Marsilio was in northern Italy, which was at least scenic—and fitting, given the family lineage.
He showed up two days ahead of Marsilio, tracked down the spot Karma had pinpointed—a waystation for mid-tier supernatural operatives traveling between territories—and passed the time practicing Karma and Mist together.
The combination was, on first use, deeply strange.
Karma revealed probability threads—weighted lines of possible outcomes.
Mist let him reach into those threads, slipping through them to fold space and land exactly where the highest-probability result awaited.
Together, it felt less like gearing up for a fight and more like bending the rules of a game he’d designed himself.
At dusk, he stood in the empty courtyard of the waystation, practicing how to slip through probability-space—shifting to the spot Karma marked as here in thirty seconds, with a seventy-nine percent chance, getting there ahead of time, and watching the place he’d left catch up to his prediction.
It was strange at first, but each attempt made it less so, like slowly learning to read in a different direction.
So this is what Karma was really for, he thought.
Not just finding people, but moving through the world at the pace of what’s about to unfold.
Karma’s reply was the probability equivalent of “finally.”
“You really could have explained that,” he said.
The universe, as always, kept its diplomatically unhelpful stance.
Marsilio was not Georg.
Where Georg had been measured and restrained, Marsilio was the opposite—the kind of man a curse-class Longinus might shape after years of chronic sleep deprivation and no way to make sense of it all.
Resentful.
Razor-edged, like someone convinced the world owed him a debt it stubbornly refused to pay.
The novel had sketched the outline for Lucian, but watching through his tracking constructs as Marsilio moved through the waystation revealed the truth: a man radiating the simmering heat of someone always on the brink of a grievance.
He didn’t try to have a conversation with him either.
Marsilio showed up at the waystation just as Karma had said—alone, in the late afternoon, walking with that slightly-too-controlled stride of someone who hadn’t slept well in years and made up for it with sheer aggression.
From his hidden perch on the low wall, Lucian watched him cross the courtyard, sensing the low hum of the Dreamlike Curse’s soul-frequency even with the Gear inactive, and waited until Marsilio had passed within two meters before making his move.
The extraction went more smoothly than Georg’s had—he was quicker now, the soul-work almost second nature, the frequency aligning in seconds instead of minutes.
Dreamlike Curse came loose with a feeling that caught him off guard: not resistance, not eagerness, but a kind of weariness, as if the Gear itself had grown tired of the fight.
Marsilio came to a halt.
He stood in the courtyard with the stillness, not pain, not fear, just the quiet absence of something so constant it had faded into the background.
He stayed like that for three seconds, then rolled his shoulders once, and something long held seemed to slip away from his stance.
The memory adjustment was quicker than it had been with Georg.
There was less to preserve—Marsilio’s resentment ran deeper than the Gear, and Lucian wasn’t in the business of reshaping personalities, only stripping away the accelerant.
He removed the Gear’s influence, the years of broken sleep, the precise form of grievance that the Dreamlike Curse had nurtured and sharpened.
What was left was a man still difficult, still sharp-edged, but now, without the constant exhaustion beneath it all, those edges might feel a little less essential.
He’d sleep tonight.
Probably for a long time.
Lucian left him standing in the courtyard, already looking faintly confused about why he’d come here, and walked back toward the station.
The third Pawn ring was copper-toned—Marsilio, being southern European, felt the warm metal suited him perfectly, as if it carried its own quiet logic.
He named it Dream, for reasons that were clear enough.
When Dream slipped onto his hand beside Karma and Mist, the three seemed to recognize each other instantly.
Lucian sank onto the waystation wall, the feeling like three instruments striking a chord none of them had realized they’d been seeking.
It passed in about four seconds.
He sat on the wall for a few seconds longer anyway.
“Right,” he muttered to himself in the deserted Italian courtyard, addressing two ancient, opinionated Longinus and a high-tier sacred gear resting across his fingers.
“I need to find a girl named Ingvild Leviathan before her time runs out.
I’ve got three of you now—one that deals in probability, one that bends space, and one that works within the frequency of dreams.”
He paused.
“Any of you want to tell me where she is?”
Karma ran the probability horizon.
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