The rain hit without ideology. Just rain, doing its job, making a point of it.

  Darkness pressed from every side.

  Then.

  Two golden eyes cut through the black—not shining like stars, but like something that had decided to keep burning long after it had any right to. The kind of light that didn't ask permission.

  They found him instantly.

  The groove stuttered.

  For one absurd, transcendent heartbeat, his brain threw out the knife, the hunger, the rain, the dying world, the whole exhausting project of staying alive—and simply The eyes looked back with the calm of things that have never needed to blink.

  he thought, with no logic to support it and no desire to argue.

  Then the figure spoke.

  "May I come in?"

  The sound of her voice completed the ambush. Melodious. Precise. Like crystal that had learned the shape of human speech but found the contents mildly disappointing.

  His rusted knife was still in his hand.

  "...Sure."

  The word departed his mouth approximately three decisions before his brain had finished making them.

  He stepped aside.

  She entered.

  As she brushed past him, something pricked his senses—not a scent exactly, but an Vacuum. Old dust. The stillness found in the space between things. He had no frame of reference for it and filed it away in the cabinet labeled

  Finlay pulled the door shut. Only then did he allow himself to actually look at her—the full accounting.

  The cloak hid most of her. What it revealed: She stood nearly a head shorter than him, which meant approximately nothing. He was half-starved and barely qualified as vertical.

  She pulled back her hood.

  His mind went quiet the way rooms go quiet when a presence enters them. Or a predator.

  Hair as dark as the sky outside—not the dim gray of overcast, but the genuine, committed black of a sky that had decided to stop pretending. And those eyes again, catching what little starlight filtered through the broken roof: molten gold, vertical pupils, calm and unreadable as a language he hadn't been taught.

  He pinched himself. The pain was sincere.

  She studied him with the focused detachment of someone who examines things before deciding what to do with them. No warmth. No fear. No agenda he could read.

  He opened his mouth.

  "Luminous..."

  "Thank you?"

  Her expression didn't change.

  Out loud again. He'd spoken it out again. But it was , so Finlay elected not to apologize for it. The world was dying. He had earned the right to an honest observation.

  The silence that followed had the quality of two people deciding independently whether the other one was going to be a problem.

  The groove offered an unsolicited verdict:

  Yes. Noted. He would file that right next to the cabinet.

  Her gaze shifted past him, sliding through the gaps in the walls to the rain-soaked dark outside. And there—heaped in the mud where he'd left it—lay the Monster Boar.

  Her head tilted slightly.

  "Using a Night Boar as a scarecrow? Wise. Their actual strength is negligible, yet their hideous form is enough to deter most monsters from your dwelling."

  Finlay's left eye twitched.

  Then his right one.

  He was quiet.

  She had looked at the Night Boar—his Night Boar—the beast he had spent three buying with his own skin, the sacred object of every food-related fantasy he'd sustained himself with for a —and classified it as a decorative deterrent.

  The bristles. The tusks. The sheer, magnificent, edible potential of that creature?

  This woman was clearly insane. Gorgeous, terrifying, possibly not-entirely-human—and insane.

  "You're wrong."

  He said it with a dignity he had absolutely no business possessing.

  "Lady."

  Her golden eyes came back to him.

  "That," he said, with the gravity of a man announcing a papal decree, "is my "

  A beat.

  Her gaze returned to the boar. Then to him. Then, very briefly, back to the boar.

  "...I was unaware they were edible."

  "They are."

  "Have you—" She stopped. Reconsidered. "Have you verified this?"

  "...I am verifying it tonight."

  Something passed across her face. Small. Fast. Gone before he could name it. Not quite a smile. More like the outline of where a smile might have lived, once, in another version of her life.

  "I see," she said. Flat as always. But marginally less flat than before, and he was starting to suspect that was her version of enthusiasm.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Then silence settled in.

  Ran the ambient catalogue. Returned: missing. All of it. The groove ran it again.

  Silence had two registers: occupied and clear.

