"Remember — notify me."
One last reminder, and Bernadette dissolved into tiny bubbles and was gone.
Klein Moretti held his rigid posture for another ten minutes before the tension finally left him all at once and he toppled backward onto the sofa, breathing out a long, slow breath.
That had been extraordinarily stressful. If he'd managed to complete the ritual and go Above the Fog, would she have noticed? He had no idea. But he knew enough to understand the stakes — the grey fog was a treasure of enormous value, and if a high-Sequence extraordinary discovered that a rank amateur had somehow come to possess it, the consequences were easy to imagine.
Still.
His gaze drifted to the stack of banknotes on the desk, and a light came into his eyes. He crossed to it in three quick strides and snatched it up.
Five hundred pounds.
He pressed his face into the notes and inhaled the particular smell of money with deep, uncomplicated satisfaction. With this, the family was genuinely clear of poverty.
The joy, unfortunately, didn't last long.
Klein Moretti sank back into thought. When Sealed Artefact 2-049 arrived and the Night Watchmen tracked down that notebook — did he actually intend to notify her? Was the notebook truly all she was after? And — the most pressing question — was tonight's visit something he should report to Captain Dunn?
He took less than a second to decide.
Of course he was reporting it. What kind of question was that?
Bernadette left Klein Moretti's building and returned to Caesar's Restaurant in Backlund. A room was always kept for her there, its furnishings arranged to her taste — not so different from the captain's quarters on the Dawn, or from her bedroom in Emerald City.
She opened a bottle of beer, took several long swallows, and sat for a while thinking about the evening.
If she hadn't happened to run into that girl tonight, she would never have known that the man had done something like that during the first exchange. She could imagine the girl's expression — the bewilderment, the sense of unfairness — when a stranger she'd tried to help had calmly walked away, leaving her to face the consequences.
Bernadette took another sip and let herself wonder: was that really just coincidence?
In the extraordinary world, what passed for coincidence usually came down to one of two explanations: some high-Sequence player arranging events, or the law of extraordinary affinity — like drawing to like.
Her fingers traced the surface of the bottle slowly. Her blue eyes went deep, then cleared again. It doesn't feel arranged.
Then — affinity?
But the girl was plainly an ordinary person, and her brother was a Divination Pathway practitioner. There was no obvious reason for either of them to draw toward a Fool on the Peek-Wiseman Pathway, unless there was something else in play she hadn't seen yet.
She set the bottle down gently. Something to watch.
For now, more immediately on her mind was tomorrow's gathering.
The gathering hosted by a certain Fallen Creator.
The next day. Monday.
After breakfast, Bernadette returned to Emerald City — it was safer there, whatever the unknown qualities of the afternoon ahead.
The hours passed quietly. When the hands of her pocket watch approached two fifty-eight in the afternoon — Loen time — Bernadette reached into the hidden compartment and took out the Visionary's Frontlet, set with what appeared to be tiny diamonds, and placed it on her brow.
In an instant, her body and soul alike became something else: a living stream of information and knowledge, each thread of it simultaneously herself — each thread her entirely, and none of them complete.
She moved without hesitation. She divided herself into countless fragments, each one a separate spiritual information-thread, each one her and yet not the whole of her. When the division had stabilised, she drew ninety-nine percent of those fragments back together into a single spirit body and separated it from her physical form, leaving only a small remainder to maintain control of the body itself.
Describing it made it sound simple. It wasn't. The danger came from the Frontlet's side effects, the pain from the tearing of the soul apart. And Bernadette still didn't know whether this would deceive the Fool, or whether it would provoke Its anger and punishment. But she refused to hand herself over to an unknown entity without resistance. Whatever came of it, she had to try.
Tick. Tick.
Then — at one particular moment — a burst of deep crimson light erupted and swallowed the fragment of soul still in the body.
Bernadette watched it happen from the outside, a spectator.
On the other side of things, in the vast and ageless silence of the great palace, the Fool arrived Above the Fog early and reached out toward the deep red star that represented "the Lovers."
One last confirmation before the gathering.
Come on then. I hope you have those Roselle diary entries ready.
He channelled his spirituality through the connection — and in the instant he moved to draw his guest upward, his vision went dark. It was as though he had seized not a light, drifting soul but something vast and enormously, impossibly heavy.
The palace shook faintly. His spirituality was pulled out of him in a sudden rush, draining toward empty with alarming speed. A throbbing pain spread through his mind.
What is happening?!
He cut the connection at once, pressed one hand to his forehead and gripped the edge of the bronze table with the other, his expression tight with the effort of what had just been spent. That shouldn't be possible. Last time was nothing like this.
He sat for two minutes, rubbing his temple, and let out a long breath. "Try again."
He sent his spirituality surging back through the connection to "the Lovers."
This time, the catastrophic drain didn't repeat — but the Fool's senses told him clearly: "the Lovers" was noticeably heavier than before.
Did they go from half an extraordinary to a full extraordinary?
While he was still turning this over, a mist-shrouded shape appeared in the Lovers' seat.
Grey-white, endless, cold and still — that was the world that opened before Bernadette's eyes. So this was the divine realm of the "Fool" that the man had described.
The ancient palace of grey mist was vast and magnificent, built to no human scale. Simply looking at it, Bernadette felt a pressure settle over her — the same feeling she remembered from her encounters with the Hidden Sage.
The Fallen Creators of this world are all cast from the same darkness, it seems.
At the head of the long bronze table sat a figure draped entirely in grey-white mist, at perfect and unhurried ease. Unmistakably the host of this gathering — "the Fool."
As Bernadette looked toward It, the Fool's gaze came through the mist to meet her, studying her with measured attention.
Bernadette's heart picked up speed. She held herself ready, braced for the Fool's fury at what she'd done.
But the Fool simply said, in an easy tone:
"'Lovers.' We meet again."
The Fool had barely finished speaking before he went completely still.
Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me — the person shrouded in the grey mist across from me is… a woman.
She's… definitely a woman.
To be continued…