until his pulse slowed.
It was always the same. The bad nights, the memories clawing their way up from the depths he tried to bury them in.
He shoved the bottle aside, there was no point to it.
The Institute. Gerard. Thorn. They’d taken everything.
Drinking didn’t numb it. Fighting only got him in trouble.
Sleep was an invitation for the past to chew him up and spit out a more fractured soul.
He needed to forget.
The memory of the torture room played in his mind like a stuck melody—the way the prisoner had gone quiet the moment the potion touched his tongue. Like something had been lifted from behind his eyes.
Not relief. Not peace.
Absence.
That’s what Symond wanted. Needed.
Symond moved through the halls, shadowing the edge of torchlight, every step calculated and quiet. The faint throb of music from the upper levels—revelry, or training, or both—muffled any sound he might have made.
He shut the door of the alchemy lab behind him and waited for his breath to slow.
The walls were lined with shelves upon shelves of glass vials containing various colored liquids and powders, labeled with small handwritten tags.
In one corner, a large alchemy table was cluttered with various ingredients and tools, while in another corner stood a few large machines, their gears turning slowly.
The pungent scents of various herbs and chemicals blended together in the air, overpowering any other smells in the room.
He moved to the cabinets along the back wall. Inside were dusty vials. Some with residue clinging to their corks like dried blood.
MEMNORé–Short-Term Displacement
TETHER-SAP–Mental Severance (24hr)
RECALL DAMPENER–Anchor Agent
He gritted his teeth. These weren’t enough. This was the stuff they used in interrogations, in damage control. Temporary fixes. Patchwork.
He needed something clean. Permanent.
For a moment he stood there, shelves open around him, and an idea struck. What if I could just erase him? Gerard. That one name. That one face.
Just one cut. One slice across the brain. Not a lobotomy, but a surgical strike.
But he wasn’t an alchemist, didn’t know the first things about potion brewing. He needed help.
He found it in the greenhouse wing, bent over a trough of steaming moss.
Nyla. Symond’s first thought was that she looked like a child.
A kid who’d snuck into the Hive’s workshop to play with the grown-ups’ magic.
Her hair was curly and wild, her face soft and round, like she hadn’t been scarred by anything yet.
She reminded him of Arria, the Al’teran half breed who died during the trials.
She’d had the same young face. The same enthusiasm.
But hopefully not the same unfortunate trait of fucking up.
Symond stood in the archway until she looked up, her hands still elbow-deep in glowing mulch.
“Need something?” she asked.
He stepped into the warmth of the room, the scent of moist soil and citrus sap clinging to his coat. “I’ve got an assignment,” he said, trying not to sound like he was choking on the words.
That caught her attention. She stood, wiping her fingers on a cloth. “From who?”
“Internal request. Violette wants something tested. For field use.”
She narrowed her eyes but didn’t challenge it outright. “What kind of something?”
He forced a shrug. “Memory-related. A potion to make someone forget a person. Permanently. You can do that, right?”
Nyla tilted her head. “I can but I need a biological imprint. DNA.”
Symond’s stomach turned. “Like hair?”
“Hair. Blood. Saliva. Anything that was part of them.” She paused, studying him. “Why? Who are they trying to erase?”
He didn’t answer. That information wouldn’t be for her to know anyway.
Her lips tightened. “Do you have the DNA?” Symond shook his head. “Well, without a tether, the potion won’t know where to target. It’ll just scramble.”
Symond inhaled sharply. No. There was no way.
No chance of getting Gerard’s hair, blood, anything.
He’d never go back there. Not for that. Not for any of them.
But the thought of it lingered, taunting him.
It had been a stupid hope to begin with.
It was never just one person. Never just one face.
Gerard was the sharpest memory, the deepest cut, but not the only one.
He could erase that bastard’s name from his mind, but the rest would still be there.
Would still eat him alive from the inside out.
The Institute. Thorn. Every order. Every punishment. Every time he was told to kneel and not speak and not fight and not feel. He needed to forget it all. But he was a damn fool for thinking it could be so simple. So clean.
“What about forgetting a period of time? Years? Is that possible?”
Nyla stiffened. “You’re talking about chronological erasure. That’s dangerous.”
“I can handle it.”
“No,” she snapped. “You don’t get it. You’d forget everything you learned during that time,” She paused to study him.
He could tell she was starting to see past his assignment facade.
She knew this was personal for him. “I don’t know what you’re trying to forget but a chronological erasure would cause you to lose everything.
Training, education, maybe even motor skills depending on how far back you want to go. ”
He faltered. The room felt suddenly too warm. His fingers curled at his sides.
“I’d lose… everything?”
She softened slightly. “It’s all coded to time. You forget those years, you forget what came from them.”
Symond looked away. Damn it. The gears in his mind ground to a halt.
He had survived the Institute. Was shaped by it. Every lesson, every talent, every instinct that led him to joining the Hive came from those halls. If he lost that—what would be left?
But Nyla didn’t let the silence last. “There might be another way,” she said, quieter this time. “I can make you something smaller. Focused. One memory per vial. You think about it, name it, bleed into it, and it gets locked away for good. Fragmented erasure. Not everything. Just the worst.”
That might work.
“How many do you think you’d need?” she asked.
Symond looked her dead in the eye.
