#tasshart

„(…) Aislinn‘s relentless desire to learn, experiment, and push the limits of what could be built eventually led her to Delesyia, where she began working alongside Valgash, Faust—and Marni.

For all his fame, Marni had always been strangely alone in his work. Delesyia adored its greatest innovator and the wonders his mind produced, but admiration was not the same as understanding. Few could follow his thoughts once they began racing ahead, let alone challenge them or add something he had not already considered. And so, more often than not, he experimented alone.

Aislinn changed that.

They recognized something familiar in one another almost immediately: the same restless curiosity, the same hunger for the impossible, and the same tendency to become hopelessly consumed by a question simply because neither of them could stand not knowing the answer. Where others eventually lost Marni somewhere along the way, Aislinn kept up. For perhaps the first time, Marni had found someone whose intellect he not only respected, but whose company he genuinely enjoyed.

What followed were years of shared work that frequently ceased to resemble work at all. The two could disappear into a laboratory for days or even weeks, emerging only when an experiment demanded something they did not have—or when somebody reminded them that food and sleep were, regrettably, still necessary. They argued, competed, built upon each other’s ideas, dismantled them again, and pursued increasingly absurd theories simply to see where they might lead. Two brilliant minds and, beneath all the titles and reputations, two absolute nerds who had finally found someone willing to be just as obsessed as they were.

Naturally, Delesyia noticed. Rumors about the exact nature of their relationship spread quickly, helped considerably by how much time the two spent alone together. Whether there was ever any truth to them was another matter entirely. Only a handful of people knew what truly existed between Aislinn and Marni in those years. Which only made Aislinn’s eventual departure from Delesyia more puzzling.

Years passed, yet Delesyia never disappeared entirely from her life. Neither did Marni. The two remained in correspondence long after she had left, exchanging letters across the distance—until, one day, his letters abruptly stopped.

Then came the rumors from Delesyia itself: unrest, instability, strange developments, a city slowly slipping into chaos.

Aislinn knew Marni well enough to know that silence was not nothing. So, years after leaving, she returned to Delesyia. Officially, perhaps, to discover what had happened to the city she had once called home.