Ambient gold illuminated the interior of the train carriage. Yellow flakes drifted through the air, layering over the natural wood and metal surfaces without obscuring their true colors.
A figure stood completely suspended near the door. He resembled a flawless marble statue cast entirely in gold.
Suddenly, the fingers of the statue twitched. A hairline crack formed along the golden surface. The coating began to break away. Small dust particles fell to the floor, followed by larger chunks.
The entire layer of golden marble shattered. The man clad in minimal blue armor stumbled forward and caught his weight against the carriage wall. He drew in ragged, heavy breaths. He opened his eyes, and the golden fragments reflecting in the air met his bright blue irises.
"Heavens," Arthur muttered.
He looked back toward the passenger seats. His familiar oni companion sat completely frozen in a meditative posture. She appeared unharmed, but patches of golden corruption crawled along her exposed skin like rigid scales.
He rushed over and grabbed her shoulders. He shook her firmly, but the physical force did not work. She had fared significantly better than him, likely because the twin moons granted her partial resistance and her ties to this specific town were minimal.
Arthur focused his energy. He channeled his remaining Fate Essence down through his hands and into her frozen body.
The golden scales started to chip. He pulled his hands back quickly to avoid blending their threads of fate.
She already carried his credence, and subjugating her thread entirely carried immense risk. The golden coating finally broke away in a cascade of sharp shards.
Ayame drew a sharp breath.
"Hey, are you alright?" Arthur asked.
She regarded him with a brief look of discomfort before her expression smoothed into absolute indifference.
"Yes. I am," Ayame answered.
Arthur stared at her with a deadpan expression. She had just spent the last several minutes completely locked in physical stasis.
Ayame looked around the cabin, taking a quiet account of what had just occurred.
"How are you uninfected?" she asked.
"I broke through it," Arthur explained. "I do not know exactly how, but I suspect it is because we are parked outside the main settlement of the town."
Ayame offered a single nod.
They exited the train carriage and walked down the tracks toward Port Vexis. They traced the familiar path of the harbor as they entered the town limits.
They intended to search for Lucid. They quickly realized a terrible, deep problem gripped the entire area.
Citizens, stray dogs, and alley cats stood completely frozen in place. Some people moved in small, jagged loops, repeating the exact same phrases over and over.
"What in the world," Arthur said. He surveyed the broken reality around them.
Ayame gave him a questioning look. "Tell me about this domain."
Arthur briefly relayed the information Lucid had shared with him at the gathering and the tavern. He also mentioned the strange rift they had investigated.
"A rift?" Ayame asked. "That is entirely impractical."
Arthur nodded in agreement. They continued down the harbor path and spotted a woman with white hair wearing a blue dress. It was Celeste.
She stood completely frozen, supported by the presence of her frozen minions. She held an elderly man in her arms to keep him from fainting.
The gold trapped them both in stone, capturing a tragic picture resembling a museum art piece.
Arthur broke into a light jog to reach her. Ayame closed the distance with quick, aggressive strides. Her eyes flared red.
She summoned a long blood blade into her hand and raised it high above her head to strike the frozen woman.
"Wait!" Arthur shouted. He pointed firmly at Ayame.
She stopped her swing and shot him a condescending look of absolute disdain.
He did not bother explaining his reasoning to her. He exhaled slowly and placed his hand directly onto Celeste.
He channeled his Fate Essence into her frozen form. As an illuminated, he possessed the capacity to support others and resist the domain of Mercyros to a certain degree.
Celeste budged slightly. Then the golden shell shattered entirely.
She gasped loudly and dropped to her knees on the cobblestone. She looked up and saw the two of them standing over her.
Her face twisted into a mask of visible horror. She opened her mouth, looking as if she were about to scream or hurl a very unpleasant insult at Arthur.
Suddenly, her entire demeanor shifted. She lost eye contact with them completely. Her gaze fell blankly past their shoulders, staring toward a distant point along the harbor.
"Dear visitors," Celeste said.
A gleeful, entirely empty smile stretched across her face.
"You are alright," she announced, speaking as if completely oblivious to the horrific magic ravaging the town.
