Weaver woke to black wood under his forearms and a room that did not care that he'd died.
For a heartbeat, his mind did what it always did—tried to locate pain, tried to locate loss, tried to locate the part where the world proved him wrong.
Then he went still.
Not because he was afraid.
Because there was a test to run.
He didn't look at the door. He didn't look at the papers. He didn't even look at the pendant.
He looked inward.
Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. With the same cold attention he'd used to build the wick in the first place—like checking whether a theorem still held when you changed the initial conditions.
There.
A centre.
A pull so subtle it would've been nothing to anyone who hadn't lived the absence. A tension like a string drawn taut inside his abdomen—quiet, absolute, refusing to be imagined away. The wick wasn't a mood. It wasn't a trick of focus. It was structure.
He breathed once, slow.
The Dao answered like it had been waiting behind a door he'd finally built correctly.
It didn't flood. It didn't dazzle.
It returned.
Weaver's lips parted.
A laugh tried to form and died before it could become sound.
So his theory was right.
Not bound to bone. Not coded into muscle. Not something the body "remembered" the way it remembered footwork.
The wick was his now—not Amos's. Not this vessel's inheritance. Not something that vanished when flesh was restarted.
It had come back with him.
Because the reset wasn't resetting him.
It was only… positioning his awareness back at the desk. Rewinding his conscious point of view to the same frame of the same room, as if the world had pinned a camera to this moment and forced him to re-enter it.
His hand went to his chest.
The pendant sat there like a patient parasite.
Heavy.
Quiet.
Ticking like it always had.
And that was the second proof.
If the loop were true time reversal, the pendant would have to rewind too. Its hands would refill. Its mechanism would forget the seconds it had spent being empty.
It didn't.
It never did.
The thought chilled him in a way pain never had.
So the pendant wasn't rolling back reality.
It was dragging his consciousness—his seat of self—back into the same point again and again, while the device continued forward, spending something each time.
A resurrection fee.
A policy clause.
Weaver stared at the desk, the papers, the ink stains from his last triumph and the last betrayal. He felt the wick humming softly beneath the skin of his attention, and he felt the pendant's ticking like a finger tapping on a table.
Two systems.
One inside him that he had forced into existence.
One outside him that was forcing him to spend existence.
Weaver sat up straighter.
Then he smiled.
Because this time he wasn't scrambling.
This time he wasn't guessing.
This time he wasn't hoping for mercy from men who treated uncertainty like infection.
He rested his elbow on the desk.
Tapped a finger against the black wood.
Once.
Twice.
Like counting down.
And waited.
He didn't hide his Tell.
He didn't tidy the papers.
He didn't rehearse a lie.
He just sat there with his wick alive inside him, the air in the room subtly occupied by something that hadn't been there the first four times.
Waiting.
Smiling.
Eventually footsteps came.
Unhurried at first—habitual, confident—then a fraction faster, as if the corridor itself had delivered news ahead of them.
Weaver's smile didn't move.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
The latch clicked.
The door opened.
Darro stepped through first, broad-shouldered, robe hanging loose over readiness. Lin followed, lighter on his feet, eyes already scanning for angles, for tells, for weakness.
Darro spoke, as he always did, because he liked his world to begin with his voice.
"This is a restricted chamber."
Lin added, almost pleasantly, like an echo with teeth.
"No one is meant to be here."
Weaver didn't turn.
He let the words land behind him, let them hang in the air, let the silence stretch long enough to make it feel deliberate.
Then he turned his head slowly.
Not startled. Not defensive.
Like a ruler acknowledging the existence of a clerk.
His eyes—silver, starburst, wrong—settled on them with calm that did not ask permission.
His expression was calm.
His voice was colder than calm.
"You're in the presence of a god," Weaver said, "and you don't kneel."
Lin laughed—sharp, incredulous.
"A god." He glanced at Darro like he needed a witness to the joke. "Hey—did you hear him?"
Lin took a step forward.
Darro stopped him with a hand on his chest.
A flat press. An order without raising his voice.
Darro's eyes didn't leave Weaver's face.
Not the desk.
Not the scattered papers.
Not the pendant.
Weaver.
Darro asked his question the way you humoured a madman while still measuring the distance to a knife.
"What is a god doing," Darro said, "in a secluded private chamber belonging to the Paper Fox Sect?"
Weaver's smile barely moved.
"Fool," he replied.
Darro's jaw tightened.
Weaver's gaze sharpened by a degree.
"You dare question a god."
He rose slowly.
Not with a fighter's flinch—no sudden violence, no fear-impulse.