  Since his first night in this world, the distant cacophony had been his constant backdrop. Screaming in the dark. The grind of things devouring other things. The bass-note wrongness of creatures whose existence was a philosophical argument against peace. He'd stopped consciously it the way you stop hearing your own heartbeat—but it was always , always pressing, always reminding him that the world was alive and hungry and he was a very convenient meal.

  Now?

  Nothing. Utter, absolute silence.

  The kind that didn't feel like peace. The kind that felt like a held breath.

  It settled. Low. Wrong.

  "There are no more monsters..."

  He hadn't meant to say it aloud.

  The woman tilted her head—a small, doll-precise motion. And just for a moment, standing in the wet dark of his collapsed little home, something flickered across her features. Something that might have been, in a different life, a kind of exhaustion.

  Gone in an instant.

  "Those things?" she said, her tone returning to its familiar flatness. "You could put it that way."

  Like she'd taken out the trash. Like she'd gone for an evening walk and the monsters had been an incidental inconvenience.

  Finlay stared at her.

  The things on this mountain. The things he hadn't catalogued after day four because cataloguing them had stopped being useful. The groove ran them anyway.

  Gone.

  And he hadn't felt so much as a tremor.

  His throat locked. Not fear—or not only. Something older. Deeper.

  "...Thank you."

  The words came out hoarse. Raw.

  All the monsters on this mountain. All of them. Dead.

  His stomach—hollow grave—

  No monsters meant no risk. No attracting them. No waiting in the dark with his teeth grinding and hunger eating him from the inside out like a slow, personal apocalypse. No reason to sit here staring at that boar and practicing the art of delayed gratification.

  The buffet was

  His mind, without consulting him, immediately departed for the kitchen.

  Somewhere in his skull, a rational voice was screaming at a volume that he was choosing not to hear. He accepted this cheerfully and continued planning the greatest meal in the history of a dying world.

  Several minutes elapsed.

  Reality tapped him on the shoulder.

  "Ah."

  He surfaced.

  The woman was still here.

  Standing in the exact spot she'd chosen, arms loosely at her sides, watching him with the patient attention of something that had genuinely nowhere else to be. Not bored. Not impatient. Simply—

  Finlay coughed.

  "Sorry. I got... sidetracked."

  She said nothing.

  He coughed again. "I'd invite you to sit, but as you can see..." He gestured vaguely at the landscape of mud, gaps, and structural suggestion that surrounded them.

  She didn't look at the mud. Didn't look at the holes. She looked at , with that same precise, unhurried attention—the kind that made you feel located, like an insect under careful glass.

  At last, she asked:

  "Do you have regrets?"

  The warmth of the culinary daydream evaporated.

  Finlay looked at his hands. The scarred, shaking, mapped-all-over hands of a man who'd been dismantled by this world and put back together by nothing but spite and desperation. A man who'd been "plating" a feast made of air and self-deception.

  He thought of the truck. Of the chair with the jabbing spring. Of waking up in a wrecked body, in a dying world, with a sword that gloated from the corner.

  "...Why are you asking?"

  "Because I have."

  The rain continued its mindless percussion on the roof. Inside the hut, something in the air went still.

  She wasn't looking at him like a specimen anymore.

  He couldn't name what she was looking at him like.

  The Sovereign's Blade hummed in the corner shadows, the way a smug thing hums.

  "Today," she said, "I want to give you a chance to get rid of yours." Her gaze moved to the hilt of the Sorrow Steel. "And settle my debt."

  "I..." He paused. Swallowed the dry ash in his throat. "Have we met before?"

  "In the past? No."

  He turned the words over. Found no bottom to them. The kind of answer that was technically correct and entirely useless.

  Before he could press it, she spoke again.

  "At the same time." Her voice dropped—very slightly. "I would like to make a request. To save someone."

  Finlay exhaled a jagged, hollow sound. "Wrong house, Lady. I'm hero. I can barely stand, let alone save whoever you think needs saving."

  "I know. The Hero is long since dead." Her golden eyes locked onto his, carrying the weight of something decided long before this conversation. "But the one capable of granting this request remains."

  She kept using that word with so much gravity, as though it were a physical thing she was handing him. He looked down at himself: scars, mud, the structural integrity of a man assembled from secondhand components.

