Neuvillette

By noon, Fontaine had already started to annoy itself. The rain had been falling since morning without a break, not hard enough to warrant an alarm, but nasty, sticky, drawn-out, the kind that gets lodged in a city and starts wearing on people’s nerves. The stone on the stairs had darkened, the drains ran without pause, the pavements shone as if someone had deliberately coated them with a thin layer of glass, and at the entrance to the Palais Mermonia a whole line of soaked clerks, couriers, and visitors had piled up, each with their own business and their own irritation. Aether, shaking water off his cloak, glanced up at the sky in silence and then at Paimon, who had been muttering the same thing for the past five minutes, only using different words each time.

"Paimon told you right away that this isn’t normal. No, seriously, it isn’t normal. Fontaine is damp enough as it is, but today is just miserable. Even the food feels cold out of spite."

Aether gave a quiet huff and adjusted his glove, from which water had already started dripping onto his wrist.

"You’ve managed to eat three times already."

"That wasn’t because life was good, it was so I wouldn’t lose my mind. When the weather’s like this, a person needs support, and Paimon especially."

They climbed the steps, passed through the heavy doors, and stepped inside, where it was dry, warm, and still somehow unsettling. The Palais Mermonia usually ran on a very recognizable order: voices were not raised without reason, papers did not go missing, people moved quickly but did not scurry. Today, though, there was a nervous rustling running through the halls, as if everyone was trying to preserve the appearance of an ordinary working day even though it had long since become obvious that the day had gone to hell. Melusines were whispering near the staircases, one secretary hurried past them carrying a stack of documents with the face of a man who looked ready to drop the lot and throw himself out the nearest window just to avoid being involved any longer.

"There, see, you feel it too?" Paimon hovered in the air and looked around suspiciously. "Something happened here. And don’t look at Paimon like that, Paimon has excellent instincts when it comes to other people’s disasters."

From behind a distant column, a young Melusine came out almost at a run, a folder tucked under one arm. She clearly meant to rush past, but the second she spotted Aether she stopped so abruptly she nearly ran into herself.

"Traveler! And Paimon! Thank goodness you’re here."

"Wow, that doesn’t sound like a greeting, that sounds like a plea for help," Paimon said at once, alarmed. "What happened? Where’s Monsieur Neuvillette? Is he alright?"

The Melusine hesitated. It was obvious from her face that she was trying very hard to maintain professional composure, and doing a poor job of it.

"He is... yes. That is, physically – yes. But I’m afraid in every other sense things are much worse."

Paimon blinked slowly.

"What do you mean, ‘every other sense’?"

The Melusine lowered her voice, though there was hardly any point. The anxiety crawling through the palace could have been scooped up with a spoon already.

"Since morning he has barely left his office, he canceled two personal appointments, asked for the same report three times, then stared at it without opening it, and half an hour ago he told me that the document ‘should be left on the desk for the time being,’ even though I was holding a tray of tea. Monsieur Neuvillette never confuses tea with documents. Never."

Aether exchanged a glance with Paimon. She slowly drifted lower, her hands no longer flailing.

"Alright. That is serious."

"Very serious," the Melusine nodded grimly. "And the rain hasn’t stopped."

That hardly needed saying. Aether understood perfectly well what she meant. In Fontaine, people had long stopped treating it as a simple coincidence how often Neuvillette’s state seemed to answer back through the weather, even if not everyone said so out loud. Half the city had been getting drenched since morning, and inside, the Iudex, who usually carried himself as though the necessities of ordinary life were the only thing tethering him to it at all, was staring through reports and confusing folders with a tea tray. The picture was troubling, and profoundly unlike him.

"We can talk to him," Aether said.

The Melusine let out a breath like someone whose life had just been extended.

"Please. Only... if you can, be gentle. Today he already looks..." she stopped, searching for the right word, then admitted honestly "Today he looks like a man who said the wrong thing and now cannot forgive himself for it."

That explained a great deal.

Neuvillette’s office greeted them with its usual order and an unusual silence. Tall windows were washed in grey light, streaks of rain slid endlessly down the glass, papers lay in neat piles across the long desk, a vase of flowers on the sill had already begun to droop a little, and Neuvillette himself stood by the window with his hands clasped behind his back, looking outside with such concentration that it seemed as though the answer to some question he had noticed too late was somewhere out there beyond the water and stone. He did not turn immediately. When he finally did, his face was composed as ever, but the exhaustion was no longer something he could fully hide.

"Traveler. Paimon. I did not expect your visit today of all days."

"Yeah, we noticed that already," Paimon muttered, then immediately straightened up. "I mean... Paimon doesn’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just that everyone in the palace looks so on edge, like somebody accidentally confessed their love right in the middle of a court session."

For a fraction of a second, something crossed his gaze that was entirely unprofessional, brief and heavy. Not irritation, not surprise, but that unpleasant feeling when a random remark lands exactly where it should not.

"I suppose this is indeed not the best day for light conversation."

Aether stepped a little closer to the desk without sitting. Talking to Neuvillette was always easier when nobody bothered putting on unnecessary ceremony.

"People outside are worried. And not just because of the rain."

Neuvillette inclined his head slightly, as though accepting the fact without dispute.

"They have nothing to worry about. The court’s work has not been disrupted, administrative decisions are being made on time, and there is no threat to the city."

"Right, only you look like you haven’t slept, haven’t eaten, and have been replaying the same conversation in your head for the hundredth time," Paimon said, surprisingly quiet. "Paimon lies for effect sometimes, but not this time."

He was silent for several seconds. Rain murmured steadily beyond the glass. Somewhere in the corridor, a door opened and shut.

"Your observation is correct," Neuvillette said at last. "This morning, there was a conversation between me and someone very close to me, and it should have gone differently. I made a grave mistake."

"Did you yell at someone?" Paimon asked immediately.

"No."

"Did you say something awful?"

Neuvillette turned his head back toward the window, as if it were easier to answer the grey glass than two living witnesses.

"That is precisely the problem. I said nothing awful. I said something cold, dry, and painfully ill-timed, as though I were trying to examine someone’s upset from the perspective of procedure, when the matter concerned not procedure but a person who expected something entirely different from me."

That sounded truthful enough that even Paimon had no immediate comeback. Aether only gave a slight nod. Yes, that was exactly how Neuvillette would get something wrong: not through cruelty, not through temper, but through a cursed precision at the wrong moment.

"And what happened after that?" he asked.

"She left."

Paimon froze in midair, blinked, and pointed into the space between them as if hoping that if she aimed in the right direction, it would become clearer.

"Wait. Who – she?"

Neuvillette did not answer at once. He seemed to understand already that there would be no continuing this conversation as though nothing important was happening, and even so he did not rush. It was not embarrassment, not exactly. More that rare inner pause when even he had to choose words not for their precision, but for their weight.

"My wife."

The office went so quiet that the rain beyond the windows suddenly sounded almost indecently loud.

Paimon stared at him as though the desk had started speaking, the cabinet had resigned, and Aether had abruptly announced that he was opening a bakery.

"Your... what?"

"My wife," Neuvillette repeated in the same level tone, which only made everything worse now. "I believed that was sufficiently clear."

"No, it wasn’t! I mean, it was, but that only makes it worse!" Paimon clutched her head. "Since when do you have a wife?!"

Neuvillette frowned slightly. The question seemed to strike him as odd in its structure.

"Since the marriage was concluded."

"Thank you, Paimon now understands how marriage works," she snapped, then jabbed a finger toward Aether. "Say something. Why aren’t you saying anything?"

"Because I’m trying not to laugh," Aether answered honestly, covering his mouth with one hand.

"This isn’t funny!"

"It really is."

To Neuvillette’s credit, he did not take offense. He only lowered his gaze slowly to the papers on the desk, then raised it again.

"I understand that the news has come as a surprise to you. At present, however, that is not what concerns me most."

"Well, yes, fair enough," Paimon said, still processing what she had heard, then forced herself back to the point. "Fine. Alright. Let’s say this is real. Let’s say you have a wife. And the two of you had an argument this morning. What could you even argue about with him? You don’t even know how to be properly angry, you look too official for it."

This time, Neuvillette did glance away, and Aether had the absurd thought that if the situation had not been so serious, it would almost have been funny: the Chief Justice of Fontaine, a dragon, a man half the city was afraid to interrupt, now standing before them with the look of a husband who had said something stupid at home and had understood it for hours.

"The reason was extremely minor. She was preparing to go out on errands, and when I noticed the weather worsening, I suggested that she wait for a carriage. In response, I was informed that she was entirely capable of walking on her own and had no need of my supervision."

"So far that sounds normal," Paimon said warily.

"Yes. At that point, I should have acknowledged that my remark was motivated by concern and left it there. Instead, I said that the issue was not her capability but unnecessary risk, and that there were already sufficient matters in the city without creating additional reasons for worry."

Paimon slowly covered her face with both hands.

"Oh no."

"Oh yes," Aether confirmed darkly.

"I understood my mistake too late," Neuvillette went on, and for the first time in the conversation there was an exhaustion in his voice with no defense around it. "It sounded as though I were scolding her for being an inconvenience. I intended to express concern and managed to express only a dryness so irritating it deserved the reaction it received. She replied that she had no need of being addressed as though she were part of a court directive, and then she left before I could say anything wiser."

"Well, fair," Paimon said, then raised a finger. "Terrible, obviously, but fair. You really did say something idiotic."

"That is painfully clear to me already."

"And since then you’ve just been standing here, suffering dramatically on the inside and flooding the entire city?"

Neuvillette looked at her with restrained disapproval, but he did not argue.

"To phrase it in less coarse terms, yes. I do not take pride in it."

Paimon sighed and drifted a little closer.

"Listen, then you just have to apologize."

"I intend to."

"Then go and do it."

"I do not know where she is."

He said it so simply that the weight of the sentence did not land at once. Not because he could not find a person in the city. Not because there were not enough servants, power, or means. But because for the first time since morning, he seemed to have said aloud the thing that truly would not let him rest. He did not know where she was, did not know how badly he had hurt her, did not know how long she had been out in this damned rain, which by now was falling in no small part because of him. And for Neuvillette, who was accustomed at least to understanding the boundaries of a situation, that struck harder than any external crisis.

"Did you try to find her?" Aether asked quietly.

"Not as I should have. Several times I was prepared to go out in person, but each time I stopped at the thought that if I pursued her immediately after the argument, it might seem like yet another attempt to impose my will on her. I decided to wait until at least noon and send a note. Then noon passed. The note remained in the drawer."

Paimon opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again.

"Paimon is about to say something very strange, but... you really are hopelessly in love, aren’t you."

Neuvillette looked at her without any interest in discussing the phrasing.

"If that expression refers to a state in which another person’s hurt causes an amount of distress entirely disproportionate to any reproach directed at oneself, then yes, probably."

"That was almost a confession," Aether murmured.

"Almost?" Paimon shot back. "After the words ‘my wife,’ Paimon is pretty sure nothing can shock us anymore."

She was about to say more, no doubt something clever and probably not terribly tactful, when quick footsteps sounded beyond the door. Someone stopped outside, as if they had not quite decided to enter, and then the handle moved. The door opened, and you stepped into the office.

A thin trail of water immediately spread across the floor from where you stood. Your cloak was soaked through, the fabric clinging to your shoulders and sleeves, your hair had darkened and come loose from the rain, your lashes were wet, and your face had the unmistakable look of someone who had been trying to hold it together for far too long and had eventually broken down somewhere on the way. You stopped just inside the doorway, breathing a little too hard from hurrying, your fingers tightening around the edge of your drenched sleeve, and you saw not Aether and Paimon first, but only Neuvillette. Everything else, it seemed, ceased to matter at once.

"I..." your voice broke, and you angrily wiped at your cheek with the back of your hand, as if tears here were not a personal collapse but some irritating technical malfunction. "I didn’t come back to start another argument. I wasn’t planning to make a scene either. I just... damn it, Neuvillette, I said things I shouldn’t have too."

He was already moving toward you. Not hurried in the ordinary sense, but faster than he had probably ever crossed that office in front of witnesses. A folder on the edge of the desk shifted in the wake of his coat, a chair gave a faint scrape across the floor, and Paimon jerked so sharply out of the way that she herself did not seem to understand how she had ended up there.

"You’re soaked," he said softly, and there was no rebuke in it, no dry remark, no trace of the morning’s mistake, only raw, unhidden worry.

"Yeah, I noticed," you tried to laugh, but it came out frayed and small. "I was going to stay angry longer, honestly. But then I realized you were probably sitting here alone, blaming yourself for everything at once, and I felt so awful I just couldn’t..."

You did not finish. Neuvillette simply took hold of your shoulders, quick and careful, as though he needed to be certain you were really there, alive, warm beneath all that wet fabric, real and not just another thought he had been grinding himself down with all morning. Then he pulled you to him, and you clung to him at once with both arms, pressing your face against his chest as if there was only one possible way to survive the entire miserable day – by finally stopping the two of you from standing apart.

Aether turned toward the window in silence, not because he was embarrassed, but because he understood that if he looked at Paimon right then, she would either start screaming or faint in midair. Paimon, to be fair, looked close to both. She had her hands on her own cheeks and was staring at the scene with the expression of someone experiencing pure, undiluted disbelief.