Just an uncoiling—deliberate, controlled— like a law standing up to be read aloud.
Darro and Lin both shifted into stances. Weight balanced. Hands ready. Eyes hard.
An attack never came.
Weaver just stared at them.
The silence stretched.
Then Weaver spoke, soft, almost conversational.
"Still… I'm in a forgiving mood today."
A beat.
"So, I'll leave your lives up to fate."
He tilted his head.
"Would you like to play a game?"
Lin laughed again, relief and contempt braided together. He patted Darro's shoulder like this was entertainment now.
"He's really crazy. Hey, did you hear him? A game."
Darro didn't look at Lin.
"What's the game?" he asked, cautious despite himself.
Weaver slid a hand into his robe pocket.
When he opened his palm, a single coin lay there—worn smooth, edges dulled by years of touch. The swan-stamp was faded but unmistakable: a bird mid-flight, wings cut sharp enough to look like a blade.
"Heads," Weaver said, "or tails."
His father had played this game.
Frequently.
Not as chance—never as chance.
On the days men were meant to die, his father would gather the criminals on death row and make them stand in a neat line in a courtyard washed clean for the occasion. He'd hold up a coin like it was scripture and smile like a benevolent judge.
Fairness, he'd call it.
Mercy.
Heads, you live.
Tails, you die.
The criminals always played. What else did you do when the rope was already measured?
They guessed like gamblers and prayed like believers.
But it was entertainment to his father. The result never mattered. If they won, he would invent a reason later. If they lost, the sentence would simply arrive on time.
A coin was a perfect disguise for cruelty—because it let the man flipping it pretend the universe had made the decision.
Weaver's throat tightened.
And then his mind did something quiet and vicious.
But I am not him.
Weaver held the coin out.
Lin snorted.
"Go on then," Lin said, grinning. "Heads."
Weaver nodded once.
Then flicked the coin.
It spun up into the lanternlight, flashing gold-black-gold fast enough that the swan became a circle of wings.
It hit the desk.
Ticked once.
Settled.
Tails.
Weaver looked at it for a beat, as if verifying the outcome like a scientist checking a repeatable result.
Then he looked up at Lin and smiled politely.
"Would you like me to do it," Weaver asked, "or you?"
Lin's grin faltered.
"Like hell I'd ev—"
He never finished.
Weaver moved.
It wasn't speed like before. It wasn't "fast."
It was unfair.
One moment his hand was empty at his side.
The next it was through Lin's face.
Not a strike.
An intrusion—copied from the way they had killed him, executed with a strength Lin had never forced himself to imagine.
Weaver had intended precision.
He overextended.
Half his arm disappeared into Lin's skull with an ugly wet finality.
Weaver blinked once, eyes widening—not in horror, in clinical surprise.
"Ah," he murmured. "I overdid it."
Darro's head turned slowly, like his mind refused to accept the angle reality had taken.
Weaver retracted his hand with controlled patience, as if pulling it out of mud.
Lin's body collapsed.
Hit stone.
Went still.
Blood spread with calm confidence.
Darro fell to his knees.
Not because his legs had failed.
Because his certainty had.
"Wait—please—" Darro's words broke apart, spilling out raw. "Please—"
Weaver stared at him.
Then, in the same calm tone, asked:
"Heads or tails?"
Darro shook his head hard.
"No. Please. I don't want to play."
Weaver crouched beside him—close enough that Darro could see the starburst pattern in his eyes properly.
"Heads," Weaver repeated, softly, "or tails."
Darro's breathing turned ragged.
His eyes flicked to Lin's corpse, then back to Weaver's face.
"…Heads," he whispered, voice shaking.
Weaver flipped the coin again.
It spun.
Fell.
Settled.
Heads.
Weaver looked at the result, then slid the coin back into his pocket like filing a document.
He rose.
And smiled down at Darro with something that almost resembled kindness—until you looked at it too long.
"Don't worry, Darro," Weaver said. "Seems fate's on your side."
Darro stared up, shaking.
Was this really a god?
How did he know his name—
There was no echo coming from him.
No external rule bleeding into the air from Darro or Lin.
Though there was a subtle insistence in the air, like the space itself had learned a new posture in Weaver's presence.
Darro swallowed.
Weaver turned toward the door.
Hand on the frame.
He glanced back once—at Darro kneeling beside Lin's body, alive by coin toss, breathing like he'd been dragged through hell and handed a receipt.
Weaver's smile stayed in place.
Then he opened the door and walked out.
Leaving Darro behind with a single unbearable thought:
The coin had landed heads—
and for the first time in Darro's life, it might have actually mattered.