YD6-110 (Job) Vitrine of Light Breaking the Vault of Nyx and the Handler’s Reluctant Tread

 

Architecture isn’t stone; it’s a nervous system.

In the heart of Aetheria, every spire and corridor breathes with a collective pulse. Can a city dream? Or are we simply the thoughts it chooses to house? You don’t walk through these streets; you resonate within them. The stone remembers your touch, the light anticipates your gaze, and the very air hums with a consciousness that predates our first breath. We are the architects of our own perception, yet Aetheria is the mind that holds the blueprint.

Step inside. Feel the shift in the atmosphere as the walls begin to listen. This isn’t a place you visit—it’s a presence you become.

The threshold is open. Cross the Crystal Portal into the living mind of the city.

[Link: Enter Aetheria]

YD6-110 (Job) Vitrine of Light Breaking the Vault of Nyx and the Handler’s Reluctant Tread

My arrival in Belgium echoed with my sister Ingrid's words, leading me to the thatched-roof house. Lodging with Mariette Somers, I meet the hefty elderly man everyone calls Tonton—Jean-François Smeets—who begs and orbits the Team Construction fleet car for an errand into the hamlet’s crisscrossing street mall, entering from a backstreet. 

I don’t question Mariette’s welcoming guest, though I linger with skepticism as we pull up before the single storefront window splashed with ‘Générale de Banque.’ 

Stepping out, he invites me to follow him inside. I stand back in the hall during his transactions with the teller. I link the postman’s mail he pockets in stealth with his control over Mariette’s bank account.

As we track back toward the Audi’s glare on the apron, he works the numbers aleatory—and for a security agent, that breeds doubt. I begin setting up my own system: initials with purpose, a double-check of the date, anchoring my mind against the mirrored zero—a miner’s tunnel in finance, a string that does not speak at a glance, like the metric system, unlike inches, feet, yards, which leave a mental paw trace. 

On our way out, the bristly door’s weatherbar scrapes the floorboards - whoosh - swinging open, then shutting behind us as we step onto the ±0 Belle Époque landing. Through the grand crystal wafer portal, we descend the split-level vestibule and out the glazed entrance door to the avenue. Victoria pulls the lever - fizz... -  the marble sweep opening and closing.

Facing us, a hunched figure eases back, cupped hands lowering from his face. The gaze thins; reflection gives way. Eyes meet, briefly. He lingers, murmuring words in a foreign tongue, glancing past Victoria, then past me, into the shadow of the split-level wafer portal—his gaze held at the mosaic threshold, Erebus’ lingering beyond, denied passage. 

His eyes peel away, returning to Victoria on the doorstep in Helios’ glare. “Flores—Flores…” slips from mumble as he shifts - clangs - a step landing on the coal-chute plate. Below, the men underground pay no heed. The slight figure drifts off, while his attention lingers behind. 

The peddler hushes the echo of those early days—a harmony born from the blue enamel street plaque, ‘Avenue Reine Marie-Henriette.’ Aetheria plucks the strings of the cosmic harp, drawing the rhyme taut in refrain, ‘Reine—Mariette.’ Only afterward does the mind wake to what had already taken hold.  

“[C’est un vendeur de fleurs]—He’s a flower peddler.” I’m already lost in Victoria’s hasty steps toward her Fiat Panda; toward her Slavic language class. ‘Flores,’ she repeats, the word striking false notes as it echoes in my head, while trying to make sense of it, watching her cross the field of asphalt, the man she dubbed, “Mr. Flores.” 

As I expect a flower peddler to drift downhill, to mingle with crowds at the bus shelter, with tram commuters—the South Station lying in the valley, the open-air market an obvious link to flowers. 

Senseless and baffled, the little man hurried uphill, empty-handed, glancing back, gaining distance along the hedgerow of cracked, fenestrated brick façades, dissolving into the far blur. 

I reach for the silver-gray Audi, confused. drive off—a small mechanic of routine, running out of self-tapping screws. I’m puzzling together the staircase to descend into the backyard. I head through suburban streets along the valley siding. Short of Forest’s villagey center, I pull up by the St. Eloi Hardware store. I step inside like a small boy in a toy store, gaze around for what I might need, while heading up to the counter. Greeting the attendant, I ask for a few boxes, an assortment of screws, and backtrack. 

The house takes over, doors whoosh and sigh; the glazed threshold opens, closes. 

