The eve of the heist, unbeknownst to Garrett and Erin, was the night of a most profane ritual.
A vesper designed to curb the will of nature and seize the most ancient power of the Leviathan, the balance of the primordial sea itself, shielded from humanity for centuries by god and guardians alike.
A ritual that Garrett and Erin had accidentally interrupted upon their literal breaking into the manor.
Resulting in that fragile balance to falter when the ceremony became violent with the introduction of the uninvited thieves.
There were many remnants of the olde rituals scattered across the city, entwined with the lore carved into the very stone the city was built upon, and the most ancient of artifacts hidden within the dankest depths of the city, shrouded from sightless eyes by mystery and myth.
Unless you knew where to look.
The Keepers coveted many of these treasures in the safety of their vaults, far below the lustrous halls of the Haven, and even deeper beneath the streets of the city.
Many of the treasures kept in the vaults were so ancient and fragile that even thinking about relocating, let alone examining a piece could have it withering away into dust.
Other pieces were so priceless that should their existence come to light, the already fragile state of the world would unravel as greed would force the hands of thousands to vie for such incomprehensible worth.
The vast majority of the artifact however were all considered sacred, in one way shape or form... Weighted with myth and lore, basked in mystery, steeped with secrets and considered so, so precious that not even Garrett dared himself to draw near…
Though he did try once...
It was two weeks after Keeper Vairia had gone through a long and thoroughly fascinating overview of some, just some, of the priceless artifacts that swelled within the Haven Vaults.
Garrett had already demonstrated more than enough signs of early onset Kleptomania, and a tenacity for getting into places he didn't belong. He wasn't caught often, he was good at getting in and out unseen, unheard.
"You're late."
Garrett didn't flinch or yelp as most young boys his age would if they were caught with their metaphorical hand in the metaphorical cookie jar, (Artemus had long since stopped trying to lock, hide or guard the cookie jar from his rambunctious children)
He instead froze in place, his homemade lock-picks still pressed deep into the lock he had been working on, he had been caught red-handed, and even if he attempted to abandon his task, he had clearly already been seen.
Despite knowing the gig was up, Garrett decided to at least try to hide for a few more seconds, sometimes, a few seconds was all it took for someone to convince themselves that they were imagining things...
"Come now Garrett, you are far to clever to think you can just hide in place sight with me."
Garrett sighed and stood, turning slowly to face the man behind him, holding his arms out to his side slightly to show that he was unarmed.
"Keeper Vairia." Garrett said quietly.
"Hello lad." The Keeper sighed tiredly as he crossed his arms over his chest, looking down at the young boy before him.
Garrett did his best to remain composed, but inside? He was panicking.
"He knew that the Haven Vaults were strictly off limits to everyone but the Keeper Archivists, the people responsible for categorizing and organizing the Haven's documentation.
He knew he was taking a huge risk treading so deep into the Haven.
Oh, but the splendor and glory Keeper Vairia described in his lecture was too tantalizing to pass up. Garrett couldn't help himself, he told himself that he wouldn't take anything (A first) just that he wanted to see...
"What are you doing down here lad?" Keeper Vairia asked gently, in his typical, 'history teacher teaching a very heavy lesson that will probably upset more than a few people' voice.
Garrett replied with sheepish silence as he cast his eyes to the floor.
"I take it you are fully aware that you're not supposed to be here?"
Garrett nodded slowly, his silence speaking volumes.
"You're late you know?" Keeper Vairia repeated, his voice lifting slightly into something far more casual.
"Ever since you started swiping pens, the other Keepers and I started placing bets on when we would find you down here." Keeper Vairia huffed softly.
"I bet that you'd find your way down here the moment you learned about the Vaults." Keeper Vairia said simply as he looked down at Garrett with a strange, playful sort of disappointment.
"Do you want to take a guess at who won the bet?" The Keeper asked lightly with a small smile.
"Garrett paused for a moment, debating whether or not to hold his tongue.
"Artemus bet that you'd find your way down here exactly two weeks after my lecture about the Haven Vaults." Keeper Vairia hummed, "And here you are, two weeks after my lecture on the Haven Vaults."
Garrett tried to shift back a step, but the door he had been trying to unlock was right behind him, the wrought iron gate clanging behind him causing Garrett to flinch.
"Why are you here Garrett." Keeper Vairia asked again, "I thought I made it clear in my lecture that no one, and I mean no one but the Acolytes were allowed down in the vaults." He said as he began to stalk towards the younger boy.
"And yet here. You. Are..."
Keeper Vairia stopped maybe a foot or so before Garrett, arms still folded across is chest.
"Garrett..." The Keeper sighed as he set his hand on the younger boy's shoulder, a means to keep the boy in place disguised as a comforting gesture.