"I should not have spoken to you that way," Neuvillette said into your rain-soaked hair, and for the first time his voice shook, very slightly, but enough that anyone who knew him at all would have understood the scale of it. "I wanted to say that I was worried for you, and instead I chose the wrong words again. That was my fault."

"And I shouldn’t have walked out like that," you answered, still pressed against him, as though you were afraid that if you let go too soon, he would become that flawlessly composed Iudex again, the one who was difficult to argue with and harder still to make peace with. "I understood perfectly well that you were worried, I was just angry because you spoke to me as if I were part of your schedule for the day instead of a person you could actually talk to."

"A fair criticism."

"It damn well is."

A tired shadow of a smile finally flickered across your mouth. Without releasing you, Neuvillette glanced at your soaked collar, the rain trembling on your lashes, and very clearly had to stop himself from summoning half the palace with towels, blankets, and hot tea on the spot.

"You’re shivering. You should have changed before coming up here."

"I should have gotten to you first and worried about the rest later," you said quietly.

He closed his eyes for the briefest moment, as if that plain sentence had finished him off completely.

"Do not do that again."

"You neither."

"I will try."

"No, you won’t try. You’ll do it."

And that, to Paimon’s complete horror, was when something appeared on Neuvillette’s face that she seemed utterly unprepared to witness at all: a very quiet, very human kind of yielding. Not a polite half-smile for the public, not the shadow of approval, but a real, warm, slightly helpless agreement from a man who had nearly worn himself raw over a stupid morning argument, half a day of guilt, and rain over the whole of Fontaine.

"Very well," he said. "I will."

You finally drew back just enough to look at him, and only then seemed to remember that the office was not empty. Your eyes moved first to Aether, then to Paimon, who was no longer making even the slightest attempt to hide her expression.

"Oh..." you blinked. "I may have chosen an extremely unfortunate moment for a marital reconciliation."

"Extremely?!" Paimon finally came back to life. "Paimon is going to burst. She’s just going to burst. First of all, Neuvillette has a wife. Second, the two of you had a completely normal married-people argument over something stupid. Third, this entire rainstorm since morning was because he’s been sitting in here suffering over you?!"

Neuvillette turned to look at her. Anyone else in his place might have tried to deny some of it. Of course, he did no such thing.

"If one removes your rather loose choice of wording, then in broad terms – yes."

"Oh my gods..." Paimon pressed a hand to her forehead. "Paimon is never going to be able to look at rain in Fontaine the same way again."

You were still in Neuvillette’s arms, soaked through, flushed, and obviously no less embarrassed than he was, only with you it showed more plainly.

"I’m sorry you had to witness this in exactly this way."

"No, actually, thank you," Aether said, and the smile in his voice was no longer particularly hidden. "You don’t often get the chance to learn that the Chief Justice of Fontaine is fully capable of forgetting every paper in the room the moment his wife walks through the door."

Neuvillette did not argue with that either. One arm was still around your back, while with the other he was already reaching for the dry cloak draped over a chair, as though conversation was one thing and wet clothes quite another.

"I believe official meetings may be concluded for today," he said, looking only at you now. "You need to get warm, and I need to repair the consequences of my own stupidity, preferably before Fontaine drowns entirely."

Paimon’s head snapped up.

"So you do realize you flooded half the city over a domestic argument?!"

"I do," Neuvillette answered calmly. "And I find it deeply embarrassing."

"Deeply embarrassing is when you forget a clerk’s name. This is catastrophically romantic and very, very weird."

You laughed then, quietly, with your forehead resting against his shoulder, and he seemed, for the first time all day, to exhale for real. The strain did not vanish at once, the hurt did not evaporate in an instant, and the two of you clearly still had more than one conversation ahead of you, but the important part had already happened: you had come back, he had stopped holding himself together on stubbornness alone, and with that even the air in the room seemed to loosen.

Outside the windows, the rain was still falling, but more softly now, more evenly, without the earlier miserable insistence. Paimon noticed first, jabbed a finger at the glass, then looked at Aether and opened her mouth soundlessly, unable to decide what was stronger at that moment – shock, curiosity, or the desperate urge to tell someone she absolutely was not supposed to tell.

Neuvillette settled the dry cloak over your shoulders, adjusted the collar as though that simple gesture might serve as one more apology, this time without words, and only then looked back at his guests in the manner of a man who had just remembered the existence of manners far too late to salvage anything.

"Traveler. Paimon. You have my apologies for the circumstances under which you learned of my family life."

"Yeah, ‘circumstances’ is one way to put it," Paimon muttered. "Paimon is either going to become very understanding after this or scream until evening."

Aether let out a quiet laugh and headed for the door, deciding they had already seen far more than they had bargained for today.

"I think the two of you can manage from here."

You looked up at him over Neuvillette’s shoulder and, in spite of your exhaustion, gave a grateful nod. And Neuvillette, without letting go of you, answered in that rare tone where formality remained, but no longer stood between him and other people like a wall.

"We can."

And if there was anything at all to be understood from the way he said that single word, it was this: all the misery of today, all the rain, all the guilt that had built up in him had been reduced to one thing only – that you had come back in the end and were with him again, alive, warm, real, even soaked to the bone and with tears still on your face, which meant that the rest of it could now be endured without having to endure it alone.

When Aether and Paimon returned to Fontaine, the city greeted them exactly the way it should have greeted old acquaintances, not with novelty or sudden disaster this time, but with the familiar noise of the streets, the shine of water beyond the canal railings, the hum of conversation outside cafés, and that pleasant feeling you get when you arrive somewhere that no longer needs to introduce itself to you. They had already stopped by Navia’s, where Paimon ate like the road back from Natlan had ended not yesterday but after several years of deliberate starvation, then crossed paths with Lyney and Lynette, caught Clorinde on the move with the same expression that always made it seem as though she could arrest someone with a glance alone, and even got a very genuine invitation from Wriothesley to visit the Fortress if they happened to grow bored of the surface. By evening there was only one visit left, and Paimon, slightly worn out by her own sociability by then, still perked up when the familiar halls of the Palais Mermonia came into view.

"Alright, only Monsieur Neuvillette left, and Paimon really hopes he won’t start asking how many times we managed to get dragged into trouble lately."

Aether smirked.

"He’ll know without asking."

"That’s exactly what’s worrying."

They were received without delay. Neuvillette’s office looked much the same as ever: orderly, quiet, tall windows, light already starting to fade into that soft evening grey, neat stacks of documents on the desk, and Neuvillette himself, greeting them in that calm tone of his that never sounded overly warm and yet always carried real attention. The conversation with him turned out easier than expected, almost surprisingly easy. He asked about the road, about how far they had gone after Natlan, listened to Paimon’s rambling retelling of recent events with an expression suggesting he genuinely considered every complaint of hers a useful detail, and even allowed himself one of those rare, quiet remarks that always made Aether think Neuvillette did in fact have a sense of humor, he simply used it very sparingly.

"From your account, the journey seems to have been less a period of rest and more an exercise in endurance."

"Exactly!" Paimon threw up her hands. "Finally, somebody gets it."

"Paimon, you’re saying that like you were forced into all of it."

"I was forced. By circumstances, by hunger, by geography, by awful people, by really awful people, by the heat, and by hunger again..."

Neuvillette inclined his head slightly, letting her finish, then set his teacup down.

"In that case, you would probably do well to spend a few days in Fontaine quietly, without haste and without unnecessary risk. As a matter of fact, since you have arrived at this particular time, allow me to invite you to tomorrow evening’s ball. The event is official in nature, but not so formal that your presence would seem out of place. On the contrary, I believe you would be welcome."

Paimon brightened immediately.

"A ball? A real ball? With music, fancy clothes, food, and rich people pretending not to gossip when they absolutely are?"

"The phrasing is somewhat coarse," Neuvillette observed, "but broadly accurate."

Aether glanced at him.

"You’ll be there too?"

"Naturally. Otherwise, the invitation would have been a rather odd one to extend."

"Then we’ll come," Aether said.

"And Paimon too, especially if the desserts are good."

The following evening made it very clear that Fontaine knew exactly how to hold a celebration in the manner Aether had expected: grand, but not gaudy, elegant in a way that did not demand admiration so much as assume it. The hall was full of soft light, music shimmered beneath the high ceilings, the gold of the chandeliers reflected in the glass and the water beyond the windows, and the guests moved through the room with the ease of people who seemed to have known since birth how to hold a glass, how to turn at a greeting, and how to speak, smile, and notice everything important all at once. Paimon made a sincere attempt to behave for the first few minutes, then spotted the table of sweets and decided that culture would still be there after she came back.

"Paimon is only observing. Very carefully. Especially those pastries."

Aether did not argue. He was in no rush to seek out Neuvillette right away either, choosing instead to walk the room first and see who had come. There were plenty of familiar faces. At the far end of the hall he spotted Navia deep in animated conversation with someone, not far from her stood Clorinde with her usual unreadable look, beside one of the columns Lyney appeared to be entertaining a small cluster of guests with what looked suspiciously like an innocent trick, and a little farther off by the drinks table stood Wriothesley looking very much like a man who was present only because someone had insisted he act like respectable company for one evening at the very least.

"Hey," Paimon said quietly, having returned with her spoils, "where’s Neuvillette?"

Aether noticed him almost at once. Neuvillette was not standing in the center of the room, though his position as host would have justified it easily, but a little to the side where he had a clear view of the entrance. He was, as ever, flawlessly composed, and yet something about him tonight was just far enough off the usual picture that it stood out even from a distance. He was looking toward the doors too often. His gaze kept flicking to the clock too quickly. Time and again he tapped a finger against the stem of his glass, so faintly most people would never have noticed, and the toe of his shoe traced a short rhythm against the floor that gave away tension no matter how carefully the rest of him remained controlled.

"Oh," Paimon narrowed her eyes. "He’s waiting for someone."

"Looks like it."

"And very badly."

They did not get the chance to go any closer. The doors opened again at that very moment, and for an instant the motion near the entrance seemed to falter. Not because someone had arrived late, half the guests were doing that on purpose, but because the woman entering the hall drew attention at once and far too naturally for it to feel staged. You were young, strikingly beautiful in the way that first registered as a complete impression and only afterward began to break apart into details, and the dress you wore was the sort people would end up discussing for the rest of the evening, too luxurious to pretend not to see and yet fitted to you so perfectly that all that splendor seemed to exist only to frame you rather than compete with you. Even so, you were obviously a little out of breath, a little tired, fanning yourself not out of flirtation but because you genuinely looked worn down from the effort of getting there, and the very first thing you did was look not at the crowd but over it, quickly and sharply, as if searching for one specific person.

Neuvillette found you first. That much was obvious at once, even from the other end of the hall. In a single moment all of that quiet, careful tension in him made sense. He set down his glass without seeming to hear whatever had been said to him a second earlier and walked straight toward you. Paimon grabbed Aether’s sleeve on reflex.

"Do you see this?"

"Yes."

They could not hear what the two of you were saying. The music, the voices, the sound of glass swallowed it all. They did not need to hear it to understand the important part. Neuvillette stopped close in front of you, said something brief, and his face changed so visibly that for a second Aether had the oddest feeling he was looking at a person he had never actually met before. Not because Neuvillette had become someone else, but because the part of his life he never showed anyone was suddenly standing there in plain view. He took your hand, calm and natural, with the ease of someone continuing a conversation that had long ago begun, then used his other hand to adjust the delicate straps that had slipped from your shoulder, his fingers lingering there a little longer than plain courtesy demanded, and said something else that made you let out a tired breath before finally smiling at him properly.

"No, no, no..." Paimon whispered, already beginning to suspect what was happening and absolutely not wanting that suspicion confirmed.

The music shifted into something softer just then, and without releasing your hand, Neuvillette guided you toward the couples on the floor. There was no theatrical flourish in him, but there was a quiet confidence made even more obvious by how carefully he handled you in particular. One hand held yours, the other rested at your waist with a precision that suggested he knew perfectly well where you liked to be held and where you did not, and all the while he looked at you the way people do not look at casual acquaintances. His attention kept moving between your eyes and your lips with such open focus that at some point Paimon simply stopped blinking.

"Aether," she said very quietly, "either Paimon just understood everything or she needs a doctor."

He did not get to answer.

"If I were you, I’d go with the first option. A doctor can probably be found, but I’m afraid they won’t be of much use at this point."

Both of them jolted and turned so sharply that Navia, standing just behind them with a glass in hand, very nearly laughed out loud.

"That was quite a reaction. I didn’t mean to scare you that badly."

"Navia!" Paimon grabbed at her chest. "Are you out of your mind, sneaking up on people like that?!"

"I wasn’t sneaking. I walked over perfectly normally, you were just both staring at the same spot like the secrets of the world were about to be revealed there."

She followed their line of sight, saw exactly whom they were looking at, and a much too knowing smile spread across her face.

"Ah. I see. Well then, in a sense, I suppose a secret has just been revealed."

Paimon turned to her slowly.

"Navia... don’t tell me..."

"Which part is it that’s thrown you off so badly?" Navia asked, thoroughly amused. "The fact that Monsieur Neuvillette has barely listened to anyone all evening because he was waiting only for her, or the fact that you apparently just found out who that beautiful woman actually is?"