A crew of men ghost past the doorstep, in Indian file rising the white marble split-level to the stairwell. 

Erebus still hides in the descent to the -1 landing, in the corners toward the -2 underground, and in the ascent to the +1 Spanish woman’s landing, the +2 landing of the crippled truck driver and wife, up to the +3 loft’s entrance niche—the Dark Ages juggling in mind, the absurdity of a bulb to light the way, a derelict make-do infrastructure. A far cry to face my partners in crime, when the occasion presented itself. 

Alexandre’s habit—drawn in for two weeks, living with his mother, then absent again—lingers as I sigh. The ±0 Belle Époque apartment reaches its finishing touches. Descending into the backyard, with my helping hands, we lean timber skeletons; the courtyard's whitewashed city brick walls soften under half-pergolas, creepers planted to entwine, inviting a countryside greenery, eventually.

In the hush of the weekend morning, I’ve been at my desk since early. Beside me, the nighthall door creaks its lever; my mind registers that Victoria has left her devoted swaddling, the heavy duvet-cocoon behind her. Clop, clop, clop… without a glance I follow her.

Victoria backtracks by the telescopic bar counter’s leaf-spring oak shelf. Staggered cornice tiers shy the worktop alongside the sink. At the shoe-tip, she turns toward the dishwasher alcove, her back to the fridge; bends before the glass-cabinet, then straightens and moves on—past the grand crystal portal—toward the dining table, into the blind spot, until only a few tufts of hair are visible above the kitchen counter. 

I lend a foot grip to the chair leg, my eyes relenting over the blueprints spread across the study’s desktop. Exhausted by the renovation work—that 100-kilometer road race, a sport meant for someone else but me—I waver: rest, recovery, back spinning my feet, training for the next race, memory trailing—dubious of the next phase. I pivot uncoil, push the chair aside, and release my ankle. Carrying the weight of commiting, I swing onto Victoria’s tracks, step past the kitchen counter, emerging from the toe-corner of the culinary enclave. 

With days not sparing me another breath, the upcoming Monday is critical. I pace up to the black Duco backrest, sidetracking the water carafe in the middle of the vivid blue diamond tablecloth, leaping the red Porto bottle beside the glass of Porto, alongside an ash tray—Victoria’s face in puffs of smoke—while Jean-François Smeets, sits across the corner from her, gangster glamor intact, Mariette’s financial manager: an elbow on the white underlay, fingertips keeping watch on his beer glass. I grip on the backrest rail, propping a stretch to relieve the pressure in the lower back. 

Apathetic, I addressed them both, asking, “Do I carry on?” My words carry their silence.

Victoria glances at Jean-François Smeets, besides her across the table, unassertive. “[Oui]—Yes.”

Jean-François Smeets insist. “Victorieke! [Wil je er echt mee doorgaan?]—Do you really want to go ahead with it?”

I stand between the two’s ping-pong of words. But La Madrina, now in a more assertive voice, fixes her gaze on me and says, “[Oui]—Yes.”

Jean-François Smeets nods, catching the cadence. “[Allez-y]—Go ahead.”—‘The money will follow.’

I draw the chair - Skrrr-t - to an angle and swing my hips by the armrest to sit, ending a cross legs sweep. The table skirt decides otherwise: my shoe’s toe slips along its fabric, skirting the table legs in stealth, only to catch the dangling knot and snare my foot. I struggle, waggle free from the loose drape’s choking tail, but witty foot nabs unsettles, then settle my foot back onto the floorboards beside the other. 

‘Victoria’s fantasy is there to admire;’ my mind hushes the swearing I aimed at her. I ease forward, arms drawn in, pour a glass of red Porto, then sit back, nursing the enigma of a townhouse under renovation.

By Monday morning, in the -2 underground beneath the brick-vaulted ceiling, I break in the crew of illegal Polish workmen, waking them under fluorescent light. Men shoulder up before the redwood stringer run upstairs, work clothes dribbling from the rail between proud, gleaming balusters, a curtain drawn across the louvered stairs. The stage clears to the No. 13 party brick wall, with a plastic wardrobe jammed beneath the tapering waste of the staircase, hangers gathering their city dress. Pinned over the masonry, the townhouse blueprints— original staggered plans over-drafted with alterations—are nursed close to heart, ushering in a new phase. 

