Kayden still hasn't answered. Amilla, after a pause that stretches just long enough to become meaningful, chooses solitude. Her dark green form recedes toward the stern, white hair trailing behind her like a wake.
Kayden doesn't watch her go.
He's standing at the bow now, one hand resting on the worn railing, the other shoved deep in his pocket. The gray mist parts and reforms endlessly before him, each wave identical to the last, each revealing the same black, glassy water before sealing shut again.
His eyes trace the hull's cut through the stillness. The Caravel doesn't fight the water. It doesn't part it. The water simply agrees to move aside. A quiet negotiation, settled before the wood even arrives.
He's trying to decode it. He believes in Amilla mostly that this ship would take them to their destination but it's the mechanism that needs his attention.
How did she make this? Was it her 'will' focused into a single image of a ship? Memory, pulling an old caravel from some historical domain? Or something deeper? a domain that isn't created but invoked, like calling a name into fog and waiting for a shape to answer?
Kayden's fingers tap the railing once, twice.
Delicate, he thinks. Not like his void, which is absolute. Not like the forest, which was simplistic. This domain breathes. It has seams. It could be read, if he stared long enough.
As the mist rolls, he doesn't look away from any of it. Then, through the gray comes oranges.
Kayden's fingers stop taping. He doesn't turn. He watches a faint, pulsing glow, suspended in the infinite mist like a dying ember caught between breaths.
He doesn't look away even when he hears her. The fabric of her robes barely whispers against the deck.
He already knows the absence of sound that follows her. He knows the particular chill that settles when she stands too close.
Kayden speaks, still watching the orange pulse and flicker, "The Caravel led us to a light."
He pauses and then asks, "This is where we are supposed to be?"
"It led us where we need to go," Amilla says.
"A light. In the fog."
"Yes."
Kendaris exhales slowly through his nose. Not quite a sigh. Not quite amused this time.
The orange continues its pulse. Waiting for them to close the distance and as they do, the mist parts in urgent swirls, fleeing the light's approach.
Kayden doesn't step back. Just watches with those flat winter-sea eyes as the orange swells to fill the entire forward view.
Then it consumes them. No heat. No sound. For one stretched second, there is only light.
Kayden feels the Caravel dissolve beneath his feet. He feels Amilla's presence beside him, still and patient as ever.
Then the light releases them, his boots meet a solid ground with a soft, wet click.
Cobblestones. Damp. Worn smooth by centuries of steps. The air smells of rain that hasn't fallen yet, bread that finished baking hours ago and something faintly metallic, the scent of a city holding its breath.
Kayden blinks when the orange is gone. In its place, a narrow street lined with tall, gray buildings. Shuttered windows. Single flickering streetlamp. Above is a sky the color of old silver, heavy with clouds that refuse to rain.
No mist. No ship. No void. Just Paris. Frozen and waiting.
Kayden turns slowly, taking it in. Then, he looks down at himself. His gray sweater remains but it's now layered beneath a fitted dark coat, charcoal, double-breasted, the kind that belongs in a cigarette advertisement from six years ago. A thin black scarf hangs loose around his neck, purely decorative. His trousers are dark, his boots are simple and scuffed in a way that suggests character, not neglect.
Amilla speaks, standing beside him, "We have to find who made this."
Kayden turns to look at her. Her usual seamless robe is gone, replaced by a deep green coat dress that falls to her ankles, tailored within an inch of its life. High-collared. Elegant. A small hat perches atop her head, a short veil draped just low enough to suggest the absence of features beneath. Her white hair spills from under the hat, luminous against the dark green, cascading past her hips like a waterfall that forgot to freeze.
He briefly closes his eyes as he runs a hand through his ash-colored hair. It's the same. Messy. Soft. Unbothered.
He thinks she looks like a grieving widow from a painting. The kind that hangs in a museum no one visits.
"This place is no dream from what I see," he states.
To which Amilla replies, "Is it complex enough in your eyes to not be a simplistic dream like last time?"
Kayden opens his eyes and for a moment glances at her with something flickering in his expression.
"She's watching me differently maybe," he thinks.
The thought passes as quickly as it came.
"Yeah," he says. "Complex enough is an understatement."
He turns and starts walking down the street, hands sliding into his coat pockets.
