Lucid lay on the king-sized bed, the unfamiliar softness a stark contrast to the hard bench of the cell and the constant tension of the void-rail journey. After finishing the basic tidying of the dusty manor room, he had finally surrendered to the mattress, letting out a sigh so deep it felt like it left a permanent hollow in his chest. For a moment, it was as if he had been absolved, the crushing weight of the last few days lifted just by the simple act of lying down.
But there was a problem.
He was awake.
He tossed, he turned, he tried to force his mind into the blankness of sleep. It never came. Maybe it was the lingering adrenaline from the harrowing journey. Maybe it was the gnawing memory of his own atrocity. Or maybe it was the persistent, silent question of where Ayame had gone. How could he sleep peacefully after all that?
He winced, grabbing the pillow and pulling it over his head, trying to smother his own thoughts.
But the sounds weren't in the room. They were inside him. The waves. The relentless push and pull of a spectral ocean. The mournful, resonant song of a whale, echoing in the vault of his skull.
'Of course,' he thought, the bitterness a cold stone in his gut. 'How could I forget?' He was a monster. Sleep was for people, not for things like him.
With a defeated sigh, he sat up at the edge of the bed. Pale moonlight streamed through the tall residential window, illuminating the sparse room. Karmen's pendant lay on the bedside table, its silver chain coiled around the red gemstone. He considered contacting him. But he also considered throwing the pendant out the window. Just why, and how, had everything turned out like this?
"Are you not going to sleep, Lucid?" Alice's voice was a tentative whisper within his mind.
He continued to stare out the window, giving no response.
A soft, green light began to glow in the room, shallow and gentle. It coalesced behind him, forming the faint, luminous suggestion of hands, reaching out as if to offer a comforting touch on his shoulder.
He felt the presence and spun around, tumbling off the bed and landing on the floor with a flinch. A hushed "Shit" escaped his lips before he could stop it, his own hands coming up in a defensive gesture.
He quickly calmed, his breath coming in short gasps as he saw it was just Alice's manifestation—a form of green light shaped like hands. They hovered, harmless and gentle. He didn't want to be embraced. He didn't deserve any comfort. He was a monster.
With another sigh, this one heavy with resignation, he stood up silently, making a decision. He walked to the bedside table.
Alice sounded confused, her light flickering with a mix of worry and perplexity. "Lucid?"
He picked up the pendant. It was strangely beautiful in the moonlight, a silver teardrop with a deep red gem etched into its center. He pressed the stone.
He waited.
He waited some more.
It didn't respond. 'Maybe Karmen is asleep,' he thought, a flicker of irrational disappointment mixing with his relief. He turned to walk back to the bed.
Then a distorted voice crackled to life in the room, seeming to come from the pendant itself, carried on a wave of static as if broadcast from a great distance through a storm.
"Hey... Lucid!"
He turned and walked back, picking up the pendant.
"Are you alright? What happened?!" The voice was worried, but it sounded strange, like an individual shouting to be heard in a crowded town square, not a quiet room. It carried a childlike, energetic tone, yet it was familiar. It was Karmen. But not the one he usually spoke to. This was one of his other masks.
Jake.
"Hey... it's me, Lucid. I wanted to talk," Lucid said, his own voice flat.
"Goshhh, mate! Do you have no courtesy?" Jake's voice laughed, full of mock indignation. "You can't call people this late!"
"It sounds like you're having a great time, though! Governor..." Lucid replied.
"Ohoho, I am but a humble musician..." Jake trailed off, laughing at his remark.
Lucid managed a faint, ghost of a smile. But it didn't reach his eyes, and it didn't crack the stone in his chest.
"Ah... I can see that smile through the line! Tell me, how are you?" Jake's tone shifted to genuine, if slightly manic, curiosity. "And didn't I tell you not to call unless it's an emergency?"
"Well... I just wanted to—" Lucid began to mutter.
"Nah, I'm jokin' with ya, pal! Tell me! Have you arrived at the sky dock yet?
"...No."
A moment of silence. An abrupt hesitation on the other end.
"What do you mean?"
"I'm in Vex."
Jake's voice changed. "Huh! That fast? I mean, it's only been a week... I said it would take three days. However that wss if you were lucky, did it in a week. That's impressive..." His words were complimentary, but the pace had slowed, become more deliberate.
