Chapter Text
The fog inside Sefirah Castle drifted without purpose.
It did not move with wind, nor did it respond to gravity or time. It simply was. A pale, endless expanse that stretched beyond horizon and thought alike, settled above the spirit world. Within his kingdom stood the ancient stone table, the towering chairs, the symbols carved into surfaces that had never known erosion. Everything remained precisely as it had been since the moment it was created.
Unchanging.
Klein Moretti sat at the head of the table, hands folded loosely before him, posture relaxed in a way that only someone who no longer needed to fear danger could afford.
He did not breathe unless he chose to.
He did not tire.
He did not ache.
That, more than anything, unsettled him.
Once, exhaustion had been a companion. Hunger, fear, the tremble in his limbs after barely surviving another encounter. Those sensations had grounded him. They had reminded him that he was alive. Now, even the concept of effort felt distant, like a story he had once read and since forgotten the ending to.
The world below the gray fog had quieted.
Not healed. Not recovered.
Just… quieter.
Cities were being rebuilt atop old bones. Faith restructured itself around surviving truths. The great powers that once loomed over humanity had either fallen, fractured, or retreated into cautious stillness. Humanity endured, as it always did, patching its wounds with stubborn hope and selective memory.
Klein observed it all without moving.
Time passed.
Or perhaps it didn’t. He no longer trusted his perception enough to tell the difference.
The fog curled lazily around the edges of the space, brushing against his awareness like a breath that wasn’t his own. It responded to him instinctively, bending to his presence without thought or resistance. He did not command it anymore. It simply obeyed. It obeyed its dominator.
That, too, was unsettling.
He was the Lord of Mysteries.
The Fool who didn’t belong to this era.
The ruler of a domain that had outlived gods.
And yet..
He felt thinner.
Not weaker. Never that. His existence was vast, terrifyingly so, stretched across layers of reality and belief. He could feel prayers before they were spoken, sense intentions before they formed. The pathways bowed to him. Concepts yielded.
That was the price of being a pillar in this universe. A god above the greatest gods. A symbolism that represents a fabric of being. A terrifying status.
But he, the part of him that had once stumbled through Tingen streets with a revolver in shaking hands, felt diluted.
Spread too thin across too many minds.
Once, survival had been the hardest thing he ever did.
Now, it was remembering why he should bother.
The thought came unbidden, dry and almost amused. He didn’t flinch from it. He had long since learned that suppressing thoughts only gave them sharper edges.
He leaned back slightly, resting against the unseen weight of the throne behind him, the high back chair with the pupil-less eye on the back. The symbol and chair that's been with him since he transmigrated, it was his.
Millions believed in him.
Millions whispered his name in fear, reverence, desperation.
And somehow, with every prayer that reached him, he felt a little less real.
Faith was supposed to anchor gods.
But anchors, he had learned, could also stretch.
He could feel them. Threads of belief extending outward in all directions, tethering him to countless minds. Some were faint and fragile, easily swayed. Others burned with fervent certainty. Together, they formed a vast web of connection that held him in place. But even those that were fervent were shallow. They didn't know who he was… who “He" was. “He" was an object of faith, the Fool was a God. Klein? Klein was human.
His anchors held him together.
And slowly, quietly, wore him thin.
He was not in pain.
That was the problem.
Pain implied resistance. Struggle. A self pushing back against pressure.
This was erosion. Gentle, patient, inevitable.
The fog shifted, coiling faintly around the long stone table. The chairs remained empty, save for his own. Their presence was symbolic now. Relics of a time when this space had been a meeting place rather than a throne; albeit his Tarot still meet monthly.
He wondered, idly, whether gods ever felt lonely.
Not the dramatic kind of loneliness that drove mortals into madness or desperation, but the subtle kind, the one that settled into the cracks between thoughts. The kind that whispered you are alone because you are above.
He found that thought faintly amusing.
Above. Below. Such simple words for such absurd distances.