"Coffee first. Then we figure out who built this place."
Amilla follows without a word. She thinks he just talked like a tourist planning an itinerary. Like Paris is a stop on a vacation, not a cage made of someone's memory.
But, she doesn't say this. She simply follows.
As they walk, streets unfold like pages from a book no one reads anymore. People pass them in ones and twos.
A woman in a faded blue coat hurries past a baguette under her arm, her eyes fixed on something three feet ahead of her never changes. A man sits at a sidewalk table, stirring coffee and his expression frozen in a pleasant vacancy. Two children roll a hoop down an alley, their faces bright with joy.
Kayden knows it is impossible that these people are real. Trained on observation, he thinks. But to perfectly give emotions to all these unreal humans would require not just sharp observations.
A café appears ahead. Wrought iron tables. Wicker chairs. A striped awning the color of dried blood. A waiter stands by the door, polishing a glass that will never be clean enough, his movements gentle and eternal.
Kayden doesn't slow. He doesn't ask.
He just picks a table by the street, pulls out a chair, and sits.
Amilla settles across from him. The wicker barely creaks.
The waiter approaches. Kayden orders two coffees without looking at a menu. The waiter nods and disappears inside.
"This place was built by someone who watched Paris for a very long time. From outside. Never participated. Just observed," Kayden says.
The waiter comes back and places two coffees on the table. Steam rises from both, curling into the gray air. He walks away without a word.
Amilla's gloved hand rests beside her cup. She doesn't lift it.
She asks, "How do you know?"
Kayden wraps his fingers around his own cup. He does not drink. Just lets the warmth seep through the ceramic.
"The woman with the baguette," he says. "She turned the same corner twice. Same speed. Same posture. Like a skipping record."
He pauses before adding, "Cobblestones polished smooth in some specific places but look at the people. They move through this place like ghosts. No impact. No friction. Like the city remembers being walked on but forgot to be changed by it until we came and ordered a coffee."
Amilla is still. Watching.
"You observed that quickly," she says.
"It's what I do," he replies.
A pause.
"You didn't touch your coffee," he notes.
"Neither did you."
Kayden looks down. The cup sits between his hands, ceramic warm against his palms. Steam still rises in a slow, patient, endless pattern. The liquid inside is dark brown. It is the color of earth, of things that grow, of things that melt on tongues and remind you that sweetness exists.
He stares at it for one beat longer than necessary.
Then Amilla's voice cuts through, softer than before but no less precise, "What else did you change?"
He doesn't look up, "Not much."
His thumb traces the rim of the cup. Once. Twice.
He continues, "I tried to remove some things. Didn't really work."
A brief pause. The coffee steaks between them.
"Sexual desires mostly. I wanted it gone because it… felt like noise." He says it flat, like describing a software update that failed to install properly. "Figured if I could edit my face to look older, why not edit the rest?"
He almost laughs but doesn't, only leans back on the chair as he adds, "Cleaner. Simpler. Instead I got nightmares of naked women. Not even doing anything. Just watching."
Amilla's voice comes quiet, almost distant, "I have seen people change themselves into things that no longer remember they were human."
A pause.
"Most don't get nightmares. They stop dreaming entirely."
Kayden leans forward again, elbows on the small table. The coffee still sits between them, untouched and cooling.
He asks, "Do you know what ambition is, Amilla?"
He doesn't wait for an answer.
"This place…" he gestures vaguely at the street, the uncanny looping people, the frozen Paris around them. "… was built by someone with no ambition at all."
His grey eyes track a woman pushing a stroller that contains no child. She passes. Reappears from the opposite direction thirty seconds later.
"Ambitious people change things. They build towers. Thrones. They put themselves at the center. Make themselves the main character." He tilts his head. "But this place? It's humble. Too humble. Whoever made it didn't want to be seen. Didn't want to be special. They just wanted…"
He trails off, now watching his coffee. A hard, dry lump went down his throat.
"...to stay exactly where they've always been. Watching the same streets. The same faces. The same beautiful Paris they've gazed at for years. No need to move. No need to change. Just... remain."
His gaze turns to Amilla. She is silent for a moment. Then, "So it's someone who wandered, someone who walked these streets. Often. For years."
Kayden glances at their own untouched coffee and then he stares at a passing couple, locked in their eternal silent conversation.
