The rain arrived without urgency.
It did not announce itself with thunder or darkened skies; it simply began, thin and patient, as though the world had decided to be damp rather than wet. Seraph watched it from beneath the inn's awning while the maid adjusted her cloak. The droplets slid down stone and skin alike, each one precise, deliberate. Rain like this was rarely accidental.
"Will we be staying?" she asked.
"For a little while," Seraph said.
That was not an answer, but she accepted it.
They walked through the streets as people hurried past them, heads lowered, conversations truncated. Rain made the city smaller. It collapsed distance, folded space inward. Seraph was aware of the way his presence bent the flow around him—how strangers adjusted their steps unconsciously, how no one brushed his shoulder no matter how crowded the street became.
Courtesy of distance.
They reached the bridge that cut the city in half, its stone balustrades worn smooth by centuries of hands. Beneath it, the river moved sluggishly, swollen with runoff and silt. Seraph leaned against the railing and looked down, watching the water struggle to remember where it was supposed to go.
"You shouldn't linger near thresholds," the maid said softly.
Seraph smiled. "You've been paying attention."
"I was made to," she replied, then immediately looked away, as though the admission had slipped out unguarded.
On the surface of the river, something rippled against the current. Not debris. Not a fish. The shape was wrong—too angular, too intentional. It held for a moment, then dissolved, leaving only disturbed water behind.
Seraph's fingers tightened on the stone.
"They're closer," the maid said.
"Yes."
"Is that… permitted?"
Seraph considered the question carefully. Permission implied authority. Authority implied oversight. He had been created to observe, not to intervene—but observation, taken to its extreme, inevitably altered the observed.
"They are curious," he said instead. "And curiosity erodes rules."
They left the bridge and entered a quieter district, where houses leaned inward and windows stayed shuttered even during the day. A child stood in the doorway of one such house, watching them with solemn intensity. When Seraph met her gaze, she smiled—not with joy, but with recognition.
He looked away first.
That night, Seraph did not sleep.
He sat at the small desk in his room, one hand resting near his eye, feeling the subtle warmth beneath the skin. The maid sat on the floor nearby, brushing her hair in slow, repetitive strokes. Neither spoke.
Eventually, Seraph closed his eyes.
He reached up and pulled.
There was no pain—only release.
The eye came free with a sound like silk tearing underwater. Pale tendrils unfurled from its back, twitching gently as though tasting the air. The maid did not flinch. She merely lowered her brush and bowed her head.
Seraph held the eye out in front of him.
The room darkened—not suddenly, but politely, as though the light were excusing itself. A seam appeared in the air, vertical and impossibly thin. The eye's tendrils wrapped around nothing, and nothing yielded.
The door formed.
Black, absolute, swallowing the space it occupied. Upon its surface shimmered faint geometric impressions—circles within triangles, lines folding into themselves—glowing softly in violet hues that pulsed in time with Seraph's breath.
He did not open it.
He listened.
Beyond the door lay the corridor of thresholds, the space between worlds where doors waited patiently for attention. But now there was something else. A pressure. A presence that did not belong to any one door.
Something had followed the idea of him here.
Seraph replaced the eye.
It slid back into place seamlessly, skin knitting without a scar. The door dissolved, leaving the room unchanged save for the lingering sense of having narrowly avoided a conversation.
The maid exhaled shakily. "They felt you," she said.
"Yes."
"Will they come again?"
Seraph stood and looked out the window. The rain had stopped. The city glistened, clean and unsuspecting.
"They already have," he replied.
And somewhere, very far away, a rule quietly revised itself.