Each step felt like a massive leap through the sand, the soft grains making that familiar squelching sound beneath his boots, the sun had fully set and the twin moons were up, their pale light casting long shadows across the harbor, and that just made it all feel like impending doom. Pilt walked with measured purpose, his mind already racing ahead, calculating, assessing, preparing.
The sun had fully set. The twin moons were up.
Pilt did not find them beautiful. He found them useful for visibility and deeply annoying as a reminder that time continued passing regardless of his preferences on the matter.
'Mira,' he thought, climbing the creaking wooden stairs toward the complex. The railing shifted slightly under his hand and he released it immediately. 'Still a colleague. Still presumably in this forsaken town. Presumably.'
He opened the door.
The hinges announced him to the entire harbor.
Paperwork lay scattered across the floor in a spread that suggested sudden movement rather than carelessness. Someone had crossed the room quickly and disturbed the desk in the process. Pilt registered this before he registered anything else, which was the correct order of priority.
Then he registered everything else.
Blood. Considerable amounts of it. Arranged across the center of the floor in a deliberate arc, not spilled but drawn, each line placed with enough care to suggest the person doing it had time and intention on their side. In the middle of the arrangement sat candles burning with purple flames that produced no smoke and very little heat, which meant they were not ordinary candles in any meaningful sense.
Pilt stood in the doorway for a moment without entering further.
'The price,' he thought. The words arrived flat and certain, without the weight of surprise behind them.
He stepped inside and crouched beside the blood, studying the placement before touching it. The arc was consistent in width throughout its length. Whoever drew it had used a single instrument without pausing. Efficient. Practiced. Not a panicked arrangement and not an improvised one.
He pressed two fingers into the nearest line and brought them to his mouth.
Metallic. Rich. A specific weight to the taste that had nothing to do with human blood and everything to do with livestock.
Goat blood.
He stood and looked around the room properly.
Valen would have reacted by now. Would have raised his voice, drawn a crowd, leveraged the sympathy of whoever was within earshot to compensate for whatever he lacked in terms of actual solutions. That was Valen's method and it worked well for Valen's purposes.
Pilt operated differently. Pilt operated alone, moved fast, and did not allow a problem to extend past its natural window before closing it. The principle had not failed him yet. He saw no reason to abandon it over goat blood and decorative candles.
He did not light a candle. The moonlight through the window was sufficient, and illuminating the room from inside would tell anyone watching from the harbor that the premises were occupied again.
His deja vu activated without effort, his awareness splitting briefly across several parallel versions of the next thirty seconds. He watched himself check the desk, the drawers, the space beneath the overturned chair near the window. He pulled back from the vision and began moving through those same actions in sequence, letting the foreknowledge compress the time it would have otherwise taken.
His eyes fell on the coat hanger.
It was tilted. Not fallen. Tilted, which was a specific and informative angle of displacement. Things fell when they were knocked. They tilted when they were thrown and caught against something on the way down.
He pictured the chair opposite the table near the window, the position it occupied in the room, the angle it faced. He had sat in that chair himself during the weeks he'd worked this territory as Valen, handling paperwork with the window at his back and the door in his sightline. Whoever had been sitting there during whatever happened tonight had been facing the window instead, which meant they had been watching something outside before the situation changed.
He moved to stand beside the chair and checked the shadow the window frame cast across the table surface.
The moon was wrong. Not in position but in relationship to the shadow's angle. The shadow should have fallen at a straight line from the upper left corner of the frame toward the lower right of the table surface. Instead it came in shallow, cutting across from the far left at a low angle.
The coat hanger was always positioned across from the drawers at the room's far edge. It was currently against the far right wall.
Someone had moved it after the altercation and done a careless job of placing it where it normally lived. The attempt at staging was legible, which made it worse than no attempt at all.
'It was thrown,' Pilt concluded, studying the slight gouge in the plaster where the hanger's hook had connected with the wall before dropping.
He straightened and raised one hand forward, palm out.
Gold light erupted from his hand and filled the room entirely, blowing out through the window frame in a concentrated burst. A bird launched itself from the wooden ledge outside with an indignant sound. The light tore a visible seam across the air near the room's center, a clean line of displaced reality that hung for two seconds before collapsing inward.
'Someone cast a temporary domain inside this room,' he noted. 'Not a large one. Contained and targeted.'
A pale arm wrapped around his collar from behind, the grip controlled and deliberate rather than desperate.
A voice arrived close to his ear. Feminine. Each word placed with uncomfortable precision.
"The Generous Scoundrel. Is it not."
Pilt caught the figure's reflection in a shard of broken mirror near the baseboard. He took in what he needed from the image and did not bother replying.
"Where is the Ring of principles."
He said nothing.
"I saw you inside that domain. Our leader survived. We survived."
The voice carried distortion underneath it, a layered quality that did not belong to a human throat working normally.
"Where. Is. The Ring. Of Principles."