"What were you going to do Garrett?"
Garrett remained stubbornly silent, keeping his eyes trained on the floor between himself and the Keeper before him, that is until Keeper Vairia sighed and crouched down, sitting on his ankles to get closer to the young boys height.
"Garrett..." Keeper Vairia repeated, slowly.
"Nothing..." Garrett finally whispered, his small hands curling into fists at his sides.
"I... I wasn't going to do anything." Garrett said firmly, "I-I just wanted to look..."
Keeper Vairia cocked a brow at Garrett before slowly repeating what Garrett said; "To look..."
Garrett nodded slowly, staggering slightly when Keeper Vairia used him as a support to get back onto his feet.
"I like you Garrett." The Keeper huffed; "I like you a lot." The Keeper confessed as he gently maneuvered the young boy to the side, fiddling with the lock-picks in the door, handing them back to Garrett without a second thought before he reached into his robe, pulling out a large elegant key that silently slipped into the lock...
The door opened with a low, ancient groan before Keeper Vairia turned to Garrett, nodding his head towards the open door.
"You tell anyone about this and it'll be both of our heads on the chopping block."
Keeper Vairia spent the night with Garrett, wandering around the ancient corners of the Haven Vaults, regaling tales of triumph and strife to the young boy with every artifact they passed.
There was a reason why Keeper Vairia was Garrett's favorite.
Had anyone else been the one to stumble across him, Garrett had no doubt that at best he'd be killed on the spot, or at worst, thrown back out to the streets.
Yet there he was, being given a personal tour of the Haven Vaults by one of the lead historians of the Haven...
At one point however, Keeper Vairia hesitated to continue, it may have been well into the early hours of dawn, but Garrett was hardly tired, if anything, he was all the more ecstatic. The Haven Vaults were every bit as expansive and bountiful as Keeper Vairia had made them out to be.
A sprawling labyrinth of rooms and halls, all filled with different bits and pieces of history. Garrett's breath had caught in his throat more than once at the mere sight of some relics the Keeper had shown him, ancient, twisting sculptures straight from myths and lore of times long passed...
Garrett had seen it all, or so he thought as Keeper Vairia slowly guided him into another document hall where the Acolytes stored the written histories the Haven either managed to find or scrap together...
"But Garrett could hardly care about the thousands of scrolls littering the floor when, between two bookshelves sat his portrait...
The resemblance was uncanny, albeit, the man in the panting, yes, man, was a good decade or so older than the young boy looking up at him...
But the facial structure, the eyes and ears and nose and lips... Garrett saw every morning when he looked in the mirror...
"The only real difference, aside from age, was the fact that the man in the portrait had a single, green eye, vibrant and unnatural even in paint.
"You remember my lecture earlier this year?" Keeper Vairia asked softly from just behind Garrett.
"Time, some say, is like a river." Keeper Vairia sighed, as he moved to stand at Garrett's back, setting both of his hands onto the younger boy's shoulders as he gazed at the portrait...
"Ever flowing onward... And in some ways the comparison is accurate..." He continued, reciting the lecture in a quiet, humbled voice as he squeezed Garrett's shoulders.
"But I disagree... I say that time is more like the tide, ever shifting yes, but constant enough, familiar enough for the illusion of repetitiveness to appear..."
Keeper Vairia looked down at Garrett thoughtfully before continuing with a solemn; "Many of of are mere ripples in the Primordial Sea... But you Garrett... You may very well be a whole damn tide."
"Garrett was too transfixed on the portrait to fully understand what Keeper Vairia's words meant, nor the weight they held. And being as shocked as he was, then the Keeper began to coax him from the painting, Garrett went along willingly.
"The time it took to reach Artemus' chambers from the vaults was lost to Garrett, as was the brief exchange the two Keepers had at the door where Garrett (Along with a pretty sum of coin) was left under the watchful eye of Artemus once more.
"Did you have fun?" Artemus asked lightly, his tone evidently playful despite being edged, it was the voice he used whenever Garrett or Erin did something they weren't supposed to and either got in trouble for it or hurt, his, 'I love you, but I told you so voice'
"And had Garrett not been in such a state, he may have tried to lessen whatever punishment Artemus had planned for him... Instead, he nodded numbly before walking over to the old chair by the fire and taking a seat, curling up, tucking his knees to his chest.
"A thoughtful silence fell between them, disturbed when Artemus began to make the two of them a cup of hot cocoa, the sounds of boiling water and clinking ceramic mugs was a familiar comfort to Garrett, and the soft; "Scootch" Artemus demanded as he took a seat directly beside his young ward even more so.