Once, he would have joked about it. Made a dry remark, perhaps comparing his situation to an overworked office worker promoted one rank too high; if this was still the Earth he grew up in…
Now, the humor felt distant. Not gone. Just muffled, like wearing earplugs while trying to pay attention to a conversation, muffled like it's irrelevant, unimportant.
He observed his own state the way a scholar might observe a phenomenon: with curiosity, caution, and a growing sense of unease.
He did not feel sorrow.
He did not feel joy.
He felt… functional.
Efficient.
Complete in a way that left no room for warmth.
His humanity wasn’t being stripped from him in some violent, dramatic fashion. No screaming loss of self. No sudden hollowing.
It was being diluted.
Shared across prayers and beliefs, across countless interpretations of who, or what, “He", no… he was supposed to be.
A god shaped by expectation.
A ruler molded by fear.
A symbol polished smooth by worship.
And somewhere beneath all of that, Klein Moretti sat quietly, wondering when he had last thought of himself without context.
The fog stirred.
Far below, beyond the veil, the world turned on.
People lived. People suffered. People hoped.
And they prayed.
The first prayer brushed against his awareness like a hesitant knock.
“The Fool that doesn’t belong to this era;
The Mysterious Ruler above the gray fog;
The King of Yellow and Black who wields good luck…"
Klein almost sighed.
The title pressed against him, heavy with reverence and misunderstanding. He had never thought it would grow to be this important. However it had grown on him like a name spoken too often to correct.
If only they knew, he thought faintly. If only they knew how ridiculous I feel hearing that.
"I should've made my honorific name something cooler..” He lampooned, his figure shrouded in mystery and fog.
Still, he listened.
Because listening, at least, reminded him that he was still here.
Still someone.
And for now, that was enough.
For a moment after he lampooned himself, the gray fog seemed to lean in closer, as if it had decided to listen out of habit. The air in Sefirah Castle did not shift, not truly, but there was a subtle tightening in the space, the same feeling one got when a room fell quiet after someone said something they shouldn’t have.
Klein let the words hang for a beat, then swallowed them down like he swallowed everything else. Humor was safer than honesty, but humor could still cut if it landed wrong, even when there was no one here to be wounded but him.
The prayer remained suspended at the edge of his perception, patient and expectant.
“The Fool that doesn’t belong to this era;
The Mysterious Ruler above the gray fog;
The King of Yellow and Black who wields good luck…”
The cadence was familiar now, like a bell struck too often until it stopped sounding holy and started sounding routine. He felt the weight of it settle across his thoughts, not as worship exactly, but as definition, as if each title was another layer pressed onto him, shaping him from the outside in.
There was a pull, immediate and instinctive, urging him to respond as “Him.” To answer with authority, to speak like a pillar, to let the prayer slide into a neat, clean miracle that proved the world was still watched over.
He resisted. Not because he couldn’t, but because he didn’t want to forget what restraint felt like.
He did not sigh aloud. He didn’t need to. But he allowed himself the smallest release of tension anyway, a soft loosening behind his eyes that would have been a sigh, back when he still had to breathe.
The person praying was a man, middle-aged, voice ragged in a way that suggested he’d been shouting recently, or crying, or both. The man’s mind brushed against Klein’s awareness like a rough cloth against skin, full of frantic edges and half-formed bargains.
“Please,” the man whispered, and then, with the reverence finished, the truth spilled out clumsily, “I need… I need luck. Just this once. I have to cross the river. The bridge is gone. The boatman says he’ll take me, but I don’t have enough coin, and my wife is on the other side, she’s sick, she’s…”
The man’s fear tasted sharp, like metal on the tongue. Klein could see it without looking, the broken span of a collapsed bridge, the muddy river swollen from recent storms, a boat that looked too small for what it was being asked to do. He could see the wife too, feverish under thin blankets, a child kneeling at her side, trying to look brave.
It would be easy.
Too easy.
A twist of fate, a smoothening of probability, the boat making it across despite the current. The boatman suddenly deciding the money didn’t matter. A piece of driftwood appearing at the right time. A miracle that would make the man kneel and cry and tell everyone that the Fool was benevolent, that “He” answered.