At a glance of my wristwatch, I press myself into a necessary habit. Pen in hand, I scribble the men’s presence on my notepad. When each name is marked with its time to the minute, I say: “Adam! [Emmène le marteau.]—Get the sledgehammer.” I indicate: ’follow me.’

Adam turns away, walks beside the staircase, slipping into the hollow shadow of the open ceiling, toward the gaping laundry gateway. He crosses the threshold, then veers and vanishes behind the efflorescent flank wall. The slit hushes. He reappears from the offset construction storage room, light gleaming the wooden handle in hand, the massive club head counterbalancing a pendulum rhythm by his leg. 

I pace back with a whirl by the newel post, treading upward. I flinch a glance beneath, checking that Adam disentangles from the men, half-seen through the balustrade. Registering who I leave behind, I narrow on Adam, bearing the task he ought to carry. I rise through the gaping ceiling, meeting the hollow shadows of the -1 bridging landing. I cross back to the front newel and climb, keeping an eye on Adam’s partial silhouette, before emerging onto the ±0 white marble, heading toward the light glittering crystal grand portal—offside, the sprayed blue-clouded panes standing as the Belle Époque apartment’s entrance. 

The entrance waits unfinished: Hasselt Glass Works still holds the stained-glass—’a medieval trade in extinction’ the thought flips through my mind. I swirl by the newel post toward the stair run, reach the mezzanine landing, slip a hand through the hairpin railing to the swingback stairs. Our destination comes up—the +1 landing along the flank wall—the little boy in me, alive, hands in clay, kneading ideas. I crank the lever, swing back the door open—void of the Spanish woman’s warm spirit, her daughter, and her boyfriend who once filled the apartment. 

I breach the cold hand waft of empty into the bare central room, my mind leaping a floor plan—conjugating the space in lieu of the downstairs cuisine enclave. I block up, condemning the doorway we just walked through. I lead Adam offside through the interleading double doors toward the bay window picturing Helios’ golden rays skimming the park’s flocculent canopies—drawn to pull more of the landscape inward, toward a living room worth the tenants. 

With a youth’s naivety, I engineer a farce for my audience—“Adam! [Passe-moi le marteau]—give me the hammer…” mimicking my professor’s intonation: ‘I’ll show you how to bring down a massive wall on a suspended floor.’ I take my stance at the middle of the half-brick internal wall. A golfer’s backswing: the sledgehammer’s mass hauled over my shoulder, my right arm straining, my spine easing open under the load, the pain drawn out and released. Both hands locked on the handle; I pull and swing through the wall - thump - the hammerhead arrested like a cannonball stopped mid-flight. The mass spent, the blow dampened; a crazed rose blooms in the paint above the skirting board.

I swing the sledgehammer head; the paint crazes, puffing dust, as each blow drives the cracks further. Lime-sand pours; giving way to a peering crust of terracotta. The battered wall yields—bricks cracking; morsels fall to the floorboards, then larger pieces—until a raw half-brick of light peers through from the adjacent room. I shatter a row toward the darker corner, the brim of debris piling a potential chock-absorber on the floorboard. Daylight squeezes under the suspended wall, stretching toward the doorjamb, diagnosing the resistance hiding there. 

I hand Adam the sledgehammer and step back, guarding the wall—a screen before me. He pounds at a brick, a course un-masoned, creeping raw on the edges, shaping a gaping arch as the adjacent room’s window daylight meddles in. 

Adam foots the heaping rubble, rises within the rugged archway as the wall’s haunches thicken along the ceiling. His grip creeps toward the hammer’s head—shorter swings—hammering overhead the wall closing in on his shoulders, crazing imminent. I call out, alarmed: “Adam! [attention—ça va tomber !]—watch out —for it's going to fall!’

He lisps: “[Oui !]—Yes!”

Under the ceiling, my gaze locks on a keystone craze to fracture, my anxiety rising. I speak to my audience: ‘Adam! Here comes the fun…’ even as I register the spandrel’s crack running straight up to the cornice—haunches bearing down, keystone tight in compression. I call: “Adam! [Attention]—watch out!” 

In slow motion, the massive wall haunches tear from the ceiling—shoulders overhead, hanging, suspended, indecisive—then shear free from the street-front by the doorjamb, met by a simultaneous shear from the stairwell’s wall. Freed of bearing, the mass tips into an acrobatic, hands-over-feet cartwheel, the two haunches in tandem; one edge rolls onto the heap of rubble, footing gives, the flank skids down the debris to lie still. 

