The cold tea sat on the table between them and neither of them moved it.
Karmen stood and went to the window. He stood there with his back to the room, looking at the courtyard below, and the silence that came with that was not uncomfortable so much as it was deliberate, the silence of someone who was deciding how much of a thing to say before saying it.
"When you first arrived in Tyriana," he said, "I had a choice to make. And I made it before you could say a single thing that would have changed it."
Lucid did not respond, he noticed something in his hand.
"I have studied in Vex Academy for longer than most people stay," Karmen continued, his voice even. "I know Frederick from those years. I know what certain kinds of people look like when they arrive in a place they do not understand. There is a specific quality to it. The way they move through a room without reading the room. The way they ask about things that everyone in a settled community stops thinking to ask about, because the answers are already in the walls."
He turned from the window and read the book in his hand it sounded peronal. "Rifts and fate essence. The nature of Mother Fate. What an Unfaithful is and why it matters. You asked about all of it with the directness of someone who genuinely did not know, and nobody in any territory of the Scattered Realms, even the most desolate settlement, reaches adulthood without knowing what a rift is. They do not have to understand the mechanics. They simply know. The way a person knows what rain is."
Lucid was quiet.
"Where I come from," Karmen said, moving back toward the table, "people knew different things. I grew up in a place that did not have rifts. Did not have fate essence. Did not have Unfaithful or Monoliths or any of the architecture this world runs on." He pulled his chair out and sat. "We had cities. Actual cities, built to last centuries, with roads that could carry thousands of people in machines that moved faster than any horse. We had buildings that touched the sky and stayed there. We had medicine that could repair what this world would consider fatal wounds. We had enough food that the primary problem was not producing it but deciding what to do with what we had already produced."
"Earth," Lucid said.
Karmen looked at him.
"You are describing Earth," Lucid said.
Karmen said nothing for a moment. Then he said, "We had art that people made purely because they wanted to. Not for currency or survival or to impress anyone with authority over them. Because they wanted to. We had people who chose their work based on what they were interested in, not what their bloodline permitted. We had integrity as a concept that people argued about seriously, as though it was something that could be defined and achieved, not just invoked."
He went back to the window. He put one hand on the frame and looked down at the courtyard.
"And in one day," he said. "One month. One event that moved too fast for anyone to stop. All of it was gone."
The room was quiet. The market noise from the lower district came through faintly, the usual texture of a working morning, entirely unaware of what was being described in this room.
"They had firepower," Karmen said. "Enough of it to end any conventional war before it properly started. Weapons designed for mass deployment, not individual combat. Artillery. Devices that could level entire regions. Enough accumulated military technology to rival Stella."
'What is Stella?' Alice asked inside him, the question arriving with the precise curiosity she used when she genuinely did not know something.
'A civilization,' Lucid thought back. 'In the Scattered Realms. So far ahead of every other faction and territory that the comparison does not hold. They do not participate in the Transcendence. Their Monolith is supposed to be one with them, not separate. They mastered fate resonance technology. They built the golden pathways. The rails.'
'Oh,' Alice said.
Karmen turned from the window and leaned forward, closing the distance across the table until his face was close enough that Lucid could see the specific quality of attention in his expression, the kind that had weight behind it.
"Have you never wondered," Karmen said, "why I have been so generous toward you?"
Lucid said nothing.
"You are not some intruder," Karmen said. "I never said you were. I said you were entitled to nothing under the Reclamation Statutes, which is a legal fact and has nothing to do with what I think of you." He straightened. "Now. Either you make some arrangement to compensate this office for the engine and the train, or we are going to have problems."
"Problems," Lucid said.
"Fog face," Karmen said.
He picked up a book from the side table. It was small, the cover dark green, the binding worn at the corners from handling. He opened it to a page near the middle and read aloud.
"From the sacred library, archived under the pilgrimage of the original flame. Where the scattered lands tremble beneath foreign gods and invading forces, one shall carry the light forward. A singular presence, burning without direction, bearing the blood of dominion and of common earth, shall illuminate the rivers with his own urgent blood and carve passage where passage was not. The liberator, bound by purpose not of his own choosing, shall return through fog from a world beyond, and the scattered realms shall remember what it means to be lit from within."
He closed the book.
"The Journey's End," he said. "Author listed as Carpe Diem."
Lucid's eyes moved to the book. Then to Karmen.
"You are not fooling anyone," Karmen said. "You arrived in my town with a face like that and no working knowledge of fate essence or what a rift was, which is not possible for anyone raised anywhere in the Scattered Realms. Anyone. Even the most isolated settlement in the most desolate territory. It is in the water here. It is in the soil. You do not reach your age without knowing."
"How did you know that," Lucid said.
"The town has eyes," Karmen said. "Rebecca. Jane. Bjorn. That librarian in the lower district whose name you probably do not know. I know." He sat on the edge of the table. "You are not fooling anyone."
'How dare he,' Alice said inside him, her voice carrying a formal indignation that had something genuinely affronted underneath it.
Lucid stayed quiet.
Karmen continued. "Now. If I were anyone else, and you had walked into their territory in your current state, the likely outcome would be this. You would be held as an example. Displayed in the town square. Sold to Materna. To the empress. Used as a sacrificial figure, because anyone with a demonstrated connection to Carpe Diem is considered a heretic, not only among organized institutions but among cultists who would otherwise embrace the material. The reality of what could happen to you in the wrong hands is not something I am going to describe in detail, but it is extensive."
The room was very quiet.
Karmen looked at him steadily. "Where on earth are you from."
"The third bastion of Pangaea," Lucid said.
Karmen's expression shifted slightly. It was not surprise. It was the expression of someone updating a calculation that had already been running.
"Have you heard of countries," Karmen said, "like the United States. China. Japan. Russia."
Lucid nodded. "Yes."
"What are they to you?"
"Countries," Lucid said. "From before. History, mostly. Some of them recent history."
Karmen looked at the window again. "They were called the golden age," he said, his voice quieter now, carrying something different in the register. "The peak of what that world managed to build, before everything changed. Before the Calamity's first movement. Before the invasion."
His eyes moved back to Lucid.
"They fell," he said.
Lucid said nothing.
Karmen's eyes had changed. Not in a way that was easy to describe. They had been measuring before. Now they were doing something else, something that was less about calculation and more about recognition, the look of someone standing across from a fact they had suspected for a long time and were now confirming.
The book sat on the table between them, closed, the worn green cover catching the light from the window.
The market noise continued below, unrelated to everything.