Karmen set the book aside and was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of someone collecting their thoughts. The quiet of someone deciding how much of a thought to share.
"Terra," he said. "That is what some scholars in the Scattered Realms call it. The rumored civilization. The fallen one. Most dismiss it as myth because the evidence is fragmentary and the fragments contradict each other. But the fragments that do align describe something that should not have been possible given what we understand about how civilizations develop under fate resonance pressure."
Lucid waited.
"Freedom," Karmen said. "Not as a political concept. As a structural feature of daily life. You could move between occupations. Not just between regions, between ways of living. A person could spend their first twenty years doing one thing and then stop and do something else. There were systems that allowed for that. Supported it. And there were elections, meaning ordinary people with no enlightened rank and no lineage could determine who governed them. On a schedule. Repeatedly. And if the person governing did a poor job, the mechanism to remove them was already built into the structure."
'That sounds like chaos,' Alice said inside him.
Lucid did not respond to her.
"There were oceans," Karmen said. "Larger than anything in the Scattered Realms. Mountains that had not been named by any ruling house because they predated every ruling house by enough time to make the naming feel absurd. Cars, which were personal transport vehicles that did not require fate essence or a conductor. Anyone could own one. Anyone could operate one after a period of instruction."
"I know what cars are," Lucid said.
Karmen looked at him.
"I know what smartphones are," Lucid said. "And the internet. And television. And elections. And oceans." He paused. "I know what manga is."
"Then you understand what was lost."
"I understand what you think was lost," Lucid said. "I was born after all of it. My parents were born after most of it. My grandparents' parents might have seen the last of the Golden Era. By the time I existed, the only thing anyone remembered was that it had been better once, which is not the same as having it."
Karmen did not argue that point.
"I was born in the Epoch of Nihilism," Lucid said. The words came out flat, not performed. Just accurate. "After the Calamity tore through. It did not just bring Unfaithful through with it. It broke the structure. Space and time moved wrong for a period that nobody agrees on the length of, and when it settled, what was left was not anything like what the records described."
'What is the Epoch of Nihilism,' Alice asked, her voice carrying genuine curiosity underneath the formal register.
'War without the concept of enemies,' Lucid thought back. 'Common threat made everyone's worst enemy irrelevant. Humans who had spent generations killing each other stopped because the Calamity was worse than any of that. But it did not make them peaceful. It made them desperate. Newborns were separated from mothers in the early years because the settlements could not support dependents that could not contribute. If you survived long enough to be useful, you stayed. If you did not, the math said otherwise.'
'That is terrible,' Alice said.
'It was Tuesday,' Lucid thought.
"The television," Lucid said aloud, looking at the window. "Reality shows. Sports with scheduled seasons and records that accumulated over decades. Books printed in enough copies that ordinary people owned them. The internet, which was a connected information system that anyone with the right device could access from anywhere." He stopped. "None of that existed where I grew up. I know what those things were from fragments. Archives. The same way you know about Terra."
Karmen was listening with the focused attention of someone who had been looking for a specific piece of information for a long time.
"The ocean existed," Lucid said. "Reduced. The coastlines had shifted. The mountains existed. Renamed by whoever had claimed them most recently. Cars existed in some settlements but fuel was contested, which meant they existed in theory more than practice. Smartphones existed in a form that worked intermittently depending on what infrastructure had survived in a given region." He looked back at Karmen. "The manga I had was thirty years old and missing the last four volumes."
'I want to know what manga is,' Alice said.
'Later,' Lucid thought.
Karmen leaned back in his chair. Something in his expression had moved from calculation to something that was not quite sympathy but was adjacent to it. "You never had the Golden Era," he said.
"No one I know had it," Lucid said. "We had stories about it. The way you have stories about Terra."
A silence settled between them that was different from the earlier ones. Less pressured.
Then Karmen straightened and set both hands on the table. "The train," he said.
Lucid's expression shifted.
He stood up from the chair.
"The Lyle Dreams belongs to the Tyriana administrative estate," Karmen said, his voice returning to the measured precision he used for formal statements. "That has not changed in the last ten minutes."
"I heard you the first time."
"Then sit down."
"I will stand."
Karmen looked at him. "The companions you traveled with. Frederick. The oni. Valen, or whatever he is calling himself. The exposure they experienced during the journey, the encounters, the danger, the structural collapse at Port Vexis, none of that was in any itinerary I provided. None of it was requested or anticipated."
"Which means it was not your responsibility," Lucid said.
"Which means," Karmen said, "that I am aware of what it cost. I did not plan for the narwhal. I did not plan for what happened in the south of Vex. I did not design the circumstances that put the people traveling with you in the positions they ended up in. And I am aware of that."
'He is doing something,' Alice said inside him. 'He is not conceding anything but he is acknowledging something. Those are not the same.'
'I know,' Lucid thought.
'Do you? Because you are about to say something aggressive and I want to register that I think you should wait.'
Lucid did not say anything.
Karmen continued. "I pity what occurred. Not in a way that transfers ownership of the train. But genuinely. The journey produced outcomes I did not intend and would not have chosen. Your companions did not sign a document agreeing to any of it."
"Neither did I," Lucid said.
"You are an Intruder of the Sacred Age," Karmen said. "Which means your situation is categorically different from your companions, and you know that."
'That keeps coming up,' Alice observed. 'He uses it like a structural argument. Not a threat. He is saying that your status in this world predetermines certain obligations regardless of consent.'
'I know what he is saying,' Lucid thought.
'I know you know. I am saying it because you are angry and when you are angry your listening degrades.'
Lucid looked at Karmen. Karmen was looking back at him with the specific expression of someone who had already resolved the argument internally and was waiting for the other person to arrive at the same resolution.
"You pity what happened," Lucid said.
"Yes."
"To my companions specifically."
"To the situation generally. Your companions specifically, yes."
"But the train is still yours."
"The train was always mine," Karmen said. "The pity is real. Those two things coexist."
Lucid sat back down.
He was still angry. He could feel it sitting behind his sternum in the specific way it sat when there was no clean place to direct it, when the argument was structurally closed and he had not lost it so much as been redirected away from winning it.
'He is not wrong,' Alice said.
'I know he is not wrong,' Lucid thought.
'And yet.'
'And yet,' Lucid agreed.
Karmen picked up the green book from the table and set it to one side. He folded his hands in front of him. The room smelled of the tea that had gone cold and faintly of the pastry stalls below, the same oil, the same warmth coming through the window at the same angle it had been coming through all morning.
"The companions," Lucid said. "If the train is yours, what do they get?"
Karmen was quiet for a moment. "What do you think is fair?"
"I think fair is not a concept you are particularly bound by."
"That is not untrue," Karmen said. "Ask the question properly and I will answer it properly."
Lucid looked at the window. At the courtyard outside, flat and quiet. At the covered doll on the side table that had not moved since Karmen switched it off but which he kept being aware of anyway.
"What do they get," Lucid said. "For what they went through."
Karmen considered this. "Something proportional," he said. "To what occurred."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only one I have right now." He paused. "It will become a more specific answer by the time you leave this room."
Lucid looked at him.
"You have my word," Karmen said, with the particular tone of someone who understood exactly how much that was worth and was offering it anyway.
'Is his word worth anything,' Alice asked.
Lucid thought about the book. About the eleven years at Vex Academy. About the town with its eyes and its unchanged pastry supplier and its unremarkable lamp posts that were almost evenly spaced.
'Probably,' he thought back. 'In its way.'
He sat in the chair and looked at the cold tea and did not pick it up.