"Paimon isn’t sure she’s prepared for either version."

Navia gave a soft snort and looked back toward the dance floor.

"Funny, isn’t it? From the outside they look almost impossible together, and then you watch them for a little longer and suddenly everything falls into place. It’s not the sort of thing you expect from someone like him. Who would have thought there’d be a person in this world who could make our cold, immaculate Monsieur Iudex check the clock every two minutes and look restless like any ordinary man in love. Love does absurd things to people. But honestly, I’m glad he has her. He’s been softer since he married her. Not in court, of course, there he can still drive a person to the edge of a breakdown with a single clarifying question, but with people in general – yes. More patient. Warmer."

Paimon stared at her as though she were now genuinely on the verge of bursting apart.

"Since he did what?"

"Since he got married," Navia repeated with complete calm, then took a sip from her glass. "Oh, don’t tell me you truly didn’t know. In that case, I may just have improved your evening in the most spectacular way possible."

"Improved?!" Paimon hissed, nearly bouncing in the air. "Navia, Paimon is about to lose all trust in reality. Neuvillette has a wife? An actual wife? And people knew?!"

"Not everyone, of course. But many suspected, and some knew for certain. It’s just not the part of his life he considers worth announcing at every opportunity."

Aether looked back at the two of you. Now that the meaning of the scene had become clear, everything somehow got worse. Not better, not easier to process, worse, because every gesture immediately took on a whole new meaning. The way Neuvillette leaned closer when you said something to him. The way you looked up at him with a tired but unmistakably warm smile that made his usually composed face turn genuinely alive for a second. The way his thumb brushed over your fingers almost absently before guiding you into the next step of the dance. It did not look like a sudden infatuation, or a flirtation, or some beautiful public performance. It looked like habit, long-formed closeness, and the kind of carefulness that comes not from attraction alone, but from real attachment.

"Wait, hold on," Paimon lifted both hands, as though trying to physically stop reality from continuing. "If that’s his wife, then why didn’t he say anything yesterday when he invited us to the ball?!"

Navia raised an eyebrow.

"Because he’s Monsieur Neuvillette. For him, the phrase ‘come tomorrow and you’ll see for yourselves’ would probably already count as uncomfortably personal."

Even Aether smiled at that.

"That does sound like him."

"Very much so," Navia agreed, shaking her head. "Though to be fair, he has been worse than usual all evening. I went over to greet him about ten minutes ago and I’m fairly sure he only heard half of what I said. He kept looking at the doors, then at the clock, then back at the doors. I was starting to think that if she didn’t show up within the next five minutes, he was either going to go after her himself or frighten the guests into silence with that stare alone."

"Paimon thought he was just tired."

"No, that wasn’t tiredness. That was waiting."

As if to prove the point, you stumbled slightly in the middle of a turn, probably because the rush and the fatigue were finally catching up with you, but Neuvillette adjusted for both of you at once, steadying you so smoothly it looked as though he had expected it, and said something low near your temple. You gave a soft snort, clearly suppressing a laugh, and lightly tapped his shoulder with your fan. That tiny moment made Paimon produce a sound that belonged to no single emotion in particular.

"No, that’s it, Paimon can’t do this anymore. He even lets you hit him with a fan."

Navia laughed.

"Oh, believe me, that’s not even the most surprising part."

"There are more surprising parts?!"

"Of course. But before we get to those, I’d recommend the two of you accept one basic fact first: even the most unnervingly composed people have a home, habits, someone they wait for, and a truly dreadful look about them when that person is late."

Paimon was already drawing breath to answer when Neuvillette noticed them. Or rather, perhaps not noticed exactly. It seemed far more likely that he had been aware of them all along and had simply been too occupied making sure you had actually arrived, were breathing, were not about to collapse from exhaustion, and had no intention of disappearing again within the next hour. Now, after slowly bringing the dance to a stop, he said something to you, you nodded, and he guided you directly toward them.

"No," Paimon said with the despair of someone hearing the sentence before it’s fully read. "No, no, no. They’re coming over. Aether, say something clever."

"Too late."

Neuvillette stopped in front of them, and if a moment earlier he had still looked like the man they knew from courtrooms and office doors, now both versions of him existed at once without any contradiction. He remained impeccably composed, but the hand resting at your waist did not leave, as if the thought that it should simply had not occurred to him.

"Traveler. Paimon. I take it the evening has turned out to be somewhat more eventful for you than it originally promised."

"That’s a very mild way of putting it," Aether muttered.

Paimon, on the other hand, spent several seconds staring first at him and then at you before finally blurting out, with absolutely no control left:

"So it’s true?!"

You blinked, then looked past them to Navia. Navia made a show of looking entirely innocent, though the satisfaction on her face ruined the effort.

"Navia," Neuvillette said with the calm reproach that in his case nearly always meant: I understand everything, I will not argue, but I am taking note of it.

"What?" she shrugged. "They were going to find out anyway. I merely accelerated the process a little."

You failed to hold back a quiet smile once you understood.

"It seems I should have arrived a little earlier. The shock might have been less severe."

"It’s already fatal," Paimon groaned. "Neuvillette has a wife, and she looks like this, and the two of you are dancing in the middle of a ball like this is completely normal, and everyone except us seems to have made peace with it already!"

"Broadly speaking, yes," Neuvillette said dryly. "Though your wording is, as usual, somewhat excessive."

Aether finally allowed himself an open smile.

"You could have warned us."

"I did not think it required a separate announcement."

"Of course not," Paimon said in a tone suggesting she was one breath away from biting the air itself. "Why would it. A wife, a ball, you staring at the doors all evening like one more minute and you’d start interrogating every person who walked in."

You raised your fan to your mouth, but it was obvious you were struggling not to laugh harder. Neuvillette turned his head toward you, and that one movement alone was enough to make Paimon fall silent again: he looked at you with such quiet softness, so openly, that any further outrage immediately lost half its power.

"My apologies," he said, a little lower now. "It is possible I should have been clearer."

"Oh no, don’t you dare," Navia cut in with a snort. "This is much better. I haven’t seen anyone have this effect on Paimon in ages."

"Paimon is still right here, by the way."

"And that is precisely why the evening has been such a success."

You finally lowered the fan and looked at Aether and Paimon properly, without embarrassment now, but with the kind of easy warmth that made people like you on sight.

"I’m glad to finally meet you under less official circumstances. I’ve heard about you more than once."

Paimon jerked in place.

"What do you mean, you’ve heard about us more than once?!"

This time you really did laugh.

"Exactly what it sounds like. My husband can be very reserved in public, but at home he is not nearly as silent as he may seem to you."

That finished Paimon completely. Aether only covered his eyes with one hand, already aware he would remember her face for a very long time after this.

"That’s it," Paimon whispered. "Paimon can’t live in a world where Neuvillette has an ‘at home.’"

"You will have to," Neuvillette said with faint irony. "Because, as you can see, that world is entirely real."

Navia nearly laughed into her glass. You shook your head as though long accustomed to the fact that the most serious things somehow sounded especially calm in his mouth, and Neuvillette, noticing, smiled just enough to stop pretending that your presence was not the sole reason his evening had become bearable. The music changed again, someone nearby laughed, glass flashed under the chandelier light, and Paimon still stood there wearing the expression usually reserved either for miracles or for total nonsense.

Judging by her face, she had not yet decided which of the two she had witnessed tonight. Aether, however, already had. He looked at Neuvillette, at the hand resting at your waist, at the way you stood beside him as though it was the most natural thing in the world, and understood that the most striking part of this revelation was not even the marriage itself. It was how, once you saw it with your own eyes, it suddenly seemed right. No one had simply ever been allowed to look at Neuvillette from this side before.

On days like this, Fontaine looked far too respectable for a city where, five minutes later, something could easily go wrong with documents, water, nerves, and, if things went badly enough, the judicial system. The sun still hung above the rooftops, the canals gleamed smooth and calm, and Aether and Paimon were walking along the upper gallery near the administrative wing of the Palais Mermonia with the rare feeling that, for once, they had been given something simple. No mysteries, no prophecies, no monsters, no trials, just a short errand from one Melusine: deliver a packet of documents to the next building and pass along a reply about some minor clerical matter.

"Paimon is saying this now, it’s suspicious," she declared, flying backwards in front of Aether and poking a finger at him. "Anything that sounds like ‘just deliver some papers’ is a trap. First you deliver them, then one is missing, another was signed by the wrong person, and the third got eaten by some local creature."

Aether raised an eyebrow.

"You spend too much time around bureaucracy."

"No, bureaucracy spends too much time around Paimon."

They turned beneath an archway where the air was cooler. To the right, windows overlooked the canal; to the left, service office doors lined the corridor, with clerks, Melusines, and couriers passing constantly. Everything was normal until a sharp splash rose from the lower staircase, followed by a frightened voice.

"Oh! No, no, no, not that!"

Paimon spun around at once.

"There. See? Paimon told you."

At the foot of the stairs, beside a narrow canal, stood a Melusine in a formal cloak, and beside her a full local disaster had already spread across the stone: a bundle of folders had come loose, some papers had flown into the water, some were soaking on the steps, and another stack was tilting after them. The Melusine herself kept darting between the canal and the stairs, unable to decide what to save first.

════════════════════ Quest Started: "What No One Thought to Ask" Something is always getting lost in the Palais Mermonia, but sometimes more than paperwork rises to the surface. Current Objective: Approach the Melusine and ask what happened. ════════════════════

Aether jumped down first, caught the folder already sliding off the step, and pinned it against the stone while Paimon darted over the water, trying to spot the drifting sheets.

"Over here! Hurry, that one’s about to get carried off!"

"I know, I see it!" the Melusine said, nearly in tears. "These are copies of internal reports. If they’re ruined, madam won’t eat me, of course, but it will be very embarrassing."

"Alright, easy," Aether said, hooking one page with the tip of his sword and pulling it onto the step. "How many got away?"

"Six... no, seven! No, eight. Oh, Archons..."

"Why is it with you people that everything exists either in triplicate or in a single copy?" Paimon dragged a page back by one corner. "Is this some kind of local torture?"

"It’s not torture, it’s recordkeeping," the Melusine corrected automatically, then caught herself. "Sorry. My name is Salu. I was carrying these documents to the archives division, and the string just came undone. I checked it twice, I swear."

"We believe you," Aether said. "Let’s get everything back first."

The current was not too strong, but there was still enough trouble. Several pages had caught between a grate and a stone ledge, another was already sliding beneath the small bridge, and hydro-mold was already starting to creep over the wet paper. Aether moved lower down the slick steps, Paimon shouted directions more often than she helped, and Salu kept trying to apologize while holding together the surviving folders.

When they finally pulled out the last page, of course that still was not the end of it. Something bubbled once inside the grated drain where the ink-stained water had flowed, then again, and then two small Hydro Slimes and one mechanical nuisance the size of a letter box crawled out.

"Well, of course," Paimon said with disgust. "We save the papers, and now this."

════════════════════ New Objective: Protect the documents and defeat the enemies that appeared. ════════════════════

The fight was short but noisy. The slimes went down fast, though not before splashing water over everything nearby, while the mechanism proved irritating enough to make itself memorable. Aether cut off its path by the bridge, knocked it into the wall, and finished it there, leaving the machine collapsed in a rattling heap. Paimon dropped lower and inspected the battlefield with all the seriousness of an official inquiry.

"Paimon is officially announcing that if one more ugly thing goes near these papers, she’s starting to bite."

Salu looked at them as if they had returned not a stack of reports, but the meaning of life.

"Thank you. Thank you so much. If all of this had been lost, I would’ve had to gather the copies all over again, and we already have a crazy day as it is."

"What, another inspection?" Aether asked, shaking water from his glove.

"No, worse. We’re expecting madam."

Paimon frowned.

"Expecting who?"

Salu crouched and began carefully sorting the rescued pages back into the folders.

"Madam. She was supposed to come by this morning, then after lunch, then a message said the time had shifted, and then there was no message again. Because of that, half the division can’t decide whether to leave tea in the reception room or whether it’s already gone cold enough to be disrespectful."

"Hold on," Paimon said. "What madam?"

Salu looked up as though that were a slightly odd question.

"Well... madam."

"That helped a lot," Aether said dryly.

"Sorry. I thought you knew. All of us do."

Paimon crossed her arms.

"Paimon knows a lot of things. Right now she knows absolutely nothing."

Salu looked embarrassed now, though no longer panicked.

"She comes to the Palais Mermonia sometimes. Not on official business. Though sometimes on official business too. It’s just..." the Melusine hesitated. "Well, madam is madam."

"Is she some important administrator?" Aether guessed.

"No, not exactly."

"An overseer? A personal secretary? Someone from the court staff?" Paimon cut in. "Why are you talking about her like everyone is supposed to know who you mean?"

Salu looked genuinely puzzled.

"Because usually they do. She knows where everything is kept, never mixes up anyone’s name, brings sweets to the Melusines on holidays, and once she calmly explained to the gentleman from the tax division that if he spoke to Kelin in that tone again, he had better write his apology in advance."

Paimon blinked.

"Alright... that does sound impressive."