"How the hell is a wretch like you still alive," Pilt said.
He turned in the same motion, catching the cloaked figure by the throat with one hand as gold light ignited inside his palm. It detonated outward with a compressed, directional force.
The figure burst apart into scattered into blood amd bone fragments.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then something began in the center of the blood arrangement on the floor. Not a figure arriving. Something growing. The blood in the arc darkened and pulled inward toward the circle's center as though being drawn through a drain. The candles flared simultaneously, their purple flames tripling in height before stabilizing. The air inside the circle thickened, pressure building visibly in the way heat haze moves above stone in summer.
A form condensed inside it. As though a body was assembling itself from locally available materials, building outward from a fixed internal point. Pale skin stretched over structure that solidified underneath it in stages, corruption threading through the new tissue in purple lines that cracked and sealed and cracked again as the process completed itself.
She stood inside the circle fully formed, her head hanging forward. Purple hair. Purple eyes, already open and already fixed on him before her spine had finished straightening. The cracks along her neck ran up her cheek in a branching pattern that looked like a dry riverbed seen from height.
She snapped her head sideways and grinned at him, the expression landing wrong on her face because the muscles producing it were new and hadn't learned what they were for yet.
Pilt walked forward and wiped blood from his cheek with the back of his hand.
"Oh dusk," she said. Her hand went to her head. "Oh the eternal. Oh dusk" She rocked forward, repeating it, the words losing shape with each iteration.
"You people are a disease," Pilt said, stopping a few paces in front of her. "You guys are just diseases, same copy of the rightful owner. Tell me, did she give you the same proportion size as her tits?"
Her head snapped upward.
Her stomach churned. Dark fluid bubbled up beneath the skin, spreading outward through the corruption lines as her frame expanded, the new body she'd grown already being discarded in favor of something larger. The ceiling connected with the nape of her neck as she rose, forcing her head forward at an angle that would have been fatal to anything with a conventional spine.
She filled the room's upper half with the sound of wet structural failure working in several directions simultaneously.
"Consume," she said. The human voice was buried now under layers of something older. "Consume. Oh pain. Consume."
"One word," Pilt said. "You were given an entire mouth and you came up with one word."
He peeled his remaining glove off. Both hands glowed gold in the dimness, fate essence sitting visible beneath the skin.
He activated his deja vu fully and let the possibilities run. His thirty second vision opened across his awareness, branching and collapsing as he assessed each thread. He saw the outcomes that ended badly, dismissed them without ceremony, and followed the thread where the heavy drawer from the desk caught the creature across the top of its bent head at the precise moment its weight shifted forward.
He wasn't finished.
He focused on that thread. Allocated the fate essence toward it. Pulled it into the present.
The creature walked forward exactly as he had seen it do.
He answered that movement by doing nothing at all, which was its own kind of action.
suddenly a drawer fell across the creature's skull with a sound like a plank dropped on stone. The impact threw its weight sideways, momentum carrying it off its intended line.
"I see what happens before it happens," Pilt said. "And before you develop any ideas about trying anyway, I want you to consider what that means for every option currently available to you."
The creature flailed its arms outward, both of them sweeping through the space where furniture had been. Pilt stepped forward, inside the arc of the nearest limb, positioned himself at the angle he had already watched himself take, and kicked with his full weight behind it.
The creature went through the wall.
Not into it. Through it — The exterior boards gave way in a shower of splinter and dust and the creature continued outward into open air before gravity reestablished its opinion on the matter. It landed near the shoreline below with the considerable noise of mass meeting wet sand at an unplanned angle.
Pilt stood at the opening where the wall had been. Sea air came through immediately, carrying salt and the distant sound of water moving against the harbor pilings.
He rolled his neck slowly.
The deja vu was useful. It was also not unlimited. Thirty seconds of vision like the usual. But there was twist... Pilt was the owner of one of the greatest corporation in the scattered realms, it meant he had a lot of collective faith, as well as temporary bought mandates.
Only when he focused the fate essence toward a specific future he'd already identified. The more better were the chances of that specific future to manifest. But it was expensive both in concentration and fate essence after all, everything is a transaction. His vision included.
"I like to call it the Mandate of Future Investment. Your gaze pierces possibility itself, making one chosen future far more likely to come to pass."
Not everything he saw was guaranteed. He knew this better than anyone. He had followed certain threads before and watched them diverge anyway, the present insisting on its own version of events despite his interference. The vision showed probability, not certainty. The distinction mattered like always.
He looked down at the creature dragging itself across the sand below. The twin moons reflected off the dark water behind it, twin silver circles broken into pieces by the movement of the harbor.
"This is going to be a long night," he said.
He reached into his coat for the lighter, lit another cigarette while he descended the stairs without rushing. Walking toward the shoreline with the measured pace of someone who had already decided how the next several minutes would go and was simply allowing time to catch up.
"There are no problems. Only solutions."
"That's my company Motto..."
He reminded himself and kept walking.