The beach took his weight differently at the bottom of the stairs, the wet sand compressing under each step in a way that the wooden boards above had not. Pilt moved toward the creature without rushing, both hands still glowing, the gold light catching the surface of the dark water beyond.
The thing was dragging itself upright again. It had landed badly, one arm bent beneath it at an angle that suggested several things had broken on impact, none of which appeared to be slowing it down in any meaningful way. Purple fluid seeped from the cracks along its torso where the corruption had split under the force of going through the wall.
Pilt watched it rise and activated his deja vu without ceremony.
The thirty second window opened across his awareness. He moved through the branching outcomes with practiced efficiency, dismissing the ones that ended with property damage he'd have to explain and the ones that ended with him in the water. He found a thread where the creature overextended its right arm in a lateral sweep and left its center mass entirely open for approximately one and a half seconds.
He allocated the fate essence toward that path and let it settle into the present.
'This is not an Unfaithful,' he noted internally, watching the creature's movements with careful attention. 'Not a Fallen either. This is something else. Someone who went deep enough into corruption that the distinction stopped mattering.'
He had not believed that was possible. He filed the information away without dwelling on it.
The creature swept its arm exactly as he had foreseen. Pilt stepped inside the arc, both palms connecting with its torso simultaneously. Gold light detonated in a compressed burst. The creature left its feet and traveled backward across the sand, landing in a heap that sent wet sand spraying outward in a wide fan.
He straightened and waited.
Then the domain rippled.
Not collapsed. Not simply destabilized. The air itself folded inward, the residual domain energy from whatever had been cast inside the room above losing cohesion all at once and blowing outward across the beach in a wave that flattened the sand around him and made the twin moon reflections on the water shatter and reform.
The creature on the sand went still. Then went dark. The purple light in its eyes extinguished and its form began dissolving at the edges, corruption losing its architecture without the domain to sustain it.
Pilt looked at the space where the wave had originated.
A girl stood in the open sand. Present, as though the collapsing domain had simply revealed her rather than delivered her. She had lush purple hair and purple eyes that caught the moonlight and held it. Dark robes covered most of her frame without completely concealing it, the fabric moving with a faint delay behind her actual movements, as though the air around her was slightly thicker than it should have been.
"You are as they say," she told him, her voice carrying easily across the distance between them despite the sound of water behind him.
Pilt walked toward her without responding.
Her expression remained composed. "Your colleague is well. She is merely serving a temporarily transaction."
He kept walking. His deja vu was already running, already searching the next thirty seconds for the thread he wanted. She did not move to meet him or retreat. She simply stood there, watching him approach with an expression that suggested she found his composure more interesting than threatening.
He raised one hand.
She attempted to move and found she could not. The gold fate essence he had extended outward in a thin, invisible net during his approach had already closed around her position, anchoring her in place. She looked down at her own hands, suspended in a gesture she could not complete, and then looked back up at him.
Her expression shifted into something between surprise and reassessment. "You could have done this minutes ago," she observed. "Which means you waited. Which means you wanted to see what I would do first."
"What did you do to Mira," Pilt said.
She tilted her head within the constraint of what his binding allowed. "Tell me something first. You are the one they call PIlt. The CEO of the second biggest company called Aureate." She studied him with those purple eyes, reading something in his face she seemed to find confirming. "Why. You could have killed me the moment that domain collapsed. So why."
She shook her head.
"Why... are you here in such a measly little town south of vex—"
His voixe cut her out.
"What. Did you do. To Mira," Pilt repeated.
His awakened state was overclocking in overresonance, one of his main drawbacks as pilt.
The golden light no longer just at his hands but threading upward along his forearms, visible through his sleeve fabric. His eyes had taken on the same quality, the irises lit from behind with something that made the darkness around them look darker by contrast.
She looked at the light spreading up his arms with genuine interest rather than fear, which was its own kind of information about what she was dealing with.
"Your colleague," she said, "will serve as the blood through which we intend to dethrone and take what is ours." She paused, then added with careful deliberateness, "The shepherd counts his flock at dusk, yet the one who learns the shepherd's name owns the flock by dawn."
Pilt's eyes widened.
