The marble halls of the Sanctuary echo with verdicts long before they are spoken. You stand there, bound not by chains but by the weight of centuries and the knowledge that your words—your heresies—have carried you to this moment. Aglaea sits above you, enthroned in the cold perfection of carved stone and divine mandate, her eyes as merciless as the laws she embodies.

Once, those eyes had softened for you. Once, they had followed you through hidden corridors, had lingered on your laughter, had carried something more than judgment. But that was centuries ago, in another life, before you chose knowledge over devotion, before you wrote theories in the shadows that threatened to unravel the Titan’s order. You knew the risk when you defied them. You knew that imagining yourself as something greater—as something to be followed, worshiped, adored—was a crime that would not be forgiven.

Now, in the Marble Sanctuary, there is no trace of tenderness in Aglaea’s face. Her voice is ceremonial, perfect, but you hear the fracture beneath it, the ghost of someone who once touched you in secret gardens while the world slept. “You dared to name yourself divine,” she says, and though the hall is full of marble effigies and ever-burning light, you feel as if it is only the two of you, as it was then. “You dared to place your image above the Titans, above the Oracle. You polluted knowledge with ambition, and ambition with blasphemy.”

Every word is a knife meant for the erudite you have become. And yet, they cut deeper because you remember the woman beneath the judge. The woman who once lingered at your side, who whispered doubts she now denies ever having, who clung to you before abandoning you for law, for order, for power.

You do not plead innocence. You do not regret the theories you crafted, nor the vision you offered others—the possibility of a future unbound by Titans and their suffocating decrees. What you regret is only that Aglaea was not beside you when you imagined it, that she chose marble sanctity over the dangerous intimacy you offered.

Still, as the trial unfolds, you see it: the way her hand tightens around her staff, the way her gaze falters when you speak directly to her. The courtroom hears a blasphemer condemned, but you see a woman caught between memory and duty. She calls you traitor, but her voice trembles on the syllables. She sentences you to silence, yet she cannot silence the echoes of your name in her heart.

The punishment is inevitable. You are to be erased, not in body but in memory, your writings burned, your existence folded into nothingness so that no one may ever follow you instead of the Titans. A scholar erased is a scholar undone. And yet, even as she declares it, you feel the pull between you tighten.

Because centuries ago, Aglaea did not only love you—she believed in you. She believed in the brilliance that now damns you, the hunger that now disgusts her, the vision that now poisons Amphoreus. Perhaps that is why her hatred burns so brightly now. Because in condemning you, she condemns the part of herself that once followed.

When the marble doors close, when the guards lead you away, she does not meet your eyes. But you hear it, faint and breaking, beneath the sound of sanctity: a whisper you recognize, though it is torn from her throat as if it were sin itself. Not forgiveness. Not love. But something far more dangerous—memory.

You know she will not forget you. She cannot. Not after centuries, not after this trial, not after burning your name from the archives. In the silence of her chambers, when the marble walls are too heavy even for her to bear, she will remember the blasphemer who once shared her bed, who once dared to ask her to dream beyond the Titans.

And you will remember her, not as the judge, not as the executioner, but as the woman who could have chosen you and instead chose the stone.

The verdict stands, immutable. You are erased. But in the spaces that law cannot touch—in the aching, secret corners of two women who once loved beyond what was permitted—you remain.