"The greatest crimes are not committed by passion, but by reason."
— Albert Camus
The city had become my chessboard.
And I, its reluctant god.
I stopped walking among people; I began moving them. Every conversation, every subtle word, every fragment of truth left hanging in the air — I knew how it would land. Like pebbles dropped in water, the ripples would always return to me.
Lilith once said the world runs on guilt and desire — and I found both remarkably easy to counterfeit.
I started with silence. With presence. I learned that people will fill silence with their fears. A trembling intern confessed a financial mistake that didn't exist, an editor admitted envy toward a colleague, a journalist whispered that she "felt watched." I had done nothing but listen — but that was the point.
Lilith called it "psychological alchemy."
I called it symmetry.
She watched from across the room, her gaze unreadable. "You've begun to enjoy this," she said one night, her voice soft, dangerous.
"Enjoy?" I smiled faintly. "It's not enjoyment. It's clarity. I've realized how easily people sell their souls when offered comfort."
She laughed — low, melodic. "And what do you offer them, Kael?"
"The illusion of choice."
In the weeks that followed, I set my first grand design in motion. The publishing house that once humiliated my mother — the same institution that chewed her life's work into profit — was drowning in rumors. Leaks. Scandals. Anonymous accusations. All meticulously engineered by whispers I had sown weeks ago, hidden behind layers of fabricated digital footprints.
It started with a single email.
And ended with a suicide note that was never proven real.
The world called it tragedy.
I called it equilibrium.
Lilith never questioned me again after that. She only watched — fascinated, perhaps terrified — as I rewired the city's nerves with precision. Each manipulation was cleaner than the last. Each person another experiment in truth and weakness.
Sometimes, at night, when the city fell silent and neon shadows slid across our walls, Lilith would trace my hand with her fingers and whisper, "You're becoming something else."
"I was always something else," I said. "I just stopped pretending otherwise."
But she didn't smile this time. She looked at me as though seeing a reflection she didn't recognize — a creature too still, too composed. Something that might love her… or consume her.
Outside, the sirens wailed like distant hymns.
Inside, I planned my next move.
Not for money. Not for vengeance.
For the perfection of control.
Because gods do not seek forgiveness.
They seek symmetry.