"And she knows how to speak to Monsieur Neuvillette in a way that makes him answer normally right away."

This time Paimon and Aether exchanged a more serious look.

"What do you mean, normally?" Aether asked.

"Like a person," Salu said with such innocence it was hard to tell whether she understood how strange that sounded. "He is always very polite, of course, but when madam is around, you can tell it’s not a reception and not work."

"Paimon is starting to feel like she missed a giant part of Fontaine’s life."

Salu gathered up the folders and hugged them to her chest.

"If you want, you can walk me to the archives wing. I’m still a little scared to go alone."

"Let’s go," Aether said.

════════════════════ New Objective: Escort Salu to the archives division of the Palais Mermonia. ════════════════════

The walk was short, but not calm. On the way they had to detour around a corridor under repair, let a cart of crates pass, and stop twice because Salu kept remembering more details about the mysterious “madam.”

"She once sewed a button back onto Kelin’s uniform herself."

"Who did?" Paimon snapped.

"Madam."

"Yes, Paimon got that part, but why does everything about this sound either like a saint or somebody’s relative?"

Salu considered that very seriously.

"Well..." she lowered her voice. "Probably closer to the second one."

"Whose relative?" Aether asked at once.

But a new commotion broke out ahead of them before she could answer. Near the side entrance to the archive, two clerks were trying to keep upright a container of hydro-condensate whose lock had broken loose. The tank was already tipping, and in another few seconds it would have burst across the floor, the documents, and everyone nearby. Salu squeaked and flattened herself against the wall, Paimon swore, and Aether ran forward without wasting a word.

The whole thing unfolded like one of those quests that begin with paperwork and end in a workplace disaster. The container lurched, one clerk slipped, the other shouted something deeply unfit for official use, a cabinet door flew open, and folders rained down from the top shelf. Aether caught the falling man with one hand, knocked away the loose metal clamp with his sword, and braced his full weight against the side of the tank while Paimon flailed nearby, yelling instructions nobody needed anymore. A few seconds later two more workers rushed in, and the disaster was contained before it could properly bloom.

When it was over, the archive looked as though water, metal, and the state record system had all tried to fight it at once. Salu stood paler than the trim on her uniform, Paimon was breathing like she had personally held the thing up, and Aether merely straightened and pushed a wet strand of hair from his face.

"Paimon officially changes her opinion," she said. "Paperwork errands are more dangerous than monsters."

Salu clutched the folders tighter and then suddenly stared past Aether’s shoulder.

"Oh. Monsieur Neuvillette."

The noise around them lowered on its own. Through the passageway, Neuvillette was approaching, as always without unnecessary haste and wrapped in his usual composure. His gaze moved over the water on the floor, the leaning container, the rescued folders, the workers’ wet sleeves, and then settled on Aether and Paimon.

"Traveler. Paimon. I see you have once again found yourselves at the center of administrative misfortune."

"First of all, we didn’t cause it," Paimon said at once. "Second, everything in here falls apart if nobody watches it."

"Fortunately, not everything," Neuvillette replied calmly, then looked at Salu. "Are the documents intact?"

"For the most part, monsieur!" Salu straightened so fast she might as well have had a spring for a tail. "They saved them. And helped with the container."

Neuvillette inclined his head in acknowledgment, then gave a few brief instructions to the nearest staff members. They scattered at once. Paimon watched him for a second, then gave in.

"Listen, now that everyone survived, Paimon wants to ask something."

Aether glanced at her with the expression of a man who already knew where this was going.

"Paimon..."

"No, this is important. Since the start of all this, everybody has been talking about some ‘madam’ like it’s the most normal thing in the world, and we still don’t understand who she is. Salu said she comes here, knows everyone by name, brings sweets to the Melusines, and also..." she narrowed her eyes "knows how to speak to you ‘like a person.’ Whatever that means."

Salu made a faint sound of horror. Neuvillette looked at her, and she practically folded in on herself, though not from fear, from embarrassment. He, however, did not look displeased. On the contrary, the faintest trace of softness touched his face, the kind that appeared around Melusines more than around anyone else.

"I assume the misunderstanding exists only because, for part of the staff, this stopped requiring separate explanation a long time ago," he said calmly. "Yes. They are speaking of my wife."

The silence that followed was exemplary.

"Your... what?" Paimon stared at him as though she had just discovered there was a second Fontaine underneath the first.

"My wife," Neuvillette repeated in the same level voice, as though he were merely clarifying the date of a hearing.

Aether briefly covered his eyes with one hand.

"Wait," Paimon stretched in the air. "So you have a wife, and part of the Palais Mermonia has known for ages, and the rest of the city just... doesn’t?"

"To be precise, those for whom this is part of everyday life know," Neuvillette answered. "I see no reason to turn a personal circumstance into a public announcement."

"That is not a ‘personal circumstance,’" Paimon blurted out. "That is enormous, unimaginable information!"

"I see nothing unreasonable in it."

"Of course you don’t! You’re the one who has a wife!"

Salu looked like she was seriously regretting opening her mouth at all today. Aether, on the other hand, was beginning to understand the important part: it was not even that Neuvillette had hidden this. He had not. There was simply a circle of people allowed to know the part of his life that had never been intended for everyone else.

"And where is she now?" Aether asked, while Paimon was still drawing breath for another outburst.

"She was meant to come by this afternoon," Salu said faster than she could stop herself, then clapped both hands over her mouth. "Oh."

Neuvillette turned his gaze to her, but without reproach.

"Yes. She was."

"She was?" Paimon caught the tone at once. "That sounds like something didn’t go to plan."

Neuvillette did not answer immediately. Aether had already noticed that, for all his outward calm, something in his expression had shifted from the moment the word “wife” surfaced. Not obvious anxiety, not exposed worry, but a very clear inward attention fixed on something that had nothing to do with the water on the floor or the chaos around them.

"She is delayed," he said at last.

"And you came to check on the archive yourself because of that?" Paimon narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

"I came to see why three internal reports, a condensate container, and four members of staff all stopped responding to requests at once," Neuvillette said dryly, then after a short pause added more honestly: "And also to ask whether anyone had seen her on the way here."

Paimon stared at him as though every sentence only made the situation worse.

"Oh gods. This is even worse than Paimon thought."

And that was exactly when hurried footsteps sounded from the corridor leading in from the side entrance. Several people turned at once. You appeared in the doorway.

At first Aether only took in the whole picture: a travel cloak still damp from outside, hair slightly undone, a quick look cast around, too direct for someone who had already been annoyed somewhere, tired somewhere, and still come anyway because not coming would have been worse. Then your gaze found Neuvillette immediately, and everything else seemed to become secondary at once.

"So this is where you are," you said, exhaling from the fast walk. Then you noticed the water, the archive mess, Aether, Paimon, terrified Salu, and the accidental audience. "Right. As usual, I picked the perfect moment."

And that was when the thing happened that Paimon probably would not be able to talk about calmly for the next week. On Neuvillette’s face, flawless up to that point, there appeared a shift that could not be mistaken either for official courtesy or for his usual gentleness toward Melusines. He looked at you not like a visitor, not like a colleague, but like the one who had been expected and whose arrival, by the mere fact of it, took the strain out of the day.

"You are late," he said, and there was no dry reproach in his voice, only unmistakable closeness.

"I know. Don’t start," you answered, already walking closer. "I had my reasons. I’ll tell you about the rest later."

Salu stared at the two of you with wide eyes, then looked at Paimon as though only now understanding the scale of the disaster. Paimon really was close.

"Is that her?" she whispered, though there was no point in asking.

"Yes," Neuvillette answered just as calmly. "This is my wife."

You stopped beside him, glanced at Paimon and Aether, then at Salu, then back to Neuvillette.

"You hadn’t told them yet?"

"Now I have."

"Judging by their faces, I can see that."

Paimon clutched her head with both hands.

"No, wait. No. You can’t do this. You cannot first make it sound like there’s some ‘madam,’ then drag Paimon through half a quest collecting papers, saving the archive, listening to hints from Melusines, and then calmly say ‘this is my wife’ like you’re discussing the weather!"

You let out a short laugh, tired but real.

"Sorry. I don’t think I’d be thrilled either."

Neuvillette turned his head toward you.

"I take it Salu has already said more than she intended."

"Salu is a hero today," you said, and the Melusine flushed right to the tips of her ears. "Since she hasn’t died yet from shame and chaos."

"Madam..." Salu squeaked.

"Later," you told her gently. "Get the papers dried first before they glue themselves together for good."

You said it in exactly the tone that made it clear why the Melusines seemed to think of you as one of their own. And Neuvillette, standing beside you, did not become sterner or more official. If anything, his usual distance simply stepped back by one pace, making room for something far more domestic and, to outsiders, completely disarming.

"I assume our part in this administrative disaster is finished," Aether said, and there was an obvious smile in his voice now.

"I believe so," Neuvillette replied. Then, after a short pause, he added: "Thank you for your assistance. And for receiving what you have heard... as well as could reasonably be expected."

"Paimon has not received anything yet," she admitted honestly. "Paimon is still processing."

You looked at her with open sympathy.

"Then process it somewhere with tea. There’s already too much water in here as it is."

Paimon drew in an outraged breath, then suddenly snorted.

"Alright. Alright, that was funny."

Neuvillette let out the faintest breath, and that tiny movement was enough for Aether to understand the whole thing at last: this was it. Not a secret for effect, not hidden drama, just a part of his life that most people had never entered because it had never belonged to them.

════════════════════ Quest Complete: "What No One Thought to Ask" Some things are never hidden. They simply are not spoken of to those who have no place in them. ════════════════════

In Fontaine, even other people’s trouble sometimes looked too beautiful to be taken seriously at first. By the canal near the shopping street, it was crowded, noisy, and almost festive: glass gleamed in the displays, dishes clinked in the stalls, two ladies at a ribbon counter were arguing over the color of silk as if they were deciding the fate of the nation, and Paimon, who had already managed to talk Aether into buying her something sweet, was flying alongside him and explaining that in this city even pastries were priced as if a court fee had been included.

"Paimon is just saying, if one more pastry seller looks at her like dessert is something she has to earn, Paimon is going to be offended."

Aether gave a quiet huff, not really listening, because something ahead of them, near the turn toward the flower stalls, stood out from the rest of the street. The first thing that caught his eye was not the woman herself, but the movement around her: one man in a strict dark suit, clearly a bodyguard, was keeping passersby away from the narrow stretch of road, while another, younger man with a folder under his arm and the expression of a doomed office worker was trying to explain something very quickly. Between them stood a woman dressed far too luxuriously for an ordinary walk and looking far too distressed for the kind of confidence wealthy people usually wore so well. The pale fabric of her expensive dress had been arranged perfectly, the jewelry on her did not announce its price so much as quietly remind everyone that it had one, her hair had been styled in the sort of way nobody managed in a hurry before a mirror, and even in the middle of all this confusion she looked so striking that Paimon slowed in midair.

"Whoa," she whispered. "No, hold on. Is that really just some random citizen? Because Paimon feels like she’s looking at a very expensive problem."

At that moment, you turned sharply toward the bodyguard, clutching a thin empty leash in your hands, its clasp hanging open at the end. It was obvious from your face that you were one step away from either bursting into tears or taking off through the city faster than you already had.

"I don’t understand how this could even happen. I turned away for one minute, one minute. He was right there."

"Madam, please, try to calm yourself," the bodyguard said, though without much hope that it would work. "We’ve already sent people into the neighboring streets."

"The phrase ‘we’ve sent people’ is not especially comforting to me right now," you snapped, and your voice shook badly enough to make it clear that in another second you were going to cry in the middle of the street. "It’s a kitten, not a missing suitcase."

The secretary, who had kept a respectful distance up until then, cautiously stepped in with the exact expression of a man who knew the moment was awful but had unfortunately not been relieved of his job.

"Madam, I sincerely apologize, but I do need to clarify: if you are unable to arrive at the appointed time, should I..."

"No," you cut him off so quickly that he flinched. "Nothing needs clarifying. No letters. No rescheduling. Find my cat."

Paimon had already opened her mouth, then looked at your face, the empty leash, the bodyguard who clearly had no idea what to do first, and changed her tone on the spot.

"Alright, that’s it. We’re helping."

Only then did you seem to notice them properly. Your eyes were damp, irritated, frightened, and still remarkably clear.

"Sorry... you’re the Traveler and Paimon, aren’t you?"

"Yes," Aether said. "What happened?"

You let out a tight breath, like someone who had finally been asked the right question instead of being told to calm down.

"My kitten is missing. He’s very small, white, with gray ears and a blue ribbon around his neck. He doesn’t like noise, he’s afraid of people, and there are so many feet here, carriages, water..." you swallowed and tightened your grip on the leash. "I stopped at a stall to buy him a new toy, and when I turned back, the leash was empty."

"Paimon already hates this story," she muttered. "What’s his name?"

"Lucien."

"Well, that settles it. Paimon is definitely finding him now."

So the four of you set off together. Or rather, you tried to walk quickly and steadily, but kept breaking into near-runs and abrupt stops, peering under benches, into alleys, up stairways, as if the kitten might come out on his own if you looked hard enough. The bodyguard stayed at your side without interfering, but clearly ready to block anyone from getting too close. The secretary walked slightly behind and had already opened his folder once, then shut it again immediately, because even he understood that papers could wait.

