The last night of the twentieth century glittered like a promise everyone had decided to believe in.
Astaria wore its festival lights like armor: strings of glass orbs threaded down avenues, paper lanterns bobbing against the low clouds, neon swallowing the darkness in friendly gulps. Somewhere in the city, somebody set off a firework that burst into a sound like distant glass breaking. The hour smelled of gunpowder and roasted chestnuts and the cheap perfume of optimism. On nights like this, people pretended the future could be rearranged with cheers and confetti.
They had every right to pretend.
Near the old shrine on the city's less-crowded edge, the pretense felt fragile in a different way. The shrine's stone steps were slick with evening mist and age. A couple walked down the path hand in hand—Rohart, tall and careful, his long French coat catching the wind; Alicia, luminous even under a heavy fur, the soft roundness of her belly unmistakable beneath her coat. They laughed in low curlicues, traded jokes that meant nothing on their own but everything to the other. Between them moved a kind of small, private gravity: contentment so plain it almost had a sound.
On the bench across from them, a man in a black formal suit sat as if he had been carved from the shadow itself. He was not merely alone—he was a cutout of solitude, edges sharp, hands clenched in the pockets of a jacket that had seen better winters. His eyes tracked the couple with something very like hunger, or like the record of a wound being touched. When he breathed, the bench seemed to listen.
The world could be measured in moments. Some are full of light; some fold into themselves like paper.
The man in black pushed himself up. The motion was clumsy, sudden. He came at Alicia with the awkward speed of someone trained in little and terrified of nothing. His foot connected with her abdomen not like a calculated strike but like a confession. The sound it made—small, humiliating—was lost under the city's celebrations.
Rohart moved as if something pulled him by the spine. There was no thought, only motion: a heel hooking out, a body collapsing to the pavement, a man in black crumpling with blood already staining his collar. It was impossible for blood to be there before; yet it was there—old, dried, like a memory finally showing itself.
Alicia's hand went instinctively to her belly. Her face drew into an expression where the light of laughter went out and something deeper, far older, came in. "It hurts," she said, and her voice was small enough to be private.
Rohart did not hesitate. He scooped her up—stiff, efficient, like a soldier lifting a comrade—and began to run. The shrine receded. The festival lights smeared into streaks. He told her things that were truths thin as glass: Don't worry. I'm right here. Hold on. The words were urgent, needless, everything at once.
Then the world slid and a hush fell—not the hush of silence but of a room suddenly full of people who had stopped pretending the play was cheerful. Alicia's eyes opened and did not register. They were empty windows. Her lips were parted and still. Rohart's breath hitched. The scream that followed was animal and precise; it split the false cheer of New Year's and left a raw, honest wound.
A hand touched Rohart's shoulder before he could understand its presence. He spun. The man from the bench stood there, blood on his sleeve, expression calm in a way that made calm feel like a threat.
Rohart's hands found the man's collar without him thinking. Rage arrived as a language he knew better than hope. "Why?" His voice was a cliff-face. "Why did you do this? Why her? I'll—" The rest of his sentence dissolved into the night.
The man let Rohart rage; he let the anger burn itself out. "I can save her," he said when the space between breaths allowed it.
Those words were trivial and seismic at once. Rohart did not lower his fist. "Then do it," he said, because the world was a bargain and all his bargains had always been about doing.
The man touched Alicia's forehead with a fingertip. His voice muttered something too low to carry, a syllabic stitch. The night inhaled. From his chest a darkness like ink uncoiled—not merely absence but intention made visible. It slipped like smoke, precise and hungry, and entered Alicia as if following a secret map.
Her eyelids fluttered. Color—too pale, but color—returned to her cheeks. Rohart's rigid features cracked into a laugh that was half relief and half fear. He held her closer, as if the weight of returning life might shift again.
The man who had saved her remained unmoved. "No," he said, and the single word was not denial but correction. "She is not well. Not in the way you want."
A name settled from his chest with the same casual burden as a stone dropped into water. "Kiwan," he said. "A creator."
The name itself would have been enough to make lesser people leave. It carried implications painstaking as heraldry: someone who altered the ledger of life, someone who could—by choice or accident—tip the balance between existence and silence. But the shrine steps took no offense at titles. Only the wind listened.
Kiwan's eyes held something fatigue-shaped. "I was human once," he said. "And I am not now." He did not ask for belief. He did not ask for forgiveness. He merely placed the sentence down like a fact.
Rohart's fingers dug more tightly into fabric. "You did this," he said. "You struck her."
"A hallucination," Kiwan admitted, speaking with a tired simplicity. "Or a failing. I do not know which is kinder. What I do know is this: the child within her was fated to die tonight by a road accident. I exchanged my life energy for his. He will live. She will not—after giving birth, she will die."
The world grew smaller around that sentence. In the distance, a bell chimed midnight as if the hour wanted to cleanse itself of consequence. Rohart's hand shook. Fury and gratitude braided into something grotesque and new. "You—why our son?" he demanded. "Why not both? Why not—"
"Fate sets ledgers," Kiwan said. He spoke as if reciting weather. "I altered one entry. I have, perhaps, a month of my own left. After that, I will pass. I offer what remains to him now. I have no one else to give it to."
He lifted his hand, and a thing the night had no right to hold appeared: a butterfly, small as a heartbeat, its wings not made of dust but of light bent into glass. It hovered above his palm and gleamed with an intelligence that was neither kind nor cruel. "Skies," Kiwan called it. "She chooses creators. She is drawn to those she deems worthy. If this child, in time, reaches the threshold—if he attains what I once attained—Skies will come to him. She will grant power according to merit."
"Worthy?" Alicia asked, i.e., they both asked. It was a simple, human question—simple enough to be dangerous.
Kiwan's smile was wan. "Worthy is not a title," he said. "It is a measure. To earn it, one must exceed. Exceed power, exceed growth, exceed whatever boundary ties the soul to mere mortality. He will learn more when he has cause to learn. For now, know only this: a debt has been paid with my life. A life has been spared. The balance is set. The rest is the world's business."
Rohart stared at the butterfly, at the man, at the baby who, for all that had happened, still lodged in the dark of Alicia's belly. Somewhere in the city a bottle shattered in jubilation. A child, five blocks away, laughed; a couple kissed. The ordinary world did not pause because ledgers shifted in secret.
They did not know then what the narrator would later insist upon: bargains made in the shadow of celebration are the kind that stain decades. They could not know the precise ways a saved life will pull threads and tangle others. They only held, for a breath, the wobbling, fragile truth that someone they loved lived and that someone else had given his days for it.
Kiwan folded his hands as if he had finished a prayer. "You don't need to know more tonight," he said. "You cannot carry everything. The child will discover what is necessary when he is ready."
He stepped back into the shadow. The butterfly lingered for a heartbeat—an omen or an emblem, depending on who would tell the story later—then vanished like a promise that never intended to be gentle.
Rohart pressed his forehead to Alicia's, both of them listening to a world that had, irrevocably, changed. Somewhere above, the clouds swallowed the last of the fireworks' smoke. The year turned, and with it, some small ledger shifted from bright to dark.