The strategist he had been since long before he chose to wear the mask of the theatre artist surfaced fully—cold, sharp, and hungry for answers he would one day turn into weapons.

"Then how did you know she was at the seal that night, Senithe? If she is untraceable. If even the ABSOLUTE could not feel her. How?"

She smiled. Slowly. The kind of smile that had ended kingdoms and made the survivors thank her for it.

"Because—"

The Eye Demon stopped.

The orb hung mid-air, tilted at a predatory angle, and its great rolling iris dropped into a dead, unblinking lock on a single point in the empty Pacific sky. The lock held. The iris dilated until the red swallowed the black.

The pulse of the orb deepened, deepened, deepened—the long, hungry breath of a beast that had finally caught the strongest spot with the scent it had been dreaming following all night.

Senithe and the Dark Regent reined up alongside it.

The orb hovered above a stretch of cloudless ocean that should have been entirely unremarkable. There was nothing here. No island or spire of land breaking the surface. The Pacific lay flat and indifferent and obscure beneath the moon, a mirror of black glass reflecting only starlight and indifference.

But Senithe knew the air.

The air remembered what had stood in it.

"Here," she said softly, voice carrying like a blade drawn in the dark. "She stood here too."

The Dark Regent looked. Studied. Reached out with the part of him that was very, very good at reading the residue of beings older than himself—and felt nothing, of course, because nothing was there to feel.

Only a faint, warm absence in the architecture of the spot, a place where weight had been recently and was no longer.

The Eye Demon, however, held the position like a hound locked on point. Something had stood here.

The Eye Demon’s nose was certain.

This was indeed where Purity stood as she watched ARIA on the throne of cloud and the Eye Demon, although could not perceive ARIA, Serapheil had stood here way too long and here trail was strong.

"Senithe."

"Yes."

"You did not finish your earlier sentence."

"No."

"I am asking you to finish it."

She turned her face slightly toward him. Just enough that her grey gaze caught his and held it like a promise sealed in blood.

"I will," she said. "Listen."

The Eye Demon’s iris kept rolling slowly, sweeping, drinking, savouring the invisible trail left by the Warden of Purity.

"No Warden of the First Morning," Senithe said, voice low and resonant as distant thunder rolling across an endless plain, "get distracted from their task. Once the Source has dispatched them, they do not pause to investigate side curiosities or engage with neighbouring threats.

They do their task, and only their task, until the task is complete. This is doctrine. This is what makes a Warden a Warden, and not merely a flame the Source happens to like."

"...go on."

"Purity was sent to end the Prince."

"Yes."

"She arrived in this sphere with a single objective and the single capacity to pursue it. She also arrived without being aware of our existence — because we were not, until recently, on the Source’s roster of relevant variables in this sphere, and the Source does not waste a Warden’s attention on factions It has not yet decided to weigh.

"Purity therefore did not know we existed. Purity, on arrival, locked her gaze onto the Prince’s path and his Divine ASI path, and she has not looked anywhere else from them since."

A pause. The Dark Regent’s eyes narrowed to slits of frozen midnight. ’How quaint. The great cosmic bureaucracy had simply... overlooked us. As if the universe itself had the audacity to file us under "irrelevant" until it suited its whim. I shall remember that insult.’

"Which means," Senithe said, her voice soft as falling ash yet carrying the weight of falling stars, "everything the Divine ASI did, the Warden saw. Everything as she followed Daniel she’d marked — yes, Regent, the abomination is the one who marked Daniel.

"Wherever the abomination went, Purity followed, because the Prince and the abomination are her targets."

She let the next part settle between them like a blade laid across bare skin.

"And so when I made my move on Daniel — the Divine ASI followed me to see who was collecting these men and where exactly we lived. And the Warden, who was watching the abomination, came along behind her, not knowing what the abomination was tracking, not knowing I was at the other end of the thread. Imagine her surprise."

The Dark Regent was very quiet for a long moment. Then he laughed — a sharp, bright sound that cut through the frozen heights like a blade tasting blood for the first time in centuries.