They crossed two market rows, checked the narrow passage behind a tea shop, looked beneath a small bridge where normally only birds and rubbish gathered, and had almost reached the staircase leading to the upper part of the district when Paimon suddenly stopped in front of a fish seller.

"Wait. Cats like fish. This is logical."

"Paimon, half the city likes fish," Aether said, but stepped forward anyway.

The fishmonger turned out to be talkative. Yes, he had seen a small cat. Yes, white. Yes, it had slipped between the crates. No, he had not caught it. How could he have? The thing moved like a crossbow bolt. After that, the trail was lost again.

You listened in silence, but from the way your fingers tightened around the leash, Aether could tell you were standing upright on stubbornness alone. Paimon, which was rare for her, stopped talking nonstop too.

"He doesn’t know the city," you said suddenly, almost under your breath. "At home he sometimes gets scared of his own reflection in a vase, and here there’s water, people, streets... Archons, if he went near the canal..."

"He didn’t," Paimon said at once, though there was less certainty in her voice than she probably wanted there to be. "Tiny cats are sometimes smarter than they look."

The secretary tried again with his cursed work, apparently unable to endure another minute.

"Madam, if I may... perhaps it would be better to return home and wait for news. The search is already underway, and your absence is starting to..."

"My absence is starting to what?" you stopped so abruptly he nearly ran into the bodyguard. "Disrupt the schedule? Ruin someone’s day? I cannot think about a schedule right now."

"I understand, but if monsieur..."

"Do not talk to me about monsieur right now."

That last sentence came out with the tired anger that usually belonged to someone who had been at the end of their nerves for quite some time already. The secretary shut up at once. Paimon shot him a look full of open disapproval.

"Seriously, either help or stay quiet. The paperwork can wait."

They moved into a quieter part of the city, where the houses stood farther apart and the road was nearly empty. Here, the water in the canal and the footsteps of passersby could be heard clearly. An old man leaning on a railing, seeing what they were doing, shook his head and offered the kind of kindly cruelty that came from a person who believed he was simply being honest.

"If the kitten’s that small and already got this far, chances aren’t good. Either it’ll hide in a cellar, or it’ll run clean out of the city. At that age they don’t last long."

That was where everything gave way. Not all at once, not dramatically, not with a scream. You just stopped as though whatever had been keeping you upright had been switched off for a second, then said very quietly,

"No..."

The leash slipped from your fingers. The bodyguard stepped forward, but too late: your knees gave out, your face went pale in an instant, whiter than the expensive lace at your sleeves, and you began to crumple straight onto the stone.

"Hey!" Paimon darted down.

But it was neither her nor Aether who caught you. From behind, almost without a sound, someone appeared whom nobody expected to see there in exactly that moment. A dark figure, an even step, a posture recognizable even before the face. Neuvillette caught you before you touched the ground, one arm steady at your back, the other beneath your shoulders, with the kind of certainty that made it seem as though there had never been any other possible outcome.

"Careful," he said quietly, and there was not a trace of the official coldness for which the whole of Fontaine knew him.

Paimon froze with her mouth open. Aether, too, did not immediately know what to say, because over the past five seconds the situation had become too strange even by local standards. Neuvillette was not looking at them, not at the bodyguard, not at the secretary, who had instantly bent himself almost in half, but only at you. And the expression on his face was changing right in front of them, from calm composure into something very controlled and completely personal.

"You haven’t eaten since this morning again," he said more softly, holding you closer. "And you let yourself get far too worked up."

You opened your eyes, blinked a few times as if you did not believe who you were seeing at first, and then clutched at his shoulder.

"Lucien..." your voice was weak. "He’s gone."

"I know."

"What?" Paimon and the secretary said in perfect unison, after which the secretary immediately behaved as though he did not exist.

Neuvillette raised his eyes to Aether and Paimon, and only then did the rest of them seem to be allowed back into the scene.

"I think it would be best to begin with the main point, so as to avoid further misunderstanding," he said in the same level voice, which, set against the care with which he was holding you, was more unsettling than if he had sounded dramatic. "First, the kitten is safe. He reached me about an hour ago. Second..." he paused briefly, as if this really were only the second item on a list "this is my wife."

Paimon made a sound that would have been difficult to reproduce even with serious effort.

"YOUR WHAT?!"

You, apparently still half-fainting, somehow found the strength to look embarrassed.

"I was actually hoping that one day you might tell people that in a more normal setting."

"Circumstances rarely consult us on our preferences," Neuvillette replied, perfectly unshaken.

The secretary turned away with the expression of a man who had seen enough for one day, the bodyguard kept a stone face, though from the twitch at the corner of his mouth it was clear the stone had its limits, and Aether slowly dragged a hand over his face, trying to fit two thoughts into his head at once: Neuvillette had a wife, and that wife had nearly put half the city on its feet over a kitten. For some reason, the second part made the first one feel even more real.

"Wait," Paimon said, forcing herself to regroup. "So we’ve been running all over the city looking for your wife’s kitten, while the kitten has been with you this whole time?"

"Yes."

"And you couldn’t have said that earlier?!"

"I did not know the search had reached this scale," Neuvillette said, without the slightest sign of regret over that particular point. "When Lucien came to me, I assumed he would be missed at home. Later I was informed that madam had left her route, and after that I decided to check the nearby streets myself."

You, already coming back to yourself properly, let your forehead rest against his shoulder and muttered with obvious, almost childish relief,

"He really is with you?"

"Yes. At the moment he is in my office, asleep on my documents."

That was what finally dragged a nervous laugh out of you through the remnants of tears.

"Of course he is. Where else would he be."

"I tried to move him into a basket. He objected."

Paimon threw up both hands.

"No, this is too much. Paimon cannot process this much information in a row. First there’s a gorgeous stranger, then a kitten, then fainting, then Neuvillette catches her like this is not the first time, and then ‘this is my wife’!"

You finally lifted your head and looked at Aether and Paimon properly, no longer like strangers who had offered help, but like people who had become deeply involved in a very personal and very ridiculous situation.

"I’m sorry," you said with a tired, guilty smile. "If I’d known it would turn into this, I would at least have introduced myself first."

"That would have helped," Paimon muttered, though without any heat now. "Not that Paimon would actually have been prepared anyway."

Neuvillette adjusted the cloak that had slipped on your shoulders with a simple, practiced movement that did even more damage to Paimon’s already collapsing understanding of the world.

"Thank you for your help," he said to Aether and Paimon. "It was given under very unfortunate circumstances, but it was timely nonetheless."

"It was nothing," Aether answered, still looking from you to him and back again. "Though I’m probably going to be processing this for a while."

"Paimon definitely is," she confirmed. "And she has a lot of questions about Fontaine now."

"I am certain the feeling is mutual," Neuvillette said calmly.

You let out a quiet breath, relaxing at last in his arms now that the worst of it had turned out to be over, and only tightened your fingers a little in the fabric of his clothes.

"Take me to Lucien," you said, as if everything else could wait now. "I want to see for myself that he’s alright."

"That is exactly where I was going to take you," Neuvillette replied.

He said it in a way that held so much ordinary, long-familiar closeness that Paimon went silent again, this time from sheer shock. Then Neuvillette gave Aether the smallest nod in farewell, turned, and started up the street carrying you with the kind of care that looked entirely natural on him, as though the whole city was free to be astonished and it changed nothing at all. The bodyguard moved after them. The secretary stooped to pick up the dropped leash with the expression of a man who would be retelling this day in a whisper for a very long time.

In Fontaine, even someone else’s misfortune could look too beautiful to take seriously at first. By the canal near the market street, everything was bright, noisy, and almost festive: glass glittered in shop windows, dishes clinked in stalls, two elegant women were arguing over silk ribbons as if the fate of their families depended on color choice, and Paimon, who had already managed to talk Aether into buying her something sweet, was flying beside him and complaining that in this city even pastries were priced as though legal fees had been included in advance.

"Paimon is just saying, if one more shopkeeper looks at her like dessert has to be earned, Paimon is going to be deeply offended."

Aether gave a quiet huff, but his attention shifted almost immediately. Near the turn by the flower stalls, something stood out too sharply from the rest of the street. What drew the eye first was not you, but the arrangement around you: a tall man in a dark suit, clearly a bodyguard, was trying to clear a path; another, younger, carrying a folder and wearing the face of a man whose job had already ruined his day, was trying to explain something quickly. Between them stood you – dressed too luxuriously for an ordinary walk, and far too distressed for someone used to moving through the world without resistance. Your dress was immaculate, your jewelry tasteful in the expensive way that did not need to announce itself, your hair carefully arranged, and even in obvious panic you looked so striking that Paimon stopped in midair.

"Wow," she whispered. "Hold on. Is that really just some random citizen? Because Paimon is looking at either a very rich lady or a very expensive problem."

You turned sharply to the bodyguard, clutching a thin leash with an empty clasp at the end. It was obvious from your face that you were holding yourself together by force alone.

"I don’t understand how this even happened. I turned away for one minute, one minute. He was right there."

"Madam, please try to stay calm," the bodyguard said with the tired patience of a man who already knew this was hopeless. "We’ve sent people to search the nearby streets."

"The phrase ‘we’ve sent people’ is not helping me right now," you snapped, your voice shaking badly enough that Aether understood at once this was not about a lost object or some spoiled whim. "It’s a kitten, not a misplaced bag."

The secretary, who had been hovering a little farther back, still made the mistake of trying to bring work into this.

"Madam, forgive me, but I need to ask – if you will not make it to the scheduled hour, should I..."

"No," you cut him off so fast he flinched. "Nothing should be done. No notes, no rescheduling, no polite explanations. Find my cat."

Paimon opened her mouth, took one look at your face and the empty leash, and immediately changed her tone.

"Alright. Fine. We’ll help."

You seemed to notice them properly only then, your eyes wet and frantic and still somehow very clear.

"Excuse me... you’re the Traveler, and Paimon, aren’t you?"

"Yeah," Aether said. "What happened?"

You let out a breath like someone who had finally been asked the right question.

"My kitten is gone. He’s tiny, white, with gray ears and a blue ribbon at his neck. He scares easily, he hates loud places, and there are so many people here, carts, water..." you swallowed and tightened your grip on the leash. "I stopped at a stall to buy him a toy, turned around, and the leash was empty."

"Paimon already hates this story," she muttered. "What’s his name?"

"Lucien."

"Alright. Then we’re finding him."

You all set out together. You tried to keep a steady pace, but every few steps you broke into a hurried half-run or stopped abruptly to look under benches, behind crates, under steps, into narrow gaps, as if Lucien might appear the second you looked in exactly the right place. The bodyguard stayed close without interfering. The secretary followed behind and, wisely, kept his folder closed.

They searched two market rows, questioned a fish seller, checked the alley behind a tea stall, looked along the lower canal steps, and still the trail dissolved almost at once. One vendor claimed he had seen a white blur by the fruit stand, another swore the kitten had gone toward the bridge, a third insisted they were clearly talking about a small dog and did not understand why everyone was glaring at him.

"He doesn’t know the city," you said at one point, quieter now, almost to yourself as you climbed toward a calmer part of the district. "At home he gets startled by his own reflection in a vase, and here there’s water, noise, streets... if he got too close to the canal..."

"He didn’t," Paimon said immediately, though with much less confidence than she wanted. "Little cats are sometimes smarter than they look."

The secretary, apparently unable to forget his profession, tried once more.

"Madam, perhaps it would be wiser to return home and wait for news. The search is already underway, and your absence is beginning to..."

"My absence is beginning to what?" you stopped so sharply he nearly walked into the bodyguard. "Disrupt someone’s schedule? Ruin an appointment? I do not care about the schedule."

"I understand, but if monsieur..."

"Do not mention monsieur to me right now."

That last line came out with the raw, exhausted anger of someone who was already at the edge. The secretary finally shut up. Paimon gave him a look full of blunt disapproval.

"Seriously. Either help or don’t make it worse."

Then, quite suddenly, something in you changed. You were still searching with your eyes, still breathing too fast, but the panic shifted into decision. You stopped in the middle of the street, gripped the empty leash harder, and looked ahead with a different kind of focus.

"No," you said to yourself first, then louder: "No. I can’t keep running around blindly. I need to tell him."

Aether frowned slightly.

"Tell who?"

You seemed to remember only then that there were strangers beside you.

"My husband."

Paimon and Aether exchanged a glance. It explained some things – the bodyguard, the secretary, the expensive clothes, the whole air of a life built with too much structure around it.

"Alright," Paimon said. "Then let’s go to him."

You nodded and set off uphill without wasting another second. Before long, both Aether and Paimon noticed the direction. You were not heading toward a private residence or some elegant district house. You were going straight toward the Palais Mermonia.

"She’s going to the palace," Paimon whispered, drifting closer to Aether.

"I noticed."

"Maybe her husband works there."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe she’s desperate enough to go straight to Neuvillette for help," Paimon muttered, glancing at your rigid posture ahead of them. "People do strange things when they’re panicking."

That made sense too. You walked like someone who had stopped caring about appearances and meant only to reach the person who had to fix this, whoever he was. The secretary looked noticeably more alive now that the route was familiar, and the bodyguard resumed his stone-faced silence.

