His Canvas
The dining table was his office, the polished wood a battlefield of neatly organized chaos. He had spent the rest of the evening, and most of the morning, lost in the paper trail. Sam’s casual comment had been the key, a single, anomalous data point that had re-contextualized the entire project. He was no longer looking for simple incompetence. He was hunting for a ghost of a different kind.
And he found him, or sometimes found him.
He wasn’t sure if it was the visit to the phantom memory of “The Cock and Pheasant” in last night's particularly vivid dream and the fog of restless sleep, or something else entirely. He had started to fill a notebook with everything he spotted, just so his mind didn't slip over it again.
The name Eric Chambers appeared again and again, a recurring signature on a litany of discrepancies. A supply manifest for rare Mimas crystals, signed off by Chambers on behalf of the Miners' Guild, but the corresponding inventory log at Esto's shop showed only common quartz had been received. A payment authorization for a shipment of high-grade Ironwood, again bearing Chambers' name, for a delivery that, according to the Carpenters' own dispatch records, had never been scheduled.
It wasn't a mistake. It was a pattern. A deliberate, systematic siphoning of resources, all neatly documented and authorized by a man who shouldn't have been there in the first place. This wasn't mismanagement. It was fraud.
And without the notebook, he was already forgetting it. This wasn’t like him, he had managed projects with budgets in the millions, over a multitude of interlinking businesses that hated each other, this should be as simple as opening a door to a child's play room. Maybe Sam had been right in his assessment, was he further gone than he even realised? More so than the 4 days of coffee fueled sleepless days it took to recover from the failed merger with another business?
He knew this. He had seen this a dozen times before in his old life. This was a project spiraling out of control due to a bad actor, and he had just been handed the audit. But, this was his chance and he didn't want it to slip away.
He picked up a fresh sheet of paper and the pencil he'd found. The path forward was clear, a series of logical, actionable steps. A plan.
Tomorrow would be busy.
He wrote the first bullet point:
- Deirdre. Report initial findings.
He had to report his initial findings. This was her project, her problem. He needed to understand the scope she wanted him to operate within, to get the full context before he started pulling on threads that might unravel something she wasn't prepared for.
He chewed on the end of the pencil, a bad habit he had long since abandoned until now, as his gaze drifted to the library book on Istos. The regeneration ritual Ricardo had prescribed was another task on his list, one he had been putting off. And the guild structure... Finnian had given him the cynical overview, but he needed the official hierarchy, the rules of the game.
- Library. - Ritual Magic Reference, Guild Law Reference
Two objectives. Find a book on basic Ritual Magic for the regeneration process and general understanding on what he is getting into. And find a text on the official structure and laws that govern the major Guilds. Knowledge was a resource, and he was operating with a criminal level of deficiency.
He paused, the pencil hovering over the page. The third point was potentially the most difficult, the one his pride rebelled against. He thought of Sam's blunt assessment: "It's your misery to manage, and you're failing at it." The ghosts wouldn't be banished by notebooks and audits. They were a separate, more insidious problem, and they were affecting his performance.
- Tori. - Professional consultation
The idea of letting her back into his mind, of allowing that invasive, magical presence to wander through the fragile, haunted landscape of his memories, was still a visceral, absolute non-starter. That was a boundary he would not cross, and if he could help it, one he would prevent anyone from attempting to cross again.
But talking... that was different. She was, accepting their short history, a specialist. A professional in a field he only pretended to understand. And if there was one thing his old life had taught him, it was that when you have a problem outside your expertise, you consult the expert. It was a bitter pill to swallow, an admission of a weakness he didn't want to acknowledge. But he wasn't too proud to admit, at least to himself, that he needed help. The project of his own sanity required it.
With the plan committed to paper, a sense of quiet, purposeful order settled over him. He carefully stacked the most damning of the invoices, the ones bearing Eric Chambers' ghost signature, into a neat pile. A portfolio of evidence for his meeting with Deirdre. The project was scoped. The stakeholders were identified. The work for tomorrow was defined.
He wheeled himself away from the table, away from the neat, quantifiable problems of fraud and logistics. The sun was slanting low, the afternoon bleeding into a cool, quiet evening. He could feel the familiar, bone-deep weariness settling in, the prelude to another long night of wrestling with the ghosts of his past.
But not tonight.
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An early night spent battling the haunting images of home was a losing proposition. He was tired. He was fragile. And he knew, with a certainty, that continuing to apply a failing strategy would only lead to the same, negative outcome. He needed a different approach. He needed a change.
He wheeled himself into the vast, cavernous bedroom, the smooth stone cool under the wheels of his chair. He transferred himself to the bed, the movement slow and deliberate, a practiced negotiation with his own aching body. He didn't lie down. He sat, his back straight, his legs stretched out before him, and closed his eyes.
It was time to do something different.
He didn't wait for the dreams to come for him. He went to them. He let his mind drift, not into the uncontrolled chaos of sleep, but into the quiet, malleable space between. He felt the familiar pressure, the first chaotic whispers of a forming narrative. But this time, he didn't push it away into the void. He guided it.