Klein’s fingers tightened slightly where they rested on the stone table. The table was cold, but the cold didn’t reach him anymore, it was only a fact, a texture, a memory of sensation. The carved symbols beneath his hands were crisp and perfect, as if time had never been allowed near them. He stared at them for a second longer than necessary, grounding himself in something simple.
He chose a smaller answer.
A nudge, almost gentle. A simple snap of his fingers, it's called a miracle; but sometimes it's how you use a wish.
On the riverbank, the boatman looked down and noticed a coil of rope he’d forgotten he owned, thick and sturdy, tangled beneath a plank. He frowned, scratched his chin, then, with a muttered curse about being careless, tied it to a tree and offered the other end.
“Hold on tight,” the boatman told the man, gruff as ever. “If the current pulls, you pull back. Don’t you let go, you hear me?”
The man blinked, startled by the sudden change in the boatman’s tone, then nodded too fast.
They crossed slowly, the rope cutting into their palms, the current tugging like a stubborn animal, but they crossed.
It wasn’t a miracle. Not in the way people wanted.
It was luck that looked like practicality.
The man’s prayer thinned, gratitude soaking through his terror like rain soaking dry earth.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and then, after a pause that felt almost shy, “Thank you… Mr. Fool.”
Klein’s throat felt strangely tight, even though he didn’t need a throat to speak, and the tightness wasn’t physical anyway. It was something older and human, a reflex that shouldn’t have survived this long.
He let the prayer go.
Another replaced it immediately, then another, then another, rolling into him like waves against a shore that never moved.
He did not drown, he couldn’t, but he felt the pressure all the same.
A young woman this time, hands clasped so hard her knuckles ached. Her voice trembled with the careful politeness of someone who had grown up being told not to want too much.
She didn’t begin with titles. She stumbled through them like a memorized lesson and then, almost embarrassed, dropped them entirely.
“I… I don’t know if this is stupid,” she said. “I know you’re busy, and I know there are bigger things. But I keep thinking about him. I keep thinking if I was different, if I was prettier, if I hadn’t been so… so sharp with my words. I don’t even want him to love me, I just want it to stop hurting.”
Klein listened.
He didn’t reach into her life and place a lover at her doorstep. He didn’t rewrite her feelings. That kind of interference was the most dangerous kind, even when it came dressed as kindness.
Instead, he left her a coincidence.
The next day, the woman walked past a stall selling old books, pages warped by moisture and smoke. One book fell from the pile, landing open at her feet. The ink was faded, but the sentence was clear enough for her to read.
Not everyone is meant to stay, but that does not mean you were unworthy.
She stared at it for a long time. Her fingers hovered, then brushed the page, and something in her expression shifted, not healed, not solved, but loosened. Like a knot that had been pulled at from the right angle.
A prayer came from an older man with a voice like dry leaves. He didn’t ask for luck or love. He asked a question that felt heavier than either.
“Should I forgive him?” the man whispered. “He sold my brother out during the chaos. I hated him for it. But he came back yesterday. He’s thin, he’s missing teeth, he looked at me like a dog waiting to be kicked. He said he was sorry. He said he did it because he was scared. I’m scared too, even now. Am I supposed to forgive him? Is that what a good man does?”
Klein almost laughed, but it wouldn’t have been kind laughter, so he didn’t.
Forgiveness was never a clean, holy thing. It was messy, humiliating, complicated. It wasn’t something a god should hand down like a decree.
He sent silence.
Not as punishment, not as cruelty, but as refusal.
The man sat with his question for hours, then days. In the end, the man made his own decision, and regardless of which way he chose, it would be his, not a divine instruction he could hide behind.
Klein felt the man’s disappointment, and beneath it, a grudging respect. He had wanted to be told what to do. He hadn’t been.
Another prayer arrived, small and bright, a child’s voice, high and uncertain.
“Hello,” the child said, sounding like he was trying not to laugh because he’d been told prayer was serious. “Um… Mommy said I have to say the big words, but I forgot some. The Fool that doesn’t… that doesn’t… belong to this… era. And the fog. And the yellow and black. Sorry. I hope I did it right the first time..”