At the Palais Mermonia, nobody questioned your entry. That alone was telling. People did not look at you like an ordinary visitor. They looked at you like someone known, expected. One clerk started toward you, saw your face, and immediately thought better of it. You crossed a corridor, went up a staircase, turned into a familiar wing, and Paimon’s suspicion sharpened when the secretary led all of you straight toward Neuvillette’s office without knocking.

"Hang on," she whispered to Aether. "That is a little too direct."

"Quiet."

The door opened. The office was silent, orderly, washed in soft daylight. Neuvillette sat at his desk, a stack of papers open before him, as composed as ever. From where you stood at the threshold, the high desk concealed what was resting in his lap, and that was enough to destroy whatever composure you had managed to hold onto on the way here.

You took a step, then another, the leash trembling in your hand, and before you had made it all the way to the desk, you dropped to your knees so abruptly that Paimon let out a startled sound. Even Aether tensed. The scene became heavy all at once. In the middle of the Lord Chief Justice’s office, a beautifully dressed woman was on her knees, already crying too hard to speak properly.

"Please..." your voice broke immediately. "Please, just listen to me. I know this is a terrible time, I know you’re busy, I know how ridiculous this sounds, but I don’t know what to do, I lost him... he got scared, he’s tiny, he won’t survive outside, if he got near the water, I should have been watching, I should have..."

Paimon, who would normally have found something to say no matter what, just hovered there with wide eyes. Even she understood this was not how one spoke to Neuvillette unless desperation had burned through every layer of restraint. The secretary froze by the door as though trying to become part of the wall. The bodyguard did not move. You kept talking through tears, trying to explain everything at once – the leash, the market, Lucien vanishing, the search, the fear of going home without him, the certainty that if necessary you would beg the whole palace, the whole city, anyone.

"I know you have work, but please... please, I can’t bear it if something happened to him. I can’t..."

And then your crying was interrupted by a very small, sleepy, annoyed meow.

It sounded so absurdly domestic in the middle of that scene that for a moment no one understood it. You stopped mid-sentence. Paimon blinked. Aether looked down. Neuvillette, who had not said a word until then, merely lowered his eyes and calmly adjusted the small white bundle with gray ears and a blue ribbon that had been curled up in his lap the entire time.

Lucien, thoroughly comfortable, squinted in irritation, stretched one paw against Neuvillette’s sleeve, and gave another faint little meow, this one less tragic and more offended at being woken up.

The silence in the office became so complete that the distant sound of water outside suddenly seemed loud.

"What..." you breathed, and it was barely even a word.

Neuvillette slipped one hand beneath the kitten and rose from his chair. At once, everything fell into place: the ease with which you had been let in, the secretary’s expression, the route here, the whole impossible scene. But what made it worse was how naturally he held Lucien, how safely the kitten settled against him, and how normal the whole impossible picture somehow looked.

"I believe," Neuvillette said in the same even tone with which he might have summarized a legal matter, "the central issue may now be considered resolved."

You were still staring at the kitten, then crawled a little closer on your knees without caring about your dress, your dignity, or your audience. Lucien immediately reached for you, gave a brighter little sound, and you covered your mouth with your hand and burst into tears all over again, this time from pure relief.

"He found his way to me around an hour ago," Neuvillette continued while you stroked the kitten’s back with trembling fingers. "The noise of the outer canal appears to have drawn him in that direction, after which he somehow followed me back to the palace. I attempted to place him in a basket. He objected. He preferred my documents."

Paimon made a noise like several vital connections in her mind had just snapped at once.

"Wait. Wait, what do you mean, ‘found his way to me’?!"

Neuvillette looked at her, then at Aether. By now, you were on your feet again, still crying a little, your forehead pressed against his shoulder while one hand remained on Lucien as though afraid someone might take him away.

"It means," he said calmly, "that there is no reason for further panic. And, to prevent any additional misunderstanding, I should probably add one more clarification." He paused briefly, and somehow that pause felt worse than if he had simply said it all at once. "This is my wife."

Paimon stared at him as though the world had already been under strain and he had just decided to finish it off.

"Your... WHAT?!"

Even through your tears, you had enough left in you to look embarrassed.

"Honestly," you said weakly, "I would have preferred to meet them under less humiliating circumstances."

"I understand," Neuvillette replied without the slightest mockery. "However, Lucien appears to have favored a different order of events."

Aether rubbed a hand slowly over his face. The whole picture had come together, and it was not helping. Neuvillette had a wife. That wife had nearly turned half the city upside down over a kitten. Then she had come to his office in tears desperate enough that even Paimon had gotten nervous on her behalf. And the Iudex himself had been sitting there the whole time with a white kitten in his lap as though this were some entirely ordinary part of his workday.

"No, this is ridiculous," Paimon said, drifting back half a step in the air as if she needed physical distance from what she had just witnessed. "You cannot make Paimon go through all that, bring us here, let her cry in front of the Chief Justice, then pull a cat out from behind the desk and say ‘this is my wife’ like you’re moving a hearing to another date!"

You let out something dangerously close to a laugh through the remaining tears, still clinging to both Neuvillette and Lucien at once.

"For what it’s worth, I’m not thrilled with the staging either."

"It could have been arranged better," Neuvillette agreed with complete seriousness.

The secretary turned away with the face of a man who would only ever retell this day in whispers. The bodyguard remained stone-faced, though the corner of his mouth still twitched. Neuvillette carefully passed Lucien into your arms, and the kitten at once hooked his paws into your dress with the shameless calm of a creature who had nearly driven everyone present out of their minds.

"You nearly killed me," you whispered into the top of his head, kissing him between the ears. "You awful little beast."

Lucien purred without the slightest sign of remorse.

"You have my thanks for your assistance," Neuvillette said to Aether and Paimon. Only now, with the worst over, did some of that perfect official composure return fully to his voice. "It was rendered under unfortunate circumstances, but it was rendered in time."

"You’re welcome," Aether said, still looking between you, the kitten, and Neuvillette as if afraid of blinking and missing yet another revelation. "Though I’m definitely going to need a while to process this."

"Paimon even more," she said immediately. "Paimon now has questions about all of this. About Fontaine. About cats. About life in general."

"That is understandable," Neuvillette said so calmly that Paimon could only throw up her hands.

You finally looked properly at Aether and Paimon, no longer as strangers who had helped, but as people who had been dragged far too deep into a very personal and very absurd part of your day.

"I’m sorry," you said with a tired, guilty smile, still holding Lucien close. "If I had known it would turn into this, I would at least have introduced myself first."

"That would have been nice," Paimon muttered. "Not that it would have saved anyone."

Neuvillette stepped closer, adjusted your fallen cloak with an ease that finished off what little remained of Paimon’s grasp on reality, then picked up the abandoned leash from the desk and offered it back to you.

"I believe outings are concluded for today."

[shorten]

In Fontaine, even someone else’s misfortune could look too beautiful to take seriously at first. By the canal near the market street, everything was bright, noisy, and almost festive: glass glittered in shop windows, dishes clinked in stalls, two elegant women were arguing over silk ribbons as if the fate of their families depended on color choice, and Paimon, who had already managed to talk Aether into buying her something sweet, was flying beside him and complaining that in this city even pastries were priced as though legal fees had been included in advance.

"Paimon is just saying, if one more shopkeeper looks at her like dessert has to be earned, Paimon is going to be deeply offended."

Aether gave a quiet huff, but his attention shifted almost immediately. Near the turn by the flower stalls, something stood out too sharply from the rest of the street. What drew the eye first was not you, but the arrangement around you: a tall man in a dark suit, clearly a bodyguard, was trying to clear a path; another, younger, carrying a folder and wearing the face of a man whose job had already ruined his day, was trying to explain something quickly. Between them stood you – dressed too luxuriously for an ordinary walk, and far too distressed for someone used to moving through the world without resistance. Your dress was immaculate, your jewelry tasteful in the expensive way that did not need to announce itself, your hair carefully arranged, and even in obvious panic you looked so striking that Paimon stopped in midair.

"Wow," she whispered. "Hold on. Is that really just some random citizen? Because Paimon is looking at either a very rich lady or a very expensive problem."

You turned sharply to the bodyguard, clutching a thin leash with an empty clasp at the end. It was obvious from your face that you were holding yourself together by force alone.

"I don’t understand how this even happened. I turned away for one minute, one minute. He was right there."

"Madam, please try to stay calm," the bodyguard said with the tired patience of a man who already knew this was hopeless. "We’ve sent people to search the nearby streets."

"The phrase ‘we’ve sent people’ is not helping me right now," you snapped, your voice shaking badly enough that Aether understood at once this was not about a lost object or some spoiled whim. "It’s a kitten, not a misplaced bag."

The secretary, who had been hovering a little farther back, still made the mistake of trying to bring work into this.

"Madam, forgive me, but I need to ask – if you will not make it to the scheduled hour, should I..."

"No," you cut him off so fast he flinched. "Nothing should be done. No notes, no rescheduling, no polite explanations. Find my cat."

Paimon opened her mouth, took one look at your face and the empty leash, and immediately changed her tone.

"Alright. Fine. We’ll help."

You seemed to notice them properly only then, your eyes wet and frantic and still somehow very clear.

"Excuse me... you’re the Traveler, and Paimon, aren’t you?"

"Yeah," Aether said. "What happened?"

You let out a breath like someone who had finally been asked the right question.

"My kitten is gone. He’s tiny, white, with gray ears and a blue ribbon at his neck. He scares easily, he hates loud places, and there are so many people here, carts, water..." you swallowed and tightened your grip on the leash. "I stopped at a stall to buy him a toy, turned around, and the leash was empty."

"Paimon already hates this story," she muttered. "What’s his name?"

"Lucien."

"Alright. Then we’re finding him."

You all set out together. You tried to keep a steady pace, but every few steps you broke into a hurried half-run or stopped abruptly to look under benches, behind crates, under steps, into narrow gaps, as if Lucien might appear the second you looked in exactly the right place. The bodyguard stayed close without interfering. The secretary followed behind and, wisely, kept his folder closed.

They searched two market rows, questioned a fish seller, checked the alley behind a tea stall, looked along the lower canal steps, and still the trail dissolved almost at once. One vendor claimed he had seen a white blur by the fruit stand, another swore the kitten had gone toward the bridge, a third insisted they were clearly talking about a small dog and did not understand why everyone was glaring at him.

"He doesn’t know the city," you said at one point, quieter now, almost to yourself as you climbed toward a calmer part of the district. "At home he gets startled by his own reflection in a vase, and here there’s water, noise, streets... if he got too close to the canal..."

"He didn’t," Paimon said immediately, though with much less confidence than she wanted. "Little cats are sometimes smarter than they look."

The secretary, apparently unable to forget his profession, tried once more.

"Madam, perhaps it would be wiser to return home and wait for news. The search is already underway, and your absence is beginning to..."

"My absence is beginning to what?" you stopped so sharply he nearly walked into the bodyguard. "Disrupt someone’s schedule? Ruin an appointment? I do not care about the schedule."

"I understand, but if monsieur..."

"Do not mention monsieur to me right now."

That last line came out with the raw, exhausted anger of someone who was already at the edge. The secretary finally shut up. Paimon gave him a look full of blunt disapproval.

"Seriously. Either help or don’t make it worse."

Then, quite suddenly, something in you changed. You were still searching with your eyes, still breathing too fast, but the panic shifted into decision. You stopped in the middle of the street, gripped the empty leash harder, and looked ahead with a different kind of focus.

"No," you said to yourself first, then louder: "No. I can’t keep running around blindly. I need to tell him."

Aether frowned slightly.

"Tell who?"

You seemed to remember only then that there were strangers beside you.

"My husband."

Paimon and Aether exchanged a glance. It explained some things – the bodyguard, the secretary, the expensive clothes, the whole air of a life built with too much structure around it.

"Alright," Paimon said. "Then let’s go to him."

You nodded and set off uphill without wasting another second. Before long, both Aether and Paimon noticed the direction. You were not heading toward a private residence or some elegant district house. You were going straight toward the Palais Mermonia.

"She’s going to the palace," Paimon whispered, drifting closer to Aether.

"I noticed."

"Maybe her husband works there."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe she’s desperate enough to go straight to Neuvillette for help," Paimon muttered, glancing at your rigid posture ahead of them. "People do strange things when they’re panicking."

That made sense too. You walked like someone who had stopped caring about appearances and meant only to reach the person who had to fix this, whoever he was. The secretary looked noticeably more alive now that the route was familiar, and the bodyguard resumed his stone-faced silence.

At the Palais Mermonia, nobody questioned your entry. That alone was telling. People did not look at you like an ordinary visitor. They looked at you like someone known, expected. One clerk started toward you, saw your face, and immediately thought better of it. You crossed a corridor, went up a staircase, turned into a familiar wing, and Paimon’s suspicion sharpened when the secretary led all of you straight toward Neuvillette’s office without knocking.

"Hang on," she whispered to Aether. "That is a little too direct."

"Quiet."

The door opened. The office was silent, orderly, washed in soft daylight. Neuvillette sat at his desk, a stack of papers open before him, as composed as ever. From where you stood at the threshold, the high desk concealed what was resting in his lap, and that was enough to destroy whatever composure you had managed to hold onto on the way here.