Garrett of course did scootch, though the moment Artemus was seated comfortably, he crawled into his Keepers far more comfortable lap.
"They sat together sipping their cocoa for a while before Garrett finally spoke up, his voice soft and not quite drowsy.
"I saw something down there..." He said quietly.
"I figured you would..." Artemus hummed gently as he began to run a hand along Garrett's spine, a gently, encouraging motion to coax the boy into continuing.
"Was it a scary something?"
"Garrett shook his head slowly before he shrugged;
"I don't know..." He confessed, looking up at Artemus nervously before he quietly, nervously whispered a timid little;
"I saw myself..." He murmured softly, "I saw a painting of me... But it wasn't me..."
Artemus looked at his ward with a somber expression, the hand at Garrett's back came to pause up by his shoulders before Artemus sighed and nodded.
"I see..." He hummed thoughtfully before he gave Garrett his own version of Keeper Vairia's lecture about the concept of time... Artemus' little lecture however went hand in hand with an ancient myth Garrett knew well...
Artemus told Garrett that the same repetitive tides that Keeper Vairia spoke of were remnants of those ancient eons of endless beginnings, and beginningless ends... That sometimes, when the waves time rode upon fell in line so perfectly with waves before them that it would seem as though time were repeating... People repeated too.
"Believe it or not." Artemus whispered softly as he set the two empty mug down on the small coffee table beside the chair, "I am not the first Artemus to walk the halls of the Haven." The Keeper said that night, quietly, his voice barely audible over the gentle crackling of the fire.
Garrett at that point was pressed flush against Artemus' chest, the Keepers arms looped around him comfortably, he was young then, no taller than his father's thigh, the perfect size to settle into Artemus' lap and press his ear to the Keeper's chest and listen to the warm heart beat below.
"Nor are you the first Garrett."
"The first Garrett, or as history would come to know him as the 'Sneak Thief' was wise and nimble and very clever, "He was a legend before he passed." Artemus whispered quietly, his fingers tenderly running through Garrett's hair as he spoke.
"He did many brave and impossible things, some good, some bad… Some necessary."
"The Sneak Thief was the one to bring about the dark ages, a time not too long ago in the grand scheme of things, but still quite far away, where the tides of time ceased to flow... Where the world stagnated, where nothing changed…
"I expect you'll learn about this soon enough." Artemus hummed softly as he moved to settle his chin atop his son's head, "But it was only recently that the tides began to move again."
Garrett untucked himself from Artemus' chest to look up at his father questioningly, Artemus smiled gently as he ran a hand through the young boy's hair.
"You can feel it in your bones Garrett, I know you can. Time, the Primal, the very energy we Keepers seek to balance." He whispered, as though sharing a most precious, priceless secret with the child in his lap.
"Before, in the dark ages, it was silent, imagine that for me, briefly."
Garrett could not.
"No one knows how or why the Primal began to shift again Garrett, no one… We know why it stopped, and we know how to keep it flowing smoothly, but we don't know why it was returned."
"If the Sneak Thief made the Primal go away... Does that make him bad?" Garrett asked quietly, nervously...
"Artemus sighed softly as he tucked a thumb beneath Garrett's chin, tilting the young boy's head back so he could look at his son properly.
"What the Sneak Thief did was a necessary evil Garrett... He did what no one else wanted or was willing to do."
Garrett frowned slightly at that.
"But... It was still bad, wasn't it?" He asked timidly.
"Not necessarily." Artemus replied simply, "There were many people who cursed the Sneak Thief for his actions... But many, many people would have died had the Sneak Thief hadn't taken action..."
Garrett remained quiet for a small while before asking Artemus something he felt horribly ill-prepared for.
"Will... Am I the Sneak Thief?"
Artemus sighed heavily, dropping his head to press his lips to Garrett's forehead.
"You are my son." Artemus said firmly as he looked down at the boy in his lap.
"But I... I was the Sneak Thief, wasn't I?" He asked nervously./span/p
Artemus paused to consider his words carefully, but upon finding none, he could only offer his boy a slow, solemn nod...
"Does that... Does that make me bad?" Garrett mumbled smally.
"Why would that make you bad?" Artemus asked quickly.
"Because I'm the Sneak Thief."
Artemus cupped the young boy's cheeks, looking between Garrett's eyes quickly before he pressed another kiss to Garrett's forehead.
"You are my son." Artemus repeated, pressing another firm kiss to Garrett's forehead before he continued./span/p
"You may share many, many similarities to the Sneak Thief. But you are your own person, you can make your own choices..." Artemus pulled Garrett as close as he could, holding his son tightly against him.
"You are loved Garrett, never forget that... And Sneak Thief or not, nothing will change this."