Klein’s lips twitched.
The child continued anyway. “Mommy said you’re nice. I don’t know if gods are nice, but she says you are. Can you help my dad stop having bad dreams? He wakes up and he thinks the sky is falling again, and he grabs me too tight, and then he cries and says sorry.”
The child hesitated, then added, quieter, “Also, can you make my cat come back? He ran away. I think he’s mad at me.”
For a second, Klein saw it clearly. A small house patched together from scavenged boards. A man jolting awake drenched in sweat, eyes wild, hands shaking as he checked the ceiling for cracks that weren’t there. A child pretending not to be scared. A mother rubbing her face with tired hands, too exhausted to comfort everyone at once.
Klein’s answers were careful.
He couldn’t simply erase trauma from the man’s mind, not safely. He could, if he wanted, but he refused to become that kind of god. Still, he could ease the edge.
That night, the man dreamed of a field instead of falling rubble. A wide field with low grass and a sky that stayed where it was supposed to. The dream didn’t cure him. It didn’t rewrite his past. But when he woke, his heart wasn’t sprinting. He held his daughter, gentle this time, and when he cried, it was quieter, less ashamed.
As for the cat, Klein allowed himself a sliver of indulgence.
The next afternoon, the missing cat appeared on the doorstep like it had always planned to return, tail flicking in casual arrogance. It meowed once, as if demanding food, then walked inside without apology.
The child shrieked with joy. The prayer that followed was messy, excited, not reverent at all.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you! You’re really real! Mommy said you were, but…”
Klein felt it like warmth in a place that shouldn’t have been capable of warmth. He felt it and, for a moment, his thoughts stopped thinning. They stopped stretching outward. Something held.
Not faith.
Not worship.
A simple human reaction. Relief. Joy. Gratitude without performance.
‘Perhaps this is why I listen. Not because they need me, but because I need them.’
The realization settled into him quietly, like dust on stone, like fog on skin. It wasn’t an epiphany that made everything better. It didn’t fix the erosion. But it named it, and naming something, he had learned, was sometimes the first act of defiance.
More prayers came. Some were selfish. Some were cruel. Some were sincere in a way that made Klein’s chest feel hollow.
A man prayed for his neighbor to fail. A woman prayed to win a dispute she knew she was wrong in. A gambler prayed for one last streak, promising, lying, bargaining with desperation that felt uglier than any monster Klein had ever faced.
Klein answered those differently.
Sometimes he did nothing.
Sometimes he redirected luck so it didn’t become a blade.
Sometimes he let consequences teach what divine intervention shouldn’t.
He remained, as much as he could, a watcher with restraint.
But even restraint wasn’t pure. He could feel “Him” inside the responses, the cold instinct that wanted to simplify humanity into outcomes and probabilities. He could feel it like a second set of hands reaching for the same threads, eager to pull harder, to make things neat.
He tightened his grip on himself. On his memory of Tingen streets, of cheap bread, of Benson’s exasperation, of Melissa’s determined smile. On the way Leonard had said his name once with a mixture of suspicion and trust. On the way Audrey’s eyes had looked when she tried to understand someone without dissecting them.
He stopped at that thought, not because it was dangerous, but because it was soft.
Soft things mattered more than they should.
The gray fog drifted, constant and indifferent, while Klein listened to the world pray beneath him.
He answered, carefully.
He answered, quietly.
And in the spaces between prayers, in the brief silences where he was not “He” and not a title, he tried to remember the shape of being Klein Moretti, human enough to care, stubborn enough to refuse the smooth, cold ease of divinity.
For now, that was his solution.
For now, it was enough.
The fog settled.
Not drifted, not rolled, not receded. It simply… settled, like a held breath finally released. The vast expanse of Sefirah Castle grew quiet in a way that felt intentional, as though the world itself had decided not to interrupt whatever came next. The echoes of prayer thinned until only a faint residue remained, like warmth left behind after a hand withdrew.