Lucid stuttered, suddenly at a loss. He didn't know what to say. Compliments felt like ashes in his mouth after what he had done. "Well, everything is... going according to plan. I'm in one of your residential areas in Vex. After I met a... knight."
"A knight...What's his name?" He sounded puzzle
"Uhh..."
Silence. The presence in his head grew more imposing. Alice spoke internally, her tone exasperated. "Don't tell me you already forgot his name?!"
"Fre... Fred? Or something like that," Lucid mumbled.
"Ahh..." The voice on the other side exhaled, a long, drawn-out sound.
"Do you know him?" Lucid asked.
After a brief, palpable pause. "Mmmh... no."
Lucid winced in confusion. Maybe he'd misheard what that knight said about Karmen earlier. He wasn't right in his head, after all.
"But he spoke of... you, Karmen."
"Ah, Karmen, yes. But I'm Jake," the voice replied, a playful lilt returning, but it felt forced.
A sigh escaped Lucid's consciousness. "Huh..."
"Hang up, Lucid," Alice urged quietly.
Lucid sighed, his thumb moving toward the gemstone to end the call.
Before he could press it, Jake spoke again. This time, all playfulness was gone, replaced by a serious, clear tone that cut through the static.
"Lucid."
The sound of his name, spoken like that, made Lucid freeze.
"From here on out, I suggest you consider your position carefully." The voice was low, intent. "Remember, if it comes to it: any means necessary. You are not a hero. You are not a savior."
The words slammed into Lucid, overriding the fatigue with a spike of cold anxiety. They echoed in the silent room, far more terrifying than any direct threat.
A moment of heavy silence dragged through the air between them. Then, as abruptly as it had turned serious, Jake's voice broke it, returning to its previous, cheerful chaos. "Well then... see ya!" A snippet of a violin tune, faint and jaunty, played in the background, mixed with distant, crowd-like noises before the static swallowed it all and faded. Lucid was left alone again with his thoughts.
He stood there in the moonlight, the pendant cold in his hand.
He looked at the window, at the unfamiliar cityscape of Vex.
He rubbed his eyes, not out of exhaustion, but out of a deep, swimming confusion. He had been dropped into a kingdom four times the size of Tyriana, with little clue how to navigate it. He also had a goal, no. Two now. Find Ayame, and find that weird engine Karmen had mentioned. He'd even forgotten what it was supposed to look like by now. The lives Karmen iterated through were not as distinct or present in his memory anymore. Just another side effect of brushing against the rift, he supposed. Everything was blurring, fading, except for the memory of what he had done. That remained in perfect, horrible clarity.
***
The next day arrived not with rest, but with a gritty-eyed, hollow-chested continuation. Lucid had not so much slept as passed out, and he now walked the waking streets of Vex feeling like a ghost haunting a world too bright and too solid.
His feet carried him without conscious direction, but they found their way back to the main avenue, toward the small crepe stand Frederick had visited. The memory of the sweet, foreign taste was a weak pull in the fog of his apathy. As he walked, however, a different sense prickled at the edges of his awareness. It wasn't sight or sound, but a faint, tingling perception that came from the Chain of Heart—a trait that made him acutely aware of the flow and disturbance of fate essence around him.
The essence he felt now was sloppy. Wild. Unrefined and unconcealed, like a trail of glowing footprints following him through the clean city air.
Alice's whisper was a quiet confirmation in his mind. *"You are being followed."*
Lucid gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod. He knew.
Instead of quickening his pace or seeking a crowd, he deliberately turned his steps away from the main thoroughfare. He led his unseen shadows down narrower lanes, past closed workshops and quiet residential walls, until he emerged into a wide, unused field at the back of a row of storage houses. It was a bare patch of hard-packed earth, open and isolated. The perfect place for an ambush—either for him, or for them.
He stopped in the center of the field and waited, hands loose at his sides. He didn't have to wait long.
From the shadowed mouth of an alley, then from behind a low wall, then from two other points around the field's perimeter, four figures emerged. They were clad in dark, close-fitting clothes that seemed to drink the daylight, their faces obscured by simple cloth masks. Their movements were not rushed, but purposeful and coordinated, fanning out to surround him completely. The sloppy, wild fate essence he had sensed radiated from them in palpable waves.
Lucid looked slowly from one to the other, his expression blank. He was surrounded. The air in the empty field grew still and heavy.