I’m eager to experience the outreach of light into the stairwell. Rubble claims hands—shoveled into bags, piggybacked down the flights, descending to the -1 basement. In the light of the street-facing egress window, loads slip from shoulders to stockpile. I turn around. 

“Adam! [Vas cherchez le mari de Basha]—get Basha’s husband to clear the rubble.” 

I leave Adam to dismantle the +1 landing’s linen cupboard—a single household feature out of the 1912s—clearing the way for the entry portal: fluted translucent doors, a bright face for the stairwell. 

In the hush of the morning—breached by an early bus’ roar, leaving the park avenue deserted save for trains of curb-parked cars—I linger in view to welcome the Polish men, expecting the stir of shadows to rise from the asphalt field, that notorious diurnal herd approaching before the distant, light-glittering, glaze, of the lined-up bus stop and the traversing tram halt. Instead, my gaze is tugged to blazing shadows nearby: the flutter of a dark car’s wing doors shedding men, creeping away, assembling on the wide sidewalk—herd-like, regal in their demeanor. One, then another—recognition settles: the allure of men who, through the seasons, have lingered, lured, flirted—goldbricking around me through a day's work. 

They advance toward duty, cavaliers’ eyes glaring on the car that ferried them. At the phantom of the driver’s door, the slight figure glares too—his trophy. Fresh in his risen status from carting bags of rubble, Basha's husband, catches his stride along the lane, the herd of men sharing that admiration. The dare of leaving another man’s possession at the curb lingers—the glare teetering in their minds until they reach the doorstep. It drops at the threshold to their work. They greet me in passing, an Indian file, disappearing through the vestibule’s split level into the shadows of the ±0 Belle Époque landing—a whisper that scatters their course through underground, then aerial floors, settling the morning into its bustling work. 

In the hush of noon, making up their workmen's pay envelopes at my desk underneath the skylight, waiting for the stained-glass ceiling mural, Hethesia’s eerie silence draws across the crystal enfilade of grand portals toward the French doors. I pull them open and stand before the faux-balcony, drawn offside to where men’s heads herd beneath a lifted hood, hovering over the engine. I stand back, thinking—after all, ‘it's their lunch break.’ The stillness draws a passing patrol car to slow, a silent meddling. I let the scene of another man live his own life. 

The next morning, the diurnal chasing of Erebus from the stairwell erases yesterday—Hethesia a plume of liberty, Helios peering through the entrance, reaching the roof-lights, waiting its turn to cut out the roof section, anxious to materialize my imagination. 

A blizzard storms the stairwell: a squat of boots clambering the slender household treads, echoes shifting through the hollow of the boxed wooden stairway, falling upstairs into a hush.

From behind the door to the ±0 landing, I catch a peek of boots stomping down the stairs—the dark, squat outfit of law enforcement. The man sighs, “We’re not after illegals.” As the hush returns to the stairwell, I emerge from the dark closet, breathing—for employing illegal workers. I follow through to the French doors’ balconette as Basha's husband is brought into the street, made to face the muzzel—the scenario shifting to a stolen car. When the ordeal is over, Basha’s husband is still walking free. The signs were there long before; ‘I should have fired the little weasel long ago.’

At the rate of new morning daylight breezing through the street-front windows, we’re cladding the walls in sheetrock. While Helios rides across the rigid rooftop, by afternoon peering deeper through the rear bedrooms. Everyday resumes, stiffening the old walls; days bleed weeks. The renovation morphs the +1 Spanish woman’s and the ±2 Trucker’s to the +3 of the unknown woman, weaving light through the stairwell, settled in a midtone of cracks and gaps—a stillness held across all azimuths as the seasons change. 

While the ±0 Belle Époque apartment sits in finished comfort, the grind continues elsewhere. Through the proper shaft, telephone cables and intercom lines trace Helio’s pencil-shaft lights—fingertips, peering past the doorstep coal-plate, stroking the ancient chute down into the -2 cellar, drawing inward toward the house’s core, then up and branching out: a watchful presence spreading through each floor. 

Apartments draw their water supply as the shaft opens at each level: mirrored corner bath, hand basin, water closet. Wastewater drops back into it; toilet vents rise through the roof. A mirrored culinary enclave shapes each middle room—IKEA casings under kitchen worktops, sink plumbed, stove wired and hooked to the gas line released from the same bundle.