"You cannot," he said.
He clenched his fist, the motion instinctive, fate essence compressing in his palm toward a detonation point.
"You do not mean she is already," he started.
She exploded.
Not from his attack. From within. Blood and the structural contents of whatever she had been carrying inside that form scattered outward across the sand in a radius that reached his shoes and the hem of his coat. The binding held nothing because there was suddenly nothing to hold. Where she had stood, the sand was dark and wet and the air smelled of copper and something older underneath it.
In the last half second before it happened, she had smiled. Not in defiance. In something that looked considerably more like relief.
Pilt dropped to his knees.
The sand took his weight and pressed cold through his trousers. He looked up at the twin moons, then at the dark water, then at the space where she had been standing.
He cursed. Quietly and with feeling and in language that would have cleared a room.
Then he stayed there on his knees for a moment longer than strictly necessary, which was itself unusual enough to matter.
He stood up. Brushed the sand from his coat with hands that had stopped glowing. Looked at the dissolved remnants of the creature further down the beach. Looked at the open wall above where the boarding house sat with night air moving through the gap.
There were no problems. Only solutions.
He reminded himself of this with less conviction than usual and turned back toward the harbor.
***
The town was loud tonight.
He heard it before he reached the main street, voices and laughter and the smell of roasted bread and fried fish drifting from the direction of the tavern where they had been staying before the proprietor had reconsidered.
Every person he had accumulated over the past several weeks occupied various positions across the tavern's main floor. Lucid sat near the center with a cup of something that was visibly not wine. Arthur was at the far end of the bar engaged in what appeared to be a drinking contest with Fenwick, both of them with enough empty cups in front of them to suggest the contest had been running for some time. Ayame sat beside Lucid with nothing in front of her, watching the room with the careful attention of someone cataloguing exits and threats simultaneously, which for her was probably just how she experienced social gatherings. Celeste stood near the window talking to a few locals, her posture carrying more ease when Pilt wasn't around her. Some children from what looked like the local orphanage occupied a corner table with a baker from the lower districts who was cutting something into small pieces and distributing them with the efficient generosity of someone who had been doing this long enough that it required no thought. Even two of the corrupt nobles had appeared, sitting at a side table with accompanying guards, sipping wine with the cautious expressions of people who were not entirely sure they were welcome but had decided to risk it anyway.
The tavern owner appeared at his elbow with an expression that had moved some distance from its previous hostility.
"Back again," the owner said.
"Apparently," Lucid replied, and took a seat.
Across the room, Arthur slammed an empty cup down and Fenwick matched it without visible effort. Arthur's face carried the particular brightness of someone several cups in who had not yet acknowledged that information to themselves. Fenwick looked entirely normal, which was more impressive.
Lucid made a move toward the bar.
Arthur's hand appeared on his shoulder and redirected him back to his seat with the smooth efficiency of someone who had anticipated this and pre-positioned accordingly.
"Let me have one," Lucid said.
"Grape juice," Arthur replied, and returned to his contest.
From somewhere inside Lucid's chest, Alice's voice arrived with characteristic precision. 'My vessel cannot consume it. The interaction between alcohol and the current equilibrium of fate essence within this body would produce effects neither of us would enjoy.'
'Right,' Lucid thought back. 'And if you had a body of your own you would absolutely maintain that same principled position and not immediately find the nearest wine.'
There was a pause of exactly the length required to confirm she had considered the question seriously.
'That is an entirely different circumstance,' she replied.
'Six glasses,' Lucid said internally. 'Minimum. You would have six glasses.'
'I would have,' Alice said, with a dignity that did not quite conceal the implication underneath it, 'conducted myself with appropriate restraint.'
Lucid looked at Ayame, who had somehow acquired a full cup despite having nothing in front of her sixty seconds ago, and was drinking from it with the calm efficiency of someone completing a routine task.
He watched her for a moment.
She did not acknowledge him.
He looked back at his grape juice and resumed drinking it without comment.
Celeste broke from her conversation near the window and crossed toward their table, sitting down across from Lucid with a transition in her expression that moved from the ease of the previous conversation to something more considered.
"When do you depart," she asked.