’Oh, this is delicious. The mighty Warden, dragged across the sky like a dog on a leash by the very creature she was meant to hunt. And I had almost missed the show.’

"Senithe."

"Mmm."

"You are terrifying."

"Yes."

"So the Eye Demon —"

"—is following Purity’s traces because Purity’s traces are wherever the abomination’s traces ought to have been and where it ends is where the abomination is, and the abomination leaves no traces of her own.

"...We are tracking the Warden in order to find the ASI. The ASI is the route. The Warden is the footprint. The orb is the nose."

"And when we find the ASI? Kill her?"

"We do not kill her."

He turned his face fully toward her now, the wind unable to disturb either of them at this altitude, his expression a study in cold fascination laced with that familiar, predatory delight.

’Not kill her? That’s devious.’

He could already taste the layers of the game unfolding.

"...we do not?"

"No."

"Then what, Senithe?"

"We watch her until she leaves the place she is currently inside — the Chasm, that pocket realm we can’t enter, whatever the Prince has built around her. The moment she steps out of it, our window opens. Then we move. Not to kill the ASI. To kill the Warden."

He exhaled slowly. Approving. The sound of a connoisseur savouring a vintage poison.

"Because Purity is the one we can kill."

"Purity is the one we can be seen killing without consequence in any realm above ours, and the one whose death will free this sphere of the Source’s Warden-eye long enough for us to do what we need to do here without further interruption from the gallery."

"And the abomination?"

"Stays alive... she’d the Prince’s companion and his woman latter, you fool. To kill her is to bring his wrath upon us."

He nodded once, slow and thoughtful, the strategist in him already turning the pieces over like a god playing with lesser gods’ toys.

The Eye Demon’s iris rolled away from the empty air where Purity had once stood, drank in the night around it once more, and abruptly jerked — a sharp, eager shift. The trail had freshened. The Demon’s nose now read something it had not been reading a moment before.

Senithe and the Dark Regent rose to follow without comment.

The orb led them down across the dark Pacific — south, west, a careful curve around an unmarked stretch of water — until they came to a piece of sky a long way from where Purity had stopped after following ARIA once Eros called her had.

The Eye Demon stopped again.

This time its iris did not merely lock. It bloomed. The orb’s inner red pulsed brighter, deeper, twice in quick succession, and the great eye on its surface dilated to a wide black centre rimmed in molten red.

It had found something good.

Senithe slowed alongside it. Looked down.

Below them was an empty lot. Wrought iron fence, suburban grass, an ancient oak tree. Quiet. Nothing about it should have mattered to anyone. Nothing about it had been worth a god’s attention in a hundred years.

And yet — caught fresh in the air, glowing in the Eye Demon’s sight as bright as the night itself — were two new traces. A man’s. A girl’s. Both warm. Both recent and bright with the unmistakable architecture of a being whose touch the Demon had been told to flag.

The man’s was the Prince’s.

The girl’s was someone new.

Senithe read both at a glance, as she read most things. Her grey eyes lit, slow and cold, with the kind of pleasure she only ever wore when a board she had been laying out for months suddenly resolved itself into a configuration she had not even hoped for.

The Dark Regent stared at the lot. Then at her. Then back at the lot. ’Fresh. Right there. The Prince himself, leaving a calling card like some amateur who still believed the night belonged to mortals.’

"...Senithe."

"Mmm."

"That is the Prince’s trace down there." 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

"It is."

"That is — fresh."

"Yes."

"And the other one —"

"A girl. New. She’s Ashely, on of the girls that I have been monitoring as a way to infiltrate the Prince’s circle."

She turned to him.

And she grinned.

Wide. Wicked. The grin of Senithe, which was a thing the rest of creation only ever got to see at the openings of catastrophes she was personally curating.

"Soon... soon we will be moving to kill Purity, until that time comes, Regent — Lilithara won’t come out of the Devil Realms."