Ayame stepped past Arthur and the still-kneeling woman in blue. She ignored the frantic, hollow blessings Celeste continued to mutter toward the harbor.
In the center of a shallow puddle of mud lay the prone figure of Lord Cassian Fenwick. His limbs were locked at unnatural angles, his skin glazed over with that same sickening, translucent gold.
Ayame looked back at Arthur. He joined her, though his eyes darted nervously between the frozen lord and the smiling woman behind them.
"What?" Arthur asked, his voice strained. He stepped over the mud to get a better look at Fenwick.
He glanced from the fallen noble to Ayame, then back to the mud. A growing, sharp sensation of unease settled in his gut.
He had known her for some time, yet every encounter felt like peeling back layers of a mask he had never fully understood. He studied her, searching for the telltale signs of the fatigue or the golden scales that had incapacitated him earlier.
"You," he whispered to himself. He had asked this question in the silence of his own mind countless times. "What exactly are you?"
She was not an illuminated. At least, that was the assumption he had operated under since they first crossed paths.
He recalled the conversation she had with the witness back at the tavern, where she claimed to possess a latent trait inherited from a forgotten bloodline. She had insisted she was a non-illuminated, yet she stood here, completely untouched by a domain that had turned the rest of the city into statues. Ordinary humans did not resist this kind of physical erosion. It was impossible.
If she was truly human, she was the most resilient specimen he had ever encountered.
Ayame seemed to read the suspicion etched into his expression.
"I am an illuminated of the awakened stage," she said, her voice devoid of any pretense. "I conquered the prerequisite of a delta rift while we were here in Port Vexis."
Arthur froze. His mouth hung open, his eyes widening until the light reflected painfully in them. A delta rift carried a mortality rate approaching seventy percent.
He knew she possessed strength, but he had barely survived a similar trial himself, and he had spent days suppressing the volatile powers granted by the mother fate afterward. To conquer a delta rift and keep it hidden was not just impressive.
It was an astonishing, almost terrifying feat.
"I... I did not know," he stammered. The gaps in his knowledge of her suddenly felt like canyons. "Why did you not tell us?"
She offered a simple, indifferent shrug. "Impractical."
Arthur shook his head, a bitter laugh escaping him. He looked at the lord in the mud, then back at Ayame. The way she moved, the way she seemed to know exactly how to navigate the golden corruption without a second thought—it all looked too practiced.
"Can you channel fate essence into Fenwick?" Arthur asked, his voice hardening. "We need to verify if it is truly the illuminated who can resist this, or if there is something else at play."
Ayame shook her head, her gaze drifting toward the horizon. "I do not touch humans who are inferior to me."
Arthur stood up straight, his hands clenching at his sides. The closeness they had shared—the way she always seemed to know where he was, the way she had appeared at his side in the carriage—suddenly felt less like camaraderie and more like surveillance.
'She knew,' Arthur thought, the suspicion burning bright. 'She knew about the rift, she knew about the state of the town, and she knew I would be the one to break the seal.'
He looked at her profile. She was composed, steady, and entirely too calm for someone standing in a city of statues. He felt like a pawn that had only just realized the game board was rigged.
"You and Lucid," Arthur said, his tone dropping into a low, accusatory register. "You both have a habit of omitting the most vital information until the moment the world starts ending. It is a strange coincidence, how often you find yourselves in the center of these divine messes.
Are you following him, Ayame? Or are you just making sure that whatever you are hunting stays on your leash?"
Ayame did not turn to face him. She kept her eyes locked on the horizon, her silhouette sharp against the fading, golden light.
"You are wasting your breath on paranoia, Arthur," she said, her voice cool and clinical. "If I wanted you dead, you would have stayed in that carriage."
Arthur watched her, his doubt deepening into a cold, hard knot. He looked at the way she stood—too poised, too ready.
He realized then that he did not know if she was an ally who had finally shown her true colors, or a threat that had simply decided he was not yet worth the effort of erasing. He reached for his own essence, feeling the hum of his connection to the mother fate, and wondered if, for the first time, he was standing in the presence of someone who saw through the very nature of his power.