After the ordeal, I ordered my men to secure the perimeter while I followed Mr. Lucius back to his estate.
"Sir," An said beside me as the carriage rolled forward, "Officer Minh never returned."
"I was informed," I replied, eyes fixed on the black-lacquered carriage ahead of us. "I was told he lost consciousness and was offered a place to rest at Mr. Lucius' residence." I wasn't sure whether that was meant to reassure me—or unsettle me.
Stonegarden slid past us in layers: streets still damp with fear, walls freshly scrubbed of mud that refused to fully forget its shape. The city looked intact, but it felt thinner, like a manuscript scraped too often.
When we reached the compound, Lucius' servants stood waiting—still, immaculate, arranged like punctuation marks in a sentence too expensive to misread.
"I sense no qi manipulation," An murmured, eyes sweeping the grounds. "They may not be cultivators."
"Or they may be something worse," I thought, but didn't say.
Officer Minh emerged to meet us. Pale, composed, embarrassed. He insisted he was unharmed, though he had no memory of collapsing. No dizziness, no residual pressure. Just… absence.
We were not acknowledged as Lucius led the two girls and the others past us, deeper into the estate. Not dismissed—archived. A polite erasure.
We stopped at a respectful distance.
Beyond them stretched a private airship dock, vast and elegant, its metal ribs curving like the skeleton of a sleeping leviathan. The thing radiated inevitability. Departure as doctrine.
"What happened to the city?" Minh asked quietly.
I checked my pocket watch. Four hours. Barely four hours, and yet the sun still sat high, unembarrassed by the amount of history it had just watched rewrite itself.
"That woman you escorted back," An whispered, "she did something I can't explain. There's a statue now. In the slum district."
"A statue?" Minh asked.
"Yes," I said. "That's correct."
In the distance, Lucius handed the girl—Victoria, I now knew—an object. A spear, though calling it that felt insufficient. It was black beyond black, a silhouette that devoured definition. Its tip refused geometry, like a thought that rejected being concluded.
"How long were you unconscious?" An muttered, attempting levity.
Lucius glanced at his pocket watch.
Stamped his cane.
The sky bruised.
Not darkened—rewritten. Indigo flooded the heavens, the stars snapping into place with such suddenness that my balance wavered. Night didn't fall. It was imposed.
Below us, Stonegarden ignited. Thousands of lanterns flared to life in perfect synchrony, a calm grid of light that made panic feel childish.
"What the—" An gasped, fumbling for his watch.
"Log it later," I snapped. "Eyes on them."
Victoria stood at the boarding ramp now. She was no longer the anomaly I had escorted hours earlier.
She looked… formal. Not powerful. Official. Like a document that had passed review.
"Why didn't you help them?" she asked.
Lucius' reply was soft, but it landed like doctrine.
"If a gardener pulls every weed the moment it sprouts, the soil never learns what it is meant to grow. I do not help the city. I audit it. Intervention is forgiveness—and forgiveness erases debt before it can be understood."
The airship doors sealed.
"We are leaving," I ordered.
One hour later, I sat in a windowless room in the Police Building.
A single gaslamp flickered overhead, its light cheap and unreliable—a humiliating contrast to Lucius' curated brilliance. This was where truth came to be simplified.
The woman across from me wore no uniform. Just a high-collared brown coat, severe and dustless, as though shadows themselves were discouraged from touching her.
"Agent Lan," she had said. White Shade.
"You say she renamed them," Lan said now, voice level as she sorted through photographs and reports.
"The Erinyes," I replied, fingers interlocked beneath the table. "She called them the Kindly Ones. They obeyed. They… reclassified."
Lan studied a photograph.
"'Custodians of Law. Witnesses to Blood. Keepers of the Verdict,'" she read from the inscriptions.
She closed the folder.
"Cultivators break things, Officer Ayaan. They shatter stone. Freeze rivers. This?" She tapped the file. "This is structural revision. She didn't defeat the Furies. She edited them."
"And the Chairman?"
Lan's mouth tightened. "The Chairman is nesting. We've watched the House of Lucius for ten years. Giving her a weapon wasn't generosity. It was deployment." My jaw tightened.
She stood.
"The White Shade assumes jurisdiction. Official cause: gas leak. The statues are a municipal art installation."
She paused at the door.
"We have a protocol for Magistrates," Lan said. "If they can't be registered, they are neutralised,"
I exhaled, staring at the table as the weight of it settled in.
"We don't tolerate laws we didn't author."
When she left, the room felt smaller.
I looked again at the photographs.
Three statues.
One with arms crossed, wings half-raised, serpents forming a vigilant crown.
One with palm extended, measuring—not accusing.
One kneeling, wings lowered, serpents coiled like chains of memory.
"Tisiphone. Megaera. Alecto," I recalled dimly. But I couldn't tell which was which anymore.
Maybe that was the point.
The city had not been saved.
It had been revised.
And as long as it breathed, it would hope— but it would also remember.