The technical shaft, back-to-back with the stairwell, fills with gas boilers; when heated, the fumes run their cooling loops and the exhausts released under the eaves. With the home infrastructure in use at the ±0 Belle Époque enfilade, the -1 basement awakens as its mirror plan—spared the crystal, glittering portals. Instead, a soft sea of charcoal heated ceramic tiles draws toward rising daylight. Grand wooden sliding doors wrap the rear Z-end, opening a threshold onto the backyard and, inevitably, toward who should own it. 

From the desk side-drawer, I pick an envelope, scribbling “Basha” across. With a bank teller’s thumb on the ten-thousand frank stack and a finger’s flick, the note flails to hand; I drop it by the envelope. My hand jumps to the five thousand stacks, or skips it, counting down: two thousand, five hundred, two hundred, one hundred. Skipping those bills the name is not worthy of, I gather the jumbled pile and slip it under the envelope’s flap, tucking and sealing. In a Friday rhythm, the stacks of banknotes decrease across the top edge of my desk as I write names across the envelopes. 

I rise from my chair with a lagging twist as I lower the Toshiba laptop screen, blinding the spreadsheet’s sprawling data. With a hips-roll around the desktop corner, I swipe the stacked envelopes into my palm. I head for the kitchen passage. I emerge from the telescopic oak blades bartop, prolong the dining room floorboard run, inadvertently crossing Jean-François Smeets’ smirking stunt. I greet him with an escaping glance that says. ‘I’m in a hurry!’

I pose my purlicue, wrapping the brass Cupid knob - clunk - crank my wrist and pull the door - whoosh... - step onto the ±0 marble landing. I veer, and after me - whoosh. . . thwock, clunk - the door seals. 

Erebus cowers ahead, deep in the rear of the stairwell. Guided by a hand, I swirl around the newel posts and jar into a descent, toward a glimpse of the -1 sentinel door. Past it, beneath the upstairs staircase, I am drawn into the glow through the bridging rail at the gaping -1 floor. The crackle of hecklers' voices, cautioning me. Unlike a boisterous Friday crew on payday, I round the newel post and tread down the louvered barn staircase—breathing—the heckling clearing as an alpha voice rises from the -2 underground site-office. 

From the upstairs flank, I oversee the men, cleaned in city clothes, shod for their trip home—Below, half-beneath the red wooden staircase, they gather in a vibrant snake pit—heckling, packed in a crescent. 

‘How did he get down here?’ I question myself. 

At the center, a sleazy stranger stages himself, his back swallowed by the newel post into oblivion—blind to my descent, shouldering abreast their eyes, daggers locked in a gladiator’s all-to-one glare. 

The crew goes dead mute. Cold eye flick across the crescent, breaking from my descend and turning inward, closing on the little weasel. Teddy isolates himself mid-argument, caught in its obsessive grip, every look calling him to shut up.

“[Qu'est-ce qui se passe ?]—What is going on here?” I call out loud.  

A phantom of his reach emerges in the herd of men—silent eyes implicated, nudging Teddy, willing him to shut up. He doesn’t. He strays a glance from his handler, meets my questioning look. ‘Need you ask what’s going on?’ 

Victoria’s fantasy flickers—the admirer who hushed himself, swearing by Flores. The name dawns on me and lingers, tethering to darkness—Eastern Europe—labor routes—now here! I fix Radek’s eyes; he evades me. I catch Valdek in the rear and let it pass. 

“Adam! [Qu'est-ce qui se passe ici ?]—What’s going on here?” 

He shrugs behind a shield of silence. César’s father shadows the exchange, both of them vulture-perched, watching for carrion. 

Flores’ gaze loosens from the men; he uncoils pacing the ceramic white-tiled apron, edging a reluctant retreat. At a snail’s pace, the imposter lay a palm on the squared newel post, pauses—memorizing the men, measuring his leeway. A hand creeps along the handrail. 

He climbs. 

Reluctant treads hover over the men as he rises through the bright gap of the vaulted brick ceiling, swallowed into the hollow shadows of exhausting light. In the hush of the -1 bridging landing upstairs, the rhythm of his footsteps slip behind the railing, a man’s hope away, bound for the street. I fall back among the men, their eyes effaced.