Rain in Fontaine had a way of making the city look prettier and more unbearable at the same time. The stone darkened, the water in the canals turned nearly black, the steps gleamed as if someone had deliberately made them impossible to walk on properly, and people under umbrellas and cloaks started moving faster, sharper, more tightly packed, the way they always did when everyone had somewhere urgent to be and nobody wanted to get soaked a second longer than necessary. By the time Aether and Paimon returned to the city, everything around them looked exactly like that: puddles underfoot, wet curbs, water rushing through the drains, and that constant Fontaine bustle in which even somebody else’s panic could, at first glance, look like just another ordinary part of the street.

"Paimon already hates this rain," she announced, flying beside Aether and trying uselessly to shield her face from the slanting drops with her hands. "No, seriously. It feels personal. Like it’s aiming for her on purpose."

Aether said nothing, adjusting the collar of his cloak. Up ahead, at the crossroads near a line of shops, someone rushed past them without really looking around. A woman. Judging by the way she moved and kept turning back, she was clearly at the end of her rope. Wet strands of hair clung to her temples, her cloak had slipped off one shoulder, one hand was pressed to her chest while the other waved sharply at passersby, as if she hoped to stop anyone at all who might have seen what she was looking for.

"Neuvi-Ann! Neuvi-Ann, where are you?!"

She practically ran right past them, not noticing Aether or Paimon, not noticing the way people turned to look after her with that familiar mixture of sympathy and reluctance to get involved. A second later she had turned the corner and vanished into the rain.

Paimon watched her go and let out a quiet breath.

"That’s bad."

"A child is missing," Aether said.

"Yeah. Definitely not a wallet."

They kept walking, though more alert now, listening to the city more closely out of instinct. Children crying, merchants arguing, heels striking wet stone, wheels hissing over puddles, all of it blending into one broad wash of noise. That was why they did not notice the very quiet, broken little sound at first, something too soft to be a proper sob and too strange to be an ordinary child’s cry. Aether stopped first. Paimon floated a little farther before turning back.

"What?"

He nodded toward a bench by the wall, where the space between two rain-darkened crates was almost hidden in shadow. Something was huddled there, curled in on itself so tightly it seemed to be trying to vanish.

Paimon dropped lower immediately.

"Oh."

At first it was hard to understand what they were even looking at. It was definitely a little boy, no more than two or three years old at most. But beyond that, nothing about him fit together in any ordinary way. His body was not built like a human child’s: short little legs, tiny feet, a small rounded frame closer to a Melusine’s silhouette than a person’s. His ears were large and lifted upward and slightly outward, soft in shape but unmistakably Melusine-like. Fine scales shimmered faintly along his neck and around his collarbones in the gray light, and beneath the soaked little garment twisted at his back, there were tiny wings just starting to come in, dragon wings, not anything else. A thin scaled tail was curled awkwardly under him. His skin was human, pale, but along his shoulders and arms there were soft bluish patches like watercolor stains. His face was a child’s face, round and human, but his eyes were the wrong color entirely, too clear, too unnatural, too deep for any ordinary little boy, and the small horns pushing through his hair near his forehead left no room for calm explanations either.

He was shaking so hard that something in Aether tightened immediately. Not only from fear. From cold, from damp, from exhaustion. A wet strand of hair stuck to one cheek, his nose was red, and his little mitten-like hands were clenched so tightly in the edge of his soaked cape that his fingers looked stiff.

"Hey," Aether said very quietly, crouching down in front of the bench. "It’s alright. We’re not going to hurt you."

The child flinched. Those huge rounded eyes opened even wider. He was clearly too frightened and too miserable to run, but he still tried to shrink deeper into the dark as if wood and stone might hide him.

"Paimon is actually going to die," Paimon whispered, pressing both hands over her mouth. "He’s so tiny..."

Aether slowly held out a hand, careful not to move too quickly.

"You’re cold, aren’t you?"

The little boy blinked, swallowed, and after a long pause managed to whisper one word.

"Mommy..."

"We’ll find your mommy," Paimon said at once, unexpectedly soft. "Promise. But first, can you come out, okay? You’re soaked."

He stared at them for several more seconds with the kind of look only children had when fear had almost fully won but trust had not been given up yet. Then very slowly, very uncertainly, he reached out one hand toward Aether. Aether lifted him carefully without a word and felt at once just how small and freezing he really was. The child clung to him almost instantly, squeezing his eyes shut first and then grabbing fistfuls of Aether’s cloak with a desperate strength that said he was only just allowing himself to understand how frightened he had been.

"Oh, Archons..." Paimon hovered close, staring at the horns, the wings, the tail. "He’s freezing. And he’s... well... he’s..."

"I know," Aether said.

"No, I mean really look at him. What even is this little miracle?"

The boy gave a tiny sob and buried his face against Aether’s shoulder. He smelled of rainwater, wet cloth, and something soft and childlike underneath it all.

"What’s your name?" Aether asked.

The child did not lift his head right away. His lips trembled, but he answered in the end.

"Neuvi-Ann."

Paimon froze.

"That’s a boy?" she whispered to Aether, as if the child were not sitting directly in front of her.

"Looks like it."

"That’s a very pretty name," she told Neuvi-Ann immediately. "And a very rare one."

Neuvi-Ann did not answer. He only clung harder and mumbled again, smaller than before:

"Mommy went... I got lost..."

"It’s alright. We’ll find her," *Aether said. "Did you see where she went?"

Neuvi-Ann shook his head and added in a pitiful little voice:

"Too loud."

"Yeah, it’s awful out here," Paimon agreed, glaring at the street as though it had personally insulted her. "A normal child could lose an adult in all this."

Only now, once the important part had been handled – lifting him out, warming him, calming him – did the full absurdity sink in. Aether looked at the small horns, the scales at his neck, the tail, the Melusine ears, the strange rounded eyes. Paimon followed his gaze, then slowly turned to look back in the direction the woman had disappeared.

"Wait," she said very carefully. "That woman looked completely human."

"Mhm."

"Completely normal. Well, aside from the panic."

"Mhm."

"So then..." Paimon pointed at Neuvi-Ann, then quickly lowered her hand so she would not scare him. "How in the world did she end up with a child like this?"

Aether said nothing. It was a fair question. What they had in their arms was the living result of something Paimon did not even have a name for yet.

"Alright," she said at last. "We haven’t seen the father. Maybe that explains the rest of the mystery."

Neuvi-Ann sniffled again, and that was the end of that line of thought.

"Daddy..." he said quietly.

Paimon and Aether exchanged a look.

"Right. Then we’re finding Daddy too."

They turned back through the street, only now much more slowly and carefully. Aether held the child so his cloak shielded him from the rain as much as possible, while Paimon stayed close and kept up a steady stream of chatter, because children usually did better with a voice to follow than with silence and city noise.

"So, Neuvi-Ann, do you like sweets?"

The little boy thought about it, then gave the tiniest nod.

"There. See? Then once we find your mommy and daddy, Paimon is personally making sure you get fed something very nice."

"And dry," Aether added.

"And dry, yes."

People glanced at them as they passed, some for a little too long. Some looked at Neuvi-Ann with simple surprise, some with curiosity, some with that particular expression that said they wanted badly to ask what exactly they were seeing but had enough sense not to. One older gentleman even started to say something about “a truly remarkable child,” but one look from Aether was enough to make him think better of it and keep walking.

Near the arched passage into the administrative district, a Melusine carrying a stack of papers came hurrying toward them. The second she saw Neuvi-Ann in Aether’s arms, she stopped dead, eyes widening so much that Paimon knew at once: this was someone who understood exactly what was happening.

"Oh!" the Melusine blurted out. "You found him!"

"I knew it," Paimon said instantly. "You know him?"

"Of course I know him! It’s Neuvi-Ann." She hugged the papers tighter to her chest. "Madam ran through here not long ago. I tried to stop her, but she didn’t even hear me. She was crying."

"Where did she go?" Aether asked right away.

"To the Palais Mermonia. Where else..." The Melusine cut herself off as though she had almost said too much, but it was already too late. "Hurry. They should be there."

Paimon floated closer.

"They?"

But the Melusine was already waving them onward.

"Later, later. Go. He’s freezing."

Neuvi-Ann, as if he understood something important had just been said, reached toward the palace gates with a miserable little sound.

"Mommy..."

"Yeah, we’re going," Aether said, and quickened his pace.

At the Palais Mermonia, the rain sounded even louder. Thin streams ran down the steps, clerks under the awnings spoke in hushed voices, some people hurried up, others down, and near the entrance there was already that little gap in the flow of movement that always formed around someone else’s grief, when people did not come too close but could not stop looking either. Aether saw them at once.

You were standing at the lower steps with your face pressed to Neuvillette’s shoulder as though if you moved away now, everything would collapse completely. Your shoulders shook, your hands were twisted into his clothing, and you were crying without any attempt at control left. Neuvillette held you with both arms, one around your back and the other moving slowly, almost automatically, over your spine in a steadying rhythm as if he were trying to keep you, himself, and the whole day inside the limits of something bearable. And if someone had not known him, they might have thought they were simply looking at a very composed man comforting a distressed citizen. But Aether could see his face clearly enough to know better. This was not detached sympathy. Neuvillette looked as though he himself was already far too close to the edge. Not lost – he hardly seemed capable of looking lost – but tightly wound, painfully focused, his gaze repeatedly lifting from your face to the steps, the street, the entrance, the crowd, like a man who could not stop searching even while he held someone in his arms.

"Wow..." Paimon whispered, instinctively lowering her voice. "He really is... kind of an empath."

Aether did not answer. For a moment, he almost thought the same thing: the Chief Justice, rain along the edge of his cloak, a woman crying against him, and Neuvillette simply standing there, patient and steady because somebody in the city was hurting. But something about it still did not fit. Too close. Too personal. Too intimate for anything official.

Neuvi-Ann suddenly threw up his head in Aether’s arms. His little tail twitched, his tiny wings tightened against his back, and then he filled his small lungs and cried out, not as softly as before but loud enough to cut straight through the rain:

"Mommy!"

You jerked away from Neuvillette’s shoulder as if pulled by a wire from inside. Neuvillette lifted his head in the same instant. Both of you saw the child – soaked, shivering, in Aether’s arms – and everything fell into place at once.

"Neuvi-Ann!"

You and Neuvillette shouted his name at the same time.

Paimon went rigid in midair.

"Oh no," she breathed. "Oh no, no, no, don’t tell me..."

There was no need. You were already running down the steps without caring about your dress, the people watching, or the fact that you had barely been standing a moment ago. Neuvillette moved just as fast, far faster than Aether would ever have expected to see from him in any official setting. A moment later both of you were there.

You reached Neuvi-Ann first, almost pulling him straight out of Aether’s arms, and clutched him so tightly that Paimon was briefly afraid for his little wings. The boy gave a frightened sound, grabbed handfuls of your wet clothes with every available limb, buried his face in your neck, and dissolved into loud, ugly, relieved crying. Neuvillette dropped down beside you almost immediately, one arm firm at your back, the other hand going to the back of his son’s head as though he needed to confirm with his own touch that the child was really here, warm, breathing, unharmed.

"It’s alright," he said quietly, though his voice was rougher than usual. "He’s here."

"Where were you, where were you, my little one..." you kept saying between broken kisses pressed into Neuvi-Ann’s wet hair, his forehead, his cheeks, unable to stop. "I was losing my mind, I thought..."

Neuvi-Ann could only cry and babble scraps about the bench, the rain, the noise, and “Daddy.” That last word finished Paimon off completely. She turned slowly to Aether with a face that suggested the world had just revealed something deeply unreasonable in broad daylight.

"Daddy," she repeated faintly. "He said Daddy."

Aether had understood already. The human mother. The impossible child. Neuvillette at the palace. The way he had held you. The way you both moved the instant you saw Neuvi-Ann. The whole picture slammed together hard enough to leave no room for anything else.

You were still kneeling on the wet stone with Neuvi-Ann crushed against your chest. Neuvillette rose first and helped you up without taking his hand from your back, then looked at Aether and Paimon. His usual composure was already returning, but not enough to hide the strain from a few moments ago.

"Traveler. Paimon," he said evenly. "It seems you have provided my family with considerable help."

Paimon let out a short, nearly hysterical laugh.

"Your family?!"

You, still trembling from crying, held Neuvi-Ann closer and looked at them properly now, no longer as strangers in the street, but as people who had just seen you in one of the worst states possible.

"I’m sorry," you said hoarsely, trying to steady your breathing. "I would have preferred to meet you under very different circumstances."

"That is putting it mildly," Paimon muttered. "Wait. Wait. So... this is your child? Yours and Neuvillette’s? This little..."

She gestured helplessly, apparently unable to find one word broad enough to cover Melusine, dragon, child, and impossible all at once.

Neuvi-Ann, still sniffling, peeked out from your arms and for some reason reached one little hand toward Neuvillette. Neuvillette took that tiny hand without any pause at all, and the gesture was so practiced, so intimate, so ordinary that whatever last hope Paimon still had for a simpler explanation died on the spot.

