The detective looked at Aurelius with a calm that seemed to provoke the surrounding nothingness, and said:
"Very well. We can stop this—postpone your theological battle for later. We have a more pressing matter for you, Aurelius; questions regarding one Simon Eisenhart."
"The Baron?" The voice emerged from Aurelius' helmet with a clear tone of bewilderment, tingeing its metallic frequencies. "What business have you with him?"
The detective produced his notebook and pen in a motion so mechanical it would have seemed natural even to Aurelius—as though he were seated in his aged office rather than at the heart of a four-dimensional prison. "Simon Vanished last night, precisely before your confrontation with Óengus began."
A brief silence reigned before Aurelius replied: "What? The Baron vanished? What do you mean by 'vanished'? Did he pack his bags and flee with some secret mistress?… No, the Lord is not of that sort. He had strange designs, obsessions of his own—but given that the great shadows themselves pursue him, it is no wonder he would abandon everything to escape."
"Indeed. I did not say he fled—I said he Vanished," the detective corrected him in an affectless tone.
Here, Óengus intervened, his voice quavering: "He was taken, Aurelius… something immense drew him away, along with the main estate, last night."
"Drawn away? Last night? Before our battle commenced?" Aurelius' lens trembled with an agitated blue flicker.
Óengus affirmed that dreadful truth with a tone wrapped in astonishment, as though he still beheld the mansion dissolving before his very eyes: "Yes… And it seems the Lord's dissolution represents a crucial piece of the puzzle to this esteemed gentleman—" he gestured subtly with his gaze toward the detective, "—though I cannot be certain of the details. It concerns the collapse of existence itself, or some such cosmic vapour that my mind cannot fathom."
A heavy silence fell, broken only by a faint hum emanating from deep within Aurelius, before he uttered with a voice dripping derision: "That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard… Are you attempting to insult my processors with this drivel you speak?"
The detective replied, keeping his composure: "No one here seeks to insult you, Aurelius. True, it may be difficult to credit—but the reality stands before us… and it is a reality ungoverned."
"The only ungoverned thing here is your account!" Aurelius cut in with metallic sharpness. "How can the disappearance of a single human from Dolan become a cosmic matter? Humans vanish all the time, blown away by the wind without a trace, and never have I seen the heavens tear or the laws of existence crumble over an ant that lost its way!"
Ancaues took a step forward, moving past the detective's shoulder, his eyes gleaming with a deep, ancient light:
"You are correct within your frame—yet Simon's disappearance is no mere absence… It is an anomaly. I perceive the world as a microstructure, a minute idea within the consciousness of the Colossus, and I can index it from the frequency of the smallest cosmic strings to the shallow, distant realms that bound this reality… I have searched every fragment, every possible iteration, every timeline, every probability—and found no trace of him."
Ancaues paused a moment, his voice seeming to come from a far-off place:
"Not I alone—all seven of us. He has ceased to exist entirely. More than that: this existence in which we now stand is the only probability, among infinities, where Simon vanishes in this manner… This is the probability that lies outside my scope, outside the Uris."
Aurelius' gears turned slowly, cautiously, as though weighing the gravity of the words, before he said:
"Very well. And what has this to do with the tearing of the cosmos? This sounds to me like a shortcoming of your capabilities, nothing more. Clearly there is a reason for Simon's disappearance, and your ignorance of it does not mean the universe is ignorant of it… One cannot act in defiance of existential logic."
Ancaues replied with decisive tone:
"This reality surrounding us is proof that Simon has indeed done the impossible. We are living in a unique probability, one among infinities… This is impossibility made manifest. And if we cannot decipher this enigma, the impossible will devour the possible, and reality will remain paralyzed forever."
Aurelius took a moment to process the information, the hum of his processors rising gradually, before speaking with profound skepticism:
"Very well… Let us suppose—merely a fleeting assumption—that I believe this nonsense. Have you tried searching for him?"
Castor surged forward with suppressed anger:
"Did you not hear what was just said? We told you we see everything, every probability, every—"
Aurelius interrupted with metallic sternness:
"I mean a physical search… Did you look for him with your own hands? Did you touch the dust upon which he trod?"
A sudden silence fell—a heavy, unforeseen quiet. Glances met in the void, until Lagrita uttered in a faint voice:
"No… No, not truly."
Here Ancaues cut in sharply:
"It is useless! So long as my comprehensive consciousness has not found him, a physical, material search is but a waste of effort. It will have no effect against the inadequacy of human senses."
At that moment, my gaze instinctively turned toward the detective. He stood there with his usual chill. I wondered silently: Tell me, detective… why did you not ask the Shadows to conduct a physical search of the Oris before?
The detective remained silent for a span. Had he been caught without a reply? Had he forgotten something so elementary? No… I knew that silence well. It was not the silence of helplessness, but the silence of one who looks upon us as if we had asked about a trivial mathematical axiom not worth the breath of an answer.
Finally, the detective spoke in his monotonous tone:
"Did I not inform you earlier Thomas? On the hill… when we investigated the disappearance of the palace; I told you then that something had drawn the mansion into a new plane of reality. Simon is certainly not in the Uris… That is a door closed, and the matter ended.
Aurelius remained unmoved, his glass-like lens flashing with solid denial:
"I do not comprehend this nonsense of yours about new planes, and I was not with you at the estate to believe your conclusions… I demand a physical search of every atom on this planet. Logic does not recognize results that cannot be touched."
The detective inclined his head slowly, his body language faint, hinting at an ancient weariness. He exhaled softly and spoke in a low voice dripping with fatigue:
"Very well… Have it your way."
He said no more, offering only a fleeting nod toward Ancaues. That gesture was the breaking of spacetime's fetters.