The transition was smooth, a gentle slide into a world of his own making.
He stood on the beach, a sanctuary created in a previous life, in a previous world.
The sand was warm beneath his bare feet, the sun a pleasant weight on his shoulders. The air was thick with the clean, salty tang of the sea, and the sound of the waves was a slow, rhythmic sigh.
But it was not the same, he knew there would be damage from Tori’s initial visit, and that was initially his target, to repair, however.
The sky, a perfect, cloudless blue in his memory, was now a bruised, angry purple. The gentle waves that lapped at the shore were not water, but a slow, roiling tide of red-tinged light. The air was not silent. It was filled with a high, keening sound, a chorus of distant, unending screams.
The ghosts were not of Manchester tonight. They were of his own making, born from the searing agony of Valerie's magical surgery. Specters of splintered bone and screaming sinew danced at the edge of his vision. The beach, his sanctuary, had become a monument to his own torment. It was a wound in his own mind.
He stood amidst the wreckage of his own creation, a quiet observer of the battlefield. It was a manifestation of the trauma his body had endured, a scar left on the landscape of his mind. He knew, with a weary certainty, that he would have to confront this, to clean this, to accept the memory of the agony before his sanctuary could truly be a place of peace again.
But that was a project for another night. A larger, more complex undertaking that he didn't have the strength for right now.
Tonight was about a measured response, a calculated expenditure of energy. His objective wasn't to win the war, but to secure a temporary peace. He had to find the line. How much effort did it take to feel rested? How much focus was required to keep the worst of the ghosts at bay without draining his already depleted reserves? Fighting them, he knew, took everything. And he couldn't afford that.
With a slow, deliberate breath, a physical act unnecessary in this mental space, but a grounding, familiar ritual, he let the beach dissolve. The purple sky crumbled, the red tide receded, and the screaming specters of bone faded into nothing.
He was surrounded by darkness. Not the peaceful, featureless void he had cultivated as his refuge, but a deep, expectant blackness. He could feel them at the edges of his perception, the ghosts of his lost world, waiting. The faint, phantom smell of rain on wet pavement. The low, distant hum of a city that was no longer his. They were there, a silent, patient audience.
But he wasn't done. The performance was not over.
Associating muscle memory to the act felt like a disservice, but it was close enough, he reached inside himself, found what he needed, and awoke the long dormant memories of a practiced bored existence.
He let himself drift, turning away from the painful, solid shores of memory. He didn't seek the familiar, rainy streets of Manchester or the sterile, echoing halls of the infirmary. He went to a place older, more fundamental. He dove into the wellspring of his own imagination, to the quiet, lazy daydreams that had filled the unimportant moments of his old life.
The darkness around him shifted. It was no longer a void, a monument to his isolation, nor was it a prison designed to keep the world out. It was a canvas. His canvas.
And on that canvas, he began to paint with the light of pure possibility.
From the deep, featureless black, a single point of light bloomed into existence, a tiny, brilliant diamond in the velvet dark. Then another. And another. Soon, there were thousands, then millions, a silent, breathtaking explosion of stars that filled the void around him. He hung nebulae in the distance, vast, swirling clouds of impossible color, deep purples, vibrant greens, and the fiery, incandescent orange of a star being born. He set galaxies to spinning in a slow, cosmic ballet, their spiral arms a testament to a beautiful, ordered chaos.
This wasn't a memory. It was an act of pure, unadulterated creation. It was the universe as seen not through a telescope, but through the pages of a hundred different science fiction novels, a thousand different cinematic masterpieces. It was the vast, infinite expanse of wonder and possibility that had always been his truest, most private refuge.
For his throne, he willed a small moon into existence beneath his feet, a silent, grey sphere of rock and dust, pockmarked with craters of his own design. He sat on its edge, his legs dangling over the star-dusted abyss, and he just watched. He watched the slow, silent waltz of galaxies, the distant, silent flash of a supernova, the steady, unwavering light of a billion billion suns.
He knew which star the Earth, his Earth orbited, but tonight was not the night to visit.
He could still feel them, the ghosts of his old life, a faint, persistent pressure at the very edge of this new, vast reality. The phantom smell of a city street, the distant echo of a tram on its tracks.
But out here, against the sheer, overwhelming scale of a universe of his own making, they were less than a whisper. They were insignificant, their grief swallowed by the infinite, silent wonder of the cosmos.
He had succeeded.
He felt the familiar, gentle pull of his physical body, the first sign of true, deep sleep approaching. He let the feeling come, a welcome tide pulling him back to the shore of the waking world. As the vibrant, star-filled landscape began to fade, he took a final, clinical assessment.
The cost.
There was almost none. This act of pure, joyful creation, this painting of a universe from the palette of his own imagination, had been no more taxing than filling a cup with water. It was an effortless, instinctual act, a muscle he had been exercising in the quiet corners of his mind for his entire life. Tomorrow may be different, but that was tomorrow.
The last of the starlight faded, and the quiet, dreamless dark took him.
Mark slept.