Klein stood where he was, unmoving, his presence no longer stretched thin across countless lives. The weight lingered in him, but it no longer pressed outward. For the first time in a while, there was space enough to hear his own thoughts without them dissolving into noise.
He exhaled slowly, more out of habit than need.
The fog near him curled, responding to a shift that had nothing to do with authority and everything to do with familiarity.
“Arrodes,” Klein said.
His voice did not echo. It did not need to.
He extended a hand, palm angled slightly upward, fingers loose, as if calling for something he trusted would come. There was no command in the gesture. No authority. Only expectation, quiet and patient.
The fog stirred, gathering into a soft spiral. Light caught within it, pale and reflective, until a familiar oval surface emerged, smooth and silver, hovering at a respectful distance from his outstretched hand.
A ripple passed across its surface, then words formed in slow, elegant gold.
“Good evening, Great Master.”
Klein let out a breath that almost became a laugh.
“You always say it like that,” he said lightly. “As if the time of day still matters here.”
The mirror shimmered, the gold letters rearranging themselves with careful precision.
“It matters if you believe it does,” Arrodes replied. “And you appear to be in need of something ordinary tonight.”
Klein lowered his hand, allowing it to fall back to his side. He studied the mirror’s surface, the way it reflected not his face but the idea of him, distorted gently by the fog and the space between realities.
“Do I?” he asked.
A pause. Not hesitation, but consideration.
“Your breathing pattern suggests a desire for grounding,” Arrodes said. “which is normal, Great Master. After all, you've claimed your rightful throne! Godhood will be an eternal struggle.”
Klein snorted quietly. “You make it sound like a medical condition.”
“If you prefer, I can phrase it as concern,” Arrodes replied.
“That might be worse.”
The fog stirred faintly, as if amused.
Silence settled between them, not empty, but companionable. It reminded Klein of late nights in the past, when he had sat alone with his thoughts and a lamp that flickered too much, the world outside quiet but never truly still.
“Are you feeling better?” Arrodes asked.
The question was simple. No ceremony. No weight of worship behind it.
Klein hesitated.
Better was a difficult word. It implied a baseline he was no longer sure existed.
“I feel… quieter,” he said at last. “Like the noise has moved a little farther away. Not gone. Just distant enough that I can think.”
The mirror’s surface rippled softly, acknowledging without judgment.
“Do you wish to continue observing the world?” Arrodes asked.
Klein considered that too. He pictured the prayers he had just answered, the way hope bent and reshaped itself under pressure. The way people reached upward not because they believed a god would save them, but because believing was sometimes the only thing that kept them standing.
“Yes,” he said. “But not the way I've been doing now.”
“In what way, then?” Arrodes asked.
Klein tilted his head slightly, eyes unfocused as he searched for words that refused to settle neatly.
“I don’t want to watch from above anymore,” he said slowly. “I want to go down, again. I want to experience the world like it is rather than seeing it through other’s eyes. But that's difficult, isn't it?”
A pause.
“That may be inefficient,” Arrodes observed.
“I know,” Klein replied, faint amusement threading through his voice. “That might be the point.” Another pause, “I still need to protect the world, don't I?"
The mirror glowed a little brighter, its surface catching reflections of the fog that were not quite accurate, as if it remembered older shapes, older rooms, older lives.
“What else do you want to ask, Great Master?” Arrodes said.
Klein almost laughed again, but this time the sound caught in his chest.
What did he want to ask.
The question opened something in him, a quiet space that had been sealed for longer than he cared to admit. He thought of the prayers, of the way belief pressed against him from all sides, shaping him into something smooth and distant. He thought of the word god, how heavy it felt, how impersonal.
“I don't know what I want to ask, to be honest..” he admitted. “It’s akin to being lost in your own home. I'm just less myself.”
The fog dimmed slightly, as if listening more closely.
“I used to know who I was even when I was afraid,” he continued. “Klein, the sequence 9 nighthawk protecting Tingen; Sherlock the detective investigating Backlund. Gehrman, the pirate-killing bounty hunter, a free spirit; Dwayne, the tycoon who