Chương 243: Chapter 242 - Structural Collapse

Sleep had taken him without warning and without mercy. He was a different person unconscious, slack and unguarded, nothing like the one who moved through rooms with his hands in his pockets and said as little as possible. A book hit the top of his head with a flat crack.

"You planning on sleeping all day?" He opened his eyes. Arthur was standing over him, dressed, arms crossed, holding the book he had just used as a blunt instrument. Ayame was seated near the carriage door, her dark eyes already open and tracking him with the steady attention she gave most things that moved. He pressed two fingers to his forehead and remembered the beach. What he had found there. He ran through it once, quietly, and said nothing. He was not ready to decide whether telling them was useful or not.

The thought that followed was less comfortable. They were the same ones he had been assigned to handle. That detail had not gone away just because he had started eating meals with them.

"I will start the engine," Arthur said, already moving toward the cabin. The feeling arrived before he could name it. Not a thought. A physical thing, his heart rate climbing for no reason he could point to, the Chain of Heart triggering on its own, blood beginning to track from the corners of his eyes without any injury to account for it. Something was wrong in a way that left no obvious evidence, and that specific combination was the worst version of wrong.

"I feel like I have a hangover," Arthur called from the cabin.

"Tell me honestly, how much did I actually drink last night?"

"Twenty," Ayame said. A short laugh from the cabin. None of it reached him. His mind was working backward through everything since they had arrived in port, stacking each detail against the others, looking for the gap. The engine began to hum. The carriage shuddered under the first pull of ignition. They were close to leaving. He stood. Ayame noticed immediately. Arthur looked back from the cabin doorway.

"What are you doing," Alice said from inside him. No question mark. Her voice was precise and clipped.

"Go. None of this involves us." He did not answer her.

"Something is wrong," he said. Arthur tilted his head.

"Wrong how?" The static sensation moved across the surface of his skin. He had felt something like it before, twice, both times just before something large and load-bearing gave out.

"You are overreacting," Alice continued.

"This is what insufficient sleep does to a mortal body. Sit down and drink water." He looked toward the exit. Ayame crossed the room and took his hand. Her grip was firm and even.

"Is something wrong?" He pulled his hand back.

"Get off me." It came out sharper than he meant it. She stepped back and studied him without expression. She was not wounded. She was measuring.

"My love," Alice said, with the particular edge of someone divine and formal who had run low on patience and was managing it poorly. He gritted his teeth, pressed both hands over the top of his head, and exhaled.

"What is wrong?" Arthur asked again from the cabin doorway. The question repeated in the air and did not resolve. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. He closed his eyes. Waited. Then the carriage lurched. The sound came from outside, not directly on top of them but close enough to feel in the floor. A heavy concussive bang that rolled across the harbor and climbed through the hull and into the soles of his feet.

The seagulls went off the water all at once and did not come back. The silence behind that was not peaceful. He looked into the carriage interior. Ayame had stopped mid-breath, her skin sheeted in a thick gold coating spreading outward from her collarbone in slow, silent rings. Arthur was halfway out of the cabin seat, one hand raised, locked in place. His face held the unfinished shape of a question.

"What is happening," Arthur said. His mouth was not moving. The words were already there from a moment ago, suspended with everything else.

"Lucid," Alice said, hard and immediate.

"Start the engine. Go. Now." He moved through the cabin, slow and even. He reached the door and kicked it open. Outside, everything was wrong. The morning sun was gone. The sky had shifted to a deep saturated gold, dense and sourceless, not light coming from anywhere specific but light filling the air itself. At the edge of the harbor a tree had grown vertically to a height it had no structural basis for, its roots still in the ground, its canopy far above where any canopy had a right to be.

Birds sat fixed in the air where they had been scattering, stopped mid-flight as though the moment had solidified around them. He looked toward the waterline. A faint thread of grey-blue ran along the horizon. The fish in the harbor moved. All of them, simultaneously, against the current.

'Structural collapse.' He knew the mechanics. A structural collapse occurred when the foundational principles an entity had established within its proximity started bleeding outward into surrounding reality. Two causes. Overresonance, meaning an Illuminated had pushed past double their channeling and processing ceiling.

Or the second cause, which was worse: the entity's own existence was under threat and the Domain was externalizing in response, pushing its interior logic into the outside world because it had no other direction to go. The Domain of Mercyros was no longer contained. It had extended itself into the harbor, into the waterline, into the gold-drenched air and the frozen birds and the fish moving in organized unison against everything natural. He looked back at his companions sealed inside the carriage.

"No," Alice said. Her voice was fully formal now, no warmth in the register, all authority.

"You turn around and come back inside."

"Do not do this," she continued.

"Do not be foolish about this. You are in no condition." He stepped onto the dock. His shoes connected with the planks and the sound was too clean, too isolated in the absence of everything else the harbor should have been producing.

"You told me yourself," he said, quiet enough that it was only for her.

"That girl prayed to every deity she could name when her people abandoned her. Someone came. And then he turned his back on her too." Alice did not respond for a moment.

"I cannot look away from this," he said.

"I cannot." Something moved through the shared space between them. Brief. Warm. She did not name it and he did not comment on it. But it was there, running beneath the authority in her voice and sitting in direct contradiction to everything she had just argued. He kept moving down the dock toward the town. The gold in the sky deepened as he walked. The frozen birds did not shift. The tree at the harbor's edge stood at its impossible height and cast no shadow because the light had no source to cast from.

The whole district smelled of salt and something older underneath it, something that had been sealed for a long time and had now found a seam. Port Vexis was not a large town. He had walked most of it in the days since arriving. He knew where the market square was, where the shuttered storefronts clustered, where the population had been pulling inward as the Domain's pressure built. All of it made sense now as a single picture. The magistrate holed up. The guards performing routes that had no real function.

The prices climbing as fewer people moved goods. The eight bodies in the river. The Domain had been pressing outward for weeks. Everything that had gone wrong in the town traced back to a single source, and that source was now sleeping across the harbor in the open air. He stopped at the end of the dock where the boards met the road. The structural collapse had a resolution window. Every collapse did. If the entity stabilized, the external bleed would retract and reality would resume.

If it did not stabilize, the bleed would continue expanding until the Domain boundary dissolved entirely and everything inside it became contiguous with the surrounding world. That second outcome had consequences for everyone in a several-kilometer radius that he did not want to calculate right now.

"You need a plan," Alice said. Her voice had shifted back slightly, less command, more consultation. She was working the problem with him now whether she had decided to or not.

"I know," he said.

"Your companions are frozen. You have limited fate essence. Your body is in the condition we have already discussed at length."

"I know all of that."

"Then state your plan." He looked at the golden sky. At the fish. At the tree.

"Go to the source," he said.

"The Domain is externalizing because something inside is destabilizing it. Find what is destabilizing it and remove the pressure. That contracts the bleed."

"And if the source is Mercyros itself."

"Then we have a more complicated conversation."

"We," she said.

"You are inside me. The grammar is accurate." A pause. Then, with great formality and something that was not quite a sigh but functioned like one: "I find you tolerable, Lucid. I want that documented."

"Noted," he said, and walked into the town.