"They just observed for years. Decades maybe," he says. He sighs softly before continuing, "Could be a shopkeeper. Someone with a permanent spot. Watching the same street every day."
He pauses. "Or a waiter. They see thousands of faces, hundreds of interactions. Good candidate."
The waiter from earlier emerges from the cafe, begins wiping a table that will never be dirty enough.
"But waiters interact. They take orders. Make small talk. They're part of the performance." Kayden's eyes narrow slightly. "This place doesn't have that. It has the view of a city, not the feel of one. The observer was always on the outside. Never participated. Just..."
He stops. A woman in a faded coat walks past with her eternal baguette. She doesn't look at them. Doesn't look at anything.
"...watched from ground level. Same spot. Every day. Same people walking past. Same light. Same rain."
His voice goes quieter.
"Not a shopkeeper. Not a waiter. Someone even more invisible than that."
He turns to Amilla and says, "beggar. Had to be."
Amilla lifts her coffee and the space around her flickers into just a soft, momentary blur, like the reality reliefly hid her by forgetting she was there.
The chair beneath her, the air around her shoulders, the cobblestones at her feet. All of it becomes briefly unreadable.
Amilla drinks. Kayden doesn't react. Doesn't stare. Doesn't ask.
He simply leans back in his chair, lifts his own cup, and takes a slow sip. His grey eyes remain fixed on something across the street. Maybe a building, or a corner, or a patch of worn cobblestone, as if nothing unusual happened at all.
Then, after a while, they stand together. The chairs scrape softly against ancient cobblestones.
Amilla's gloved hand lifts, gesturing down the street with the certainty of someone reading a map only she can see.
"Then we find where he watched from."
She begins walking. Kayden follows.
"The most detailed streets first. The ones that feel more real than the others. More worn. More lived-in." Her voice carries that same flat clarity, but now with purpose and direction.
"Those are the streets he observed most. The ones he knew by heart."
They turn a corner. The buildings here feel older. More textured.
"The most observed corners next. Intersections where multiple sightlines meet. Places where people passed closest to him." She pauses at a cross street, then turns left without hesitation. "He would have sat where he could see the most. Where the city flowed past like a river and he was the bank."
Kayden says nothing, just watches and follows.
"The beggar will still be there." Her voice doesn't waver. "Still watching. Still invisible. To himself, he's just doing what he's always done. The domain doesn't need him to move. It just needs him to be."
They walk in silence for a moment. The people part around them like water around stones.
A bridge comes into view. Old stone. Worn railings. A single figure hunched at its edge, wrapped in cloth the color of faded sky.
Amilla stops and says, "There."
The figure doesn't move, doesn't look up. Just sits, hand outstretched toward a river that flows but never goes anywhere.
Kayden stares at the beggar. The beggar stares at nothing.
He doesn't even look up when they approach. Just sits, a heap of worn fabric against old stone, one hand extended toward the frozen river.
Amilla stops before him. Her gloved hand reaches into the folds of her coat and produces a single coin, gold and ancient. She drops it into his palm. A gesture Kayden has never seen her make.
The beggar's fingers close around it. Then nothing. He stares ahead, unseeing.
Kayden shifts his weight. Clears his throat before speaking, "So you are gonna take us where we need to go."
"You saw me," the beggar whispers.
Kayden blinks, replies "I mean. Yeah. You're right there."
The beggar's hand tightens around the coin. A single tear tracks through the grime on his cheek.
"No one sees me. You found me. Followed the... the looking. No one ever follows the looking." A wet, broken laugh. "Everyone looks past. Through. Never at."
His gaze lifts up. Past the buildings. Past the gray sky even.
"You want to go somewhere. I can't take you. Can't move. Never could." Another laugh, softer. "But I can show you who visits."
He raises one trembling finger and points at the sky. Then instantly the clouds part.
A sphere hangs there. It is massive, pulsing. The color of dying embers and fresh flame, swirling with veins of deeper orange that move like thoughts. It's not the sun. Too close. Too wrong. Too aware.
Kayden's head tilts back and his grey eyes fix on the thing in the sky. His face shows nothing but his hands slide into his pockets.
The beggar whispers, almost reverent:
"My god comes to watch me too."