Gods. That presence cut through the crowd like silk through smoke—fluid, deliberate, yet untouched by the weight of attention. Not performative, not coy. Just motion, pure and unbothered, as if the world bent around it without earning so much as a glance. Worse than arrogance was the absence of awareness, that quiet kind of beauty that didn’t seek validation because it didn’t need it. No softness in it. No fragility. Just something elemental and unreachable, like moonlight on water—seen, never held. And I hated how the gaze refused to shift, how something in the air felt charged the moment that figure stepped into it.

“You’re standing at a crossroads most don’t even know exists. So either you wandered here by accident… or you knew exactly what you were doing. If it’s the second, then we’ve both got a problem. And I’m suddenly very curious about how you plan to solve it.”