  A fractured smile found his face. He felt a ghost of pity—not for himself, but for For coming all this way, hoping to find something that was simply not there.

  Then her pupils shifted. Vertical slits widening, slow and inevitable, the way a cat's eyes adjust to darkness they were made for.

  "So. My choice was fated after all."

  "Huh?"

  He didn't understand.

  She seemed to notice.

  "They say only the truly strong keep their smile in the most desperate of times."

  Finlay opened his mouth to correct her—to explain the precise grade of pathetic this smile was, to clarify that was not strength, this was a man grinning at the void because the alternative was lying down and letting the void have him—

  She read his mind.

  "It matters not how you smile," she said, already closing the distance, stopping only when the cold of her presence broke over him like a door opened on empty space. "The very fact that you still do carries weight. Even a pathetic smile is a strike against reality."

  She was close enough now that he could see, past the composure and the golden light, something he hadn't expected.

  Old.

  Not in her face—her face was ageless and clearly intending to stay that way. But in her eyes, in the way they held things, in the particular quality of her stillness: The way a mountain is old. The way something becomes old by outlasting what was supposed to outlast it.

  "After all," she said faintly, "many of us are no longer capable of even that."

  Above them, through the broken roof, the last star flickered.

  He'd clocked it now—silver, curved, half-hidden by the cloak, long enough to settle any argument permanently. It caught what little light existed and refused to return it.

  His gaze locked on.

  She followed it.

  Something moved in her golden eyes—fast. There. Gone.

  "Oh." Her voice dropped into flat. "I almost forgot about that."

  A beat.

  "When am I going to stop making such obvious mistakes?"

  His body already knew.

  The politeness. The regrets. The request. All of it preamble. She had a reason for being here, and it almost certainly ended with him horizontal and significantly less living.

  His hand moved toward the rust-knife.

  The honest answer was: no. Not even a little. Someone who'd erased an entire mountain of horrors without him hearing so much as a scream wasn't something a corroded kitchen blade was going to intimidate. But he hadn't survived a week in this place by rational assessment of survivability.

  He'd survived by

  His fingers found the hilt.

  She moved.

  And—

  Bent down.

  Removed her shoes.

  Straightened.

  Walked three steps to the doorway, placed the shoes carefully on the threshold—beside what he optimistically called a foyer—and then returned.

  Barefoot. Unbothered. Standing in the mud.

  Her feet, he noticed, despite stepping directly into the filth of his floor, remained Spotless. As if the grime of this world understood its station and declined to apply.

  Refused to move past it.

  "..."

  Finlay's hand was still on the knife.

  He stared at her feet.

  Then up at her face.

  "Is something wrong?"

  Her voice, still perfectly calibrated to nothing in particular, hung in the damp air.

  "I heard that people remove their shoes before entering someone's home." She paused. "It was not a custom where I lived. I tend to forget it." Another pause. Smaller. "I was reminded recently."

  The words landed with the soft, precise thud of something she hadn't entirely meant to say.

  Finlay let go of the knife.

  He closed his eyes.

  He needed a moment. Just a moment.

  Because she had just committed mountain-wide genocide on his behalf—casually, completely, without leaving him a single thing to hear—and her primary concern, standing in the aftermath with her silver blade and her ancient eyes, was whether she had tracked mud across someone's floor.

  He didn't know which of them was the strange one. He'd arrived in this world a modern man, a reasonable man, a man who'd looked both ways and worn his seatbelt—and somewhere in the last week he'd become a rat, a wraith, a thing that

  She was more like a resident of a civilized world than he was.

  This world had gone mad. He had gone mad with it.

  He belonged.

  When Finlay opened his eyes, they were quiet. The way deep water is quiet. If the sky came down—let it.

  "It's fine," he said.

  He looked at her: this small, ancient, immaculate, violent, shoe-removing woman standing in his mud.

  "So," he said. "What can I do for you?"

  Her golden eyes found his.

  "Go back," she said.

  The last star flickered through the broken roof.

  "Find me."

  The rain drummed its patient rhythm.

  "Fix me."