In a billionth of a second, Ancaues' form vanished from its place, leaving behind a thunderous silence. It was not mere motion—it was an eruption of matter. Ancaues became a thread of incandescent light, a divine blade cleaving the veil of the Oris with a speed that rendered light itself lame by comparison.
The great sweep had begun.
Ancaues was everywhere and nowhere at once. He surged forth, scouring existence atom by atom; he overturned every stone in the farthest wastelands, dredged the silt of the deepest oceans never touched by sunlight. He passed like a breeze behind the chimneys of old women in forgotten villages, slipped as a fleeting shadow beneath the beds of sleeping children, and even delved into the dreams of demons dwelling in the cellars of dark consciousness to sift through the folds of their nightmares.
He left no speck of dust suspended in the air without interrogating its essence, no gap between molecules without inserting his being into it. He ascended to the skies, circling the infinite moons of the Oris, transforming their orbits into rings of lightning as he scanned their volcanic craters and frozen plains, seeking a chemical trace, a human scent, even a material echo of Simon Eisenhardt's footsteps.
It was a sight that shook the very blue weave of the narrative—the magical Totality made manifest at the lowest levels of matter, a symphony of absolute motion rifling through the trash-heap of existence.
Then, with the same suddenness with which he had departed, the light condensed once more within the whiteness. Ancaues returned to stand in his place, his robes undisturbed, his breath unlabored, yet his eyes held a void more terrifying than the emptiness around us. He cast his gaze toward Aurelius—a gaze laden with the defeat of matter before nothingness—and spoke:
"I have searched the All, atom by atom… Simon Eisenhardt does not exist in the records of this world. He is not here, and he never shall be."
A heavy silence followed Ancaues' return, but Aurelius did not yield. His gears began to spin with frenetic speed, emitting a screech akin to a muffled, scornful laugh.
"A full search? Atom by atom?" Aurelius uttered, his voice echoing through the void like metal striking stone. "Detective—you and the Shadows believe you have cornered truth in a narrow confine, but you have merely built a prison of delusions around your own minds."
Aurelius took a heavy step toward the detective, his metallic hand gesturing into the emptiness:
"First, let us speak of 'dead angles'. You claim this magical being inspected every inch—but who guarantees that his 'perception' is not deficient? Even in the most precise machines, gaps exist. Simon could be lurking in a cavity unseen by magic's eyes—a secret chamber not built of matter, or a fold in the fabric of space untouched by Ancaues' awareness. Since you cannot prove you have searched 'every' possible point without a single exception, the possibility of a 'forgotten place' remains—a dagger tearing through your conclusion!"
The detective inclined his head and remained silent, which emboldened Aurelius to press his assault:
"Second: there is 'the failure of sight'. You say Ancaues did not find Simon. I say: perhaps he saw him and did not recognize him! Simon Eisenhardt may have altered his appearance, or cloaked himself in a material hue that misleads your primitive senses. Can you swear that every being Ancaues beheld was verified in its essential identity?"
Aurelius paused a second, then a sound like the whirr of raging energy issued from his helm:
"And now, the finishing blow… If you are unable to locate Simon, then you must prove the absence of all who are 'not Simon'. Search every atom and every being in this existence, and show me conclusive proof that none of them is Simon in disguise. So long as you have not examined'the All' to negate from them the attribute of 'Simon', your claim of his disappearance remains but childish conjecture!"
The detective stayed silent, toying mechanically with his pen between his fingers while Aurelius hurled his hypotheses like shattered gears. No reaction showed on the detective's face—though it was hard to be certain, given his featureless countenance.
"Have you concluded your argument?" The detective spoke, his voice quiet, monotonous, cutting through Aurelius' metallic clamor.
He advanced a single step and looked into Aurelius' glass lens as a forensics expert might regard a smudged fingerprint:
"Aurelius, you are trying to build a castle of paper in a gale. Let us begin with your first hypothesis: 'the forgotten room'. In investigative science, a room is only 'forgotten' if there is a wall to justify its existence. You possess no map, no gap—only a 'void' in your imagination. To propose a place Ancaues did not see is a claim that first requires you to prove that the 'All' he saw is not total. And since you have no coordinates, your room lies in the realm of 'wishes', not 'facts'."
The detective turned his gaze toward the white horizon and continued with chill precision:
"As for 'mistaken identity'… that is the excuse of the weak. For Ancaues to misidentify Simon, there must be a 'mask'. Where is it? Where are the remnants of the disguise? Where is the chemical alteration of the body that could deceive senses operating at the atomic level? If you cannot present me with the 'instrument of the crime' that enabled his concealment, then your claim that we saw him but did not know him is merely a desperate attempt to throw dust in the eyes of justice."
The detective paused and closed his notebook with an audible *snap* that reverberated in the absolute silence:
"And now, let us speak of your final gambit… demanding I examine every being to negate the attribute of 'Simon'. In my profession, we call this 'rotten circular logic'. Were I to indulge you, you would later ask: And how do you prove you found 'every' person? How do you prove the person you examined was not swapped with another the moment you looked away?"
The detective fixed his sharp gaze upon Aurelius, his voice growing sterner:
"Investigation is not an endless fishing trip in an ocean of trivial probabilities. The second rule in investigation: 'no theory may be announced without at least one piece of evidence.' You are obliged to provide one piece of evidence—one thread, one hair—connecting Simon to this place. Without it, his 'disappearance' is not a hypothesis; it is the only reality left on the table."
The detective placed his hand inside his coat pocket and added a final sentence that sounded like a definitive verdict:
"I am not searching for the 'possible', Aurelius—I am eliminating the 'impossible'. And since you have failed to prove his material existence, and since your logic chases its own tail like a dog in circles… my conclusion stands as a law of physics: Simon Eisenhart has left this stage. And your attempt to open illusory doors will not change the fact that the walls have vanished along with their owner."