That night, in the shielded silence of the climatology archive, they powered the old spectrograph. Sage used a sliver of power from his personal ration—a reckless expenditure—to bring the machine online with a low hum.
With tweezers and hands that shook only slightly, he placed a single, minuscule droplet of the corrupted Vitae into the analysis chamber. Valentine manned the antique readout screen.
The droplet vaporized. The machine whirred and clicked, translating its essence into light and data.
Lines scrawled across the screen. Not the clean, predictable bands of pure Aqua Vitae, but a frenzied, overlapping jungle of signatures. Valentine read them aloud, her voice hollow.
"High-energy magical isotopes… in a state of forced decay. Entropic resonance. It's not just unstable. It's… unraveling. And the unraveling is contagious." She pointed to a particular, vicious spike. "This waveform acts as a catalyst. It doesn't just transmute matter. It pushes stable magical bonds into a cascading failure."
Sage remembered the stone ceiling flowing like wax. "So if enough of this came into contact with the pure source…"
"It wouldn't just pollute it," Valentine concluded, horror dawning in her eyes. "It could trigger a chain reaction. An inversion of the Aqua Vitae's fundamental properties. Instead of creating and sustaining… it would unmake."
The vial in the cabinet was no longer just proof of corruption.
It was a seed of annihilation. And the Syndicate' machine was actively, carelessly creating it.