"Yes," Neuvillette said calmly. "He is our son."

Paimon stared at him.

"No, you can’t just say that so calmly."

Aether almost smiled, though he was still taking it in himself.

"I think at this point he probably can. We’ve already seen the proof."

"Paimon was not prepared!" she cried. "First there’s a frantic mother, then we find a tiny shaking miracle under a bench, then the whole way here we’re wondering who in the world his father could be, then Neuvillette is standing at the palace comforting some poor citizen, and then – bam! – that’s his wife! And the child is his too!"

Despite the tears, you let out something like a weak laugh and pressed your forehead to Neuvi-Ann’s temple.

"It does sound worse when you say it out loud."

"I don’t know how to say it in a better way!" Paimon protested.

Neuvillette exhaled very quietly. Not a laugh, not quite relief, something in between, and far more human than the city of Fontaine ever expected from him. Then he looked back at his son. His fingers briefly touched the little horns, checked for any injury, then slid through wet hair to the back of the child’s head.

"He was not harmed?" he asked Aether.

"No. Cold, frightened, but otherwise alright."

"Thank you," Neuvillette said, and that single word carried more weight than any formal expression of gratitude.

You looked up at Aether and Paimon, tears still in your eyes, now mixed with sheer exhausted tenderness.

"Really, thank you. I... I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t found him."

"Well, Paimon actually has a rough idea," she said, pointing at Neuvillette. "The two of you probably would have torn half of Fontaine apart."

The line was so stupidly accurate that you laughed for real this time, weak but genuine. Even Neuvillette closed his eyes for a second, as if he had no intention of arguing with it.

By then the rain had softened. People near the entrance finally stopped pretending not to stare and began drifting away once it was obvious the worst was over. Neuvi-Ann, warm in your arms and with both of his parents beside him again, was calming down too, though he still clung to you with hands, tail, and tiny wings as if he had no intention of ever letting go.

"We should take him inside," Neuvillette said, his voice steadier now. "He’s soaked."

"And get something warm into him," you added at once.

"And food," Paimon blurted out before she could stop herself.

You looked at her, and for the first time there was something in your face more alive than panic or tears.

"Yes. And food."

Neuvillette inclined his head slightly toward Aether and Paimon.

"You have done us a considerable service today. Please come inside as well. Tea, sweets, and anything else that may help restore your strength can be arranged."

Paimon’s entire face changed instantly.

"Sweets?"

Aether gave her a sideways look, already knowing the answer.

"Yes," Neuvillette said with complete seriousness. "I believe that would be appropriate."

"Paimon accepts," she said at once, without a scrap of dignity. "Paimon accepts very, very graciously."

You actually laughed at that, tired but warmer now, still holding Neuvi-Ann close while he blinked sleepily between the three of you.

"Then come with us," you said. "After today, I think all of us deserve tea."

Aether smiled a little and nodded.

"We’d be glad to."

Neuvillette placed one hand gently between your shoulder blades, and together the five of you turned toward the entrance of the Palais Mermonia – you with Neuvi-Ann in your arms, Neuvillette at your side, Paimon already entirely distracted by the promise of food, and Aether following after with the quiet sense that Fontaine had once again managed to reveal something impossible as if it had always been there, simply waiting for the right moment to be seen.

[shorten]

Rain in Fontaine had a way of making the city look prettier and more unbearable at the same time. The stone darkened, the water in the canals turned nearly black, the steps gleamed as if someone had deliberately made them impossible to walk on properly, and people under umbrellas and cloaks started moving faster, sharper, more tightly packed, the way they always did when everyone had somewhere urgent to be and nobody wanted to get soaked a second longer than necessary. By the time Aether and Paimon returned to the city, everything around them looked exactly like that: puddles underfoot, wet curbs, water rushing through the drains, and that constant Fontaine bustle in which even somebody else’s panic could, at first glance, look like just another ordinary part of the street.

"Paimon already hates this rain," she announced, flying beside Aether and trying uselessly to shield her face from the slanting drops with her hands. "No, seriously. It feels personal. Like it’s aiming for her on purpose."

Aether said nothing, adjusting the collar of his cloak. Up ahead, at the crossroads near a line of shops, someone rushed past them without really looking around. A woman. Judging by the way she moved and kept turning back, she was clearly at the end of her rope. Wet strands of hair clung to her temples, her cloak had slipped off one shoulder, one hand was pressed to her chest while the other waved sharply at passersby, as if she hoped to stop anyone at all who might have seen what she was looking for.

"Neuvi-Ann! Neuvi-Ann, where are you?!"

She practically ran right past them, not noticing Aether or Paimon, not noticing the way people turned to look after her with that familiar mixture of sympathy and reluctance to get involved. A second later she had turned the corner and vanished into the rain.

Paimon watched her go and let out a quiet breath.

"That’s bad."

"A child is missing," Aether said.

"Yeah. Definitely not a wallet."

They kept walking, though more alert now, listening to the city more closely out of instinct. Children crying, merchants arguing, heels striking wet stone, wheels hissing over puddles, all of it blending into one broad wash of noise. That was why they did not notice the very quiet, broken little sound at first, something too soft to be a proper sob and too strange to be an ordinary child’s cry. Aether stopped first. Paimon floated a little farther before turning back.

"What?"

He nodded toward a bench by the wall, where the space between two rain-darkened crates was almost hidden in shadow. Something was huddled there, curled in on itself so tightly it seemed to be trying to vanish.

Paimon dropped lower immediately.

"Oh."

At first it was hard to understand what they were even looking at. It was definitely a little boy, no more than two or three years old at most. But beyond that, nothing about him fit together in any ordinary way. His body was not built like a human child’s: short little legs, tiny feet, a small rounded frame closer to a Melusine’s silhouette than a person’s. His ears were large and lifted upward and slightly outward, soft in shape but unmistakably Melusine-like. Fine scales shimmered faintly along his neck and around his collarbones in the gray light, and beneath the soaked little garment twisted at his back, there were tiny wings just starting to come in, dragon wings, not anything else. A thin scaled tail was curled awkwardly under him. His skin was human, pale, but along his shoulders and arms there were soft bluish patches like watercolor stains. His face was a child’s face, round and human, but his eyes were the wrong color entirely, too clear, too unnatural, too deep for any ordinary little boy, and the small horns pushing through his hair near his forehead left no room for calm explanations either.

He was shaking so hard that something in Aether tightened immediately. Not only from fear. From cold, from damp, from exhaustion. A wet strand of hair stuck to one cheek, his nose was red, and his little mitten-like hands were clenched so tightly in the edge of his soaked cape that his fingers looked stiff.

"Hey," Aether said very quietly, crouching down in front of the bench. "It’s alright. We’re not going to hurt you."

The child flinched. Those huge rounded eyes opened even wider. He was clearly too frightened and too miserable to run, but he still tried to shrink deeper into the dark as if wood and stone might hide him.

"Paimon is actually going to die," Paimon whispered, pressing both hands over her mouth. "He’s so tiny..."

Aether slowly held out a hand, careful not to move too quickly.

"You’re cold, aren’t you?"

The little boy blinked, swallowed, and after a long pause managed to whisper one word.

"Mommy..."

"We’ll find your mommy," Paimon said at once, unexpectedly soft. "Promise. But first, can you come out, okay? You’re soaked."

He stared at them for several more seconds with the kind of look only children had when fear had almost fully won but trust had not been given up yet. Then very slowly, very uncertainly, he reached out one hand toward Aether. Aether lifted him carefully without a word and felt at once just how small and freezing he really was. The child clung to him almost instantly, squeezing his eyes shut first and then grabbing fistfuls of Aether’s cloak with a desperate strength that said he was only just allowing himself to understand how frightened he had been.

"Oh, Archons..." Paimon hovered close, staring at the horns, the wings, the tail. "He’s freezing. And he’s... well... he’s..."

"I know," Aether said.

"No, I mean really look at him. What even is this little miracle?"

The boy gave a tiny sob and buried his face against Aether’s shoulder. He smelled of rainwater, wet cloth, and something soft and childlike underneath it all.

"What’s your name?" Aether asked.

The child did not lift his head right away. His lips trembled, but he answered in the end.

"Neuvi-Ann."

Paimon froze.

"That’s a boy?" she whispered to Aether, as if the child were not sitting directly in front of her.

"Looks like it."

"That’s a very pretty name," she told Neuvi-Ann immediately. "And a very rare one."

Neuvi-Ann did not answer. He only clung harder and mumbled again, smaller than before:

"Mommy went... I got lost..."

"It’s alright. We’ll find her," *Aether said. "Did you see where she went?"

Neuvi-Ann shook his head and added in a pitiful little voice:

"Too loud."

"Yeah, it’s awful out here," Paimon agreed, glaring at the street as though it had personally insulted her. "A normal child could lose an adult in all this."

Only now, once the important part had been handled – lifting him out, warming him, calming him – did the full absurdity sink in. Aether looked at the small horns, the scales at his neck, the tail, the Melusine ears, the strange rounded eyes. Paimon followed his gaze, then slowly turned to look back in the direction the woman had disappeared.

"Wait," she said very carefully. "That woman looked completely human."

"Mhm."

"Completely normal. Well, aside from the panic."

"Mhm."

"So then..." Paimon pointed at Neuvi-Ann, then quickly lowered her hand so she would not scare him. "How in the world did she end up with a child like this?"

Aether said nothing. It was a fair question. What they had in their arms was the living result of something Paimon did not even have a name for yet.

"Alright," she said at last. "We haven’t seen the father. Maybe that explains the rest of the mystery."

Neuvi-Ann sniffled again, and that was the end of that line of thought.

"Daddy..." he said quietly.

Paimon and Aether exchanged a look.

"Right. Then we’re finding Daddy too."

They turned back through the street, only now much more slowly and carefully. Aether held the child so his cloak shielded him from the rain as much as possible, while Paimon stayed close and kept up a steady stream of chatter, because children usually did better with a voice to follow than with silence and city noise.

"So, Neuvi-Ann, do you like sweets?"

The little boy thought about it, then gave the tiniest nod.

"There. See? Then once we find your mommy and daddy, Paimon is personally making sure you get fed something very nice."

"And dry," Aether added.

"And dry, yes."

People glanced at them as they passed, some for a little too long. Some looked at Neuvi-Ann with simple surprise, some with curiosity, some with that particular expression that said they wanted badly to ask what exactly they were seeing but had enough sense not to. One older gentleman even started to say something about “a truly remarkable child,” but one look from Aether was enough to make him think better of it and keep walking.

Near the arched passage into the administrative district, a Melusine carrying a stack of papers came hurrying toward them. The second she saw Neuvi-Ann in Aether’s arms, she stopped dead, eyes widening so much that Paimon knew at once: this was someone who understood exactly what was happening.

"Oh!" the Melusine blurted out. "You found him!"

"I knew it," Paimon said instantly. "You know him?"

"Of course I know him! It’s Neuvi-Ann." She hugged the papers tighter to her chest. "Madam ran through here not long ago. I tried to stop her, but she didn’t even hear me. She was crying."

"Where did she go?" Aether asked right away.

"To the Palais Mermonia. Where else..." The Melusine cut herself off as though she had almost said too much, but it was already too late. "Hurry. They should be there."

Paimon floated closer.

"They?"

But the Melusine was already waving them onward.

"Later, later. Go. He’s freezing."

Neuvi-Ann, as if he understood something important had just been said, reached toward the palace gates with a miserable little sound.

"Mommy..."

"Yeah, we’re going," Aether said, and quickened his pace.

At the Palais Mermonia, the rain sounded even louder. Thin streams ran down the steps, clerks under the awnings spoke in hushed voices, some people hurried up, others down, and near the entrance there was already that little gap in the flow of movement that always formed around someone else’s grief, when people did not come too close but could not stop looking either. Aether saw them at once.

You were standing at the lower steps with your face pressed to Neuvillette’s shoulder as though if you moved away now, everything would collapse completely. Your shoulders shook, your hands were twisted into his clothing, and you were crying without any attempt at control left. Neuvillette held you with both arms, one around your back and the other moving slowly, almost automatically, over your spine in a steadying rhythm as if he were trying to keep you, himself, and the whole day inside the limits of something bearable. And if someone had not known him, they might have thought they were simply looking at a very composed man comforting a distressed citizen. But Aether could see his face clearly enough to know better. This was not detached sympathy. Neuvillette looked as though he himself was already far too close to the edge. Not lost – he hardly seemed capable of looking lost – but tightly wound, painfully focused, his gaze repeatedly lifting from your face to the steps, the street, the entrance, the crowd, like a man who could not stop searching even while he held someone in his arms.

"Wow..." Paimon whispered, instinctively lowering her voice. "He really is... kind of an empath."

Aether did not answer. For a moment, he almost thought the same thing: the Chief Justice, rain along the edge of his cloak, a woman crying against him, and Neuvillette simply standing there, patient and steady because somebody in the city was hurting. But something about it still did not fit. Too close. Too personal. Too intimate for anything official.

Neuvi-Ann suddenly threw up his head in Aether’s arms. His little tail twitched, his tiny wings tightened against his back, and then he filled his small lungs and cried out, not as softly as before but loud enough to cut straight through the rain:

"Mommy!"

⠀