“Fifty.”
Nyla’s jaw worked, but she said nothing. Just nodded slowly. “It’ll take time.”
“I’ll take them in batches. Just get me some fast.”
∞∞∞
The first vial sat in the center of the table. Milky white. Innocent. Promising peace. Surrender.
Symond sat across from it, fingers curled tight around the edge of his chair.
Dozens more waited in a crate at his feet.
Nyla had explained how it worked. The potion was a blank slate until it was personalized.
You recalled the memory. Poured it into the liquid through your blood.
Only then would it know what to erase. Symond told her that sounded ridiculous but she stated that blood carried microscopic fragments of the mind. It would work.
He stared at the bottle until the glow of the MahōKi-infused base seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat.
Start small, he told himself. But nothing about this was small.
He reached for the vial. Uncorked it with shaking fingers. It smelled like nothing, just emptiness.
He closed his eyes. He didn’t even need to search his brain for the worst memories. They were always right behind his eyelids.
The new dorm room. The creak of hinges. Confusion. Dragged from his bed and forced to his knees—
His stomach twisted. He gagged, doubled over, arms braced on his knees as bile clawed at the back of his throat.
Symond clamped a hand to his mouth, swallowing down the bitterness.
It took minutes to still himself as the room spun and the air turned heavy.
Sweat soaked through his shirt, cold and clinging.
But the memory was there.
He sliced his bicep and let the trickle of blood fall into the potion. It shimmered pink, then darkened. Thickened. As if it had swallowed something whole.
He fumbled for a pen, hand still trembling, and scrawled across the label: “First time.”
Then moved to the next.
The second memory came easier. Not softer—just faster.
A Potion of Rousing. A little experiment, Gerard had said. To make Symond more receptive. More lively. While his body reacted, internally he felt dead.
He screamed into his pillow then. Not in memory. In the room. Present. The cry cracked something in his throat, shrilling his vocal cords.
Another vial. Another cut.
“Potion of Rousing.”
The third memory nearly broke him.
For once the pain wasn’t being inflicted by someone else.
Not Thorn. Not Gerard. It was by him. An enchanted blade he made at the forge, dragged across his thighs.
The enchantment made the bleeding almost impossible to stop.
That was what he wanted. What he decided.
The one decision about his body that he was able to make. But Thorn stopped him.
“Failed Attempt 1.”
By the tenth vial, he didn’t flinch.
His hands still shook, but only slightly. Like after a forge shift—residual tension, nothing more.
He stopped gagging.
Stopped blinking too long.
The memories came faster. Not because they hurt less, but because he stopped resisting.
“Days in confinement.”
“Finding out the truth.”
“15 minutes of revenge.”
“Last time.”
“Failed Attempt 2.”
“Barn fight.”
“Prostitute.”
Each one a slice.
Each one a brick pulled from the wall that held him together.
By the time he reached the fiftieth vial, he no longer read the labels as he wrote them.
His hand moved automatically, looping letters like sigils on a page he didn’t understand.
The memories blurred together, faces became shadows, voices static. The worst ones were starting to feel… dull. Like looking through water at something far away.
When he finally stopped—when the crate was full, and the table littered with blood-slick cloths, and his skin raw from wiping his face with the same sleeve—he sat back.
Not relieved.
Not broken.
Just… quiet.
He reached for the last vial. He didn’t remember what this one was for.
Didn’t care.
He capped it.
Labeled it: “Doesn’t matter.”
And placed it gently with the rest.
∞∞∞
He didn’t sleep.
Just sat there in the half-light of morning, the sky outside his narrow window dull and gray, like the color had been drained from the world overnight.
The crate waited beside his bed, rows of neatly labeled vials nestled in straw. He picked one up. “First time.” He uncorked it and drank.
It was cold going down. Thicker than it should’ve been. Not viscous, just… heavy. The effect was subtle. Not a shudder, not a scream. But something… peeled. He blinked. Could still feel the tension in his jaw. But couldn’t remember why.
He set the vial on the empty bookshelf. Right side up. Label facing forward. Then reached for the next. Down. Gone. Placed.
“Failed Attempt 1.” Gone.
“15 minutes of revenge.” Gone.
One by one, he drank them.
One by one, they left.
There was no order now. No logic. His hands moved before his eyes could focus. Some labels blurred. Others he didn’t bother to read. They were all echoes now. Each vial took less time to finish. Each memory vanished with less protest.
Soon, the rhythm was steady.
Open.
Drink.
Place.
Repeat.
The bookshelf filled like a row of gravestones, each one a marker for something he no longer remembered. Something he no longer was.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t cry. Didn’t pause. He drank until the crate was empty. Until his gut ached. Until the world felt… clean.
He sat back, staring at the shelf. They gleamed in the pale light, glass bones in tidy rows.
A mausoleum of his own making.
His pulse was steady. Too steady. He could still move, still breathe, still function. But something was missing. He wasn’t sure what. Couldn’t remember.
And that, finally, felt right.
He wasn’t Symond anymore.
He was the act of forgetting.
He was the hand, the knife, and the severance.
He was silence.
Symond rose, his chair creaking as he stepped away from the shelf. He didn’t look back. There was no point.
The man who’d made those vials—the one who trembled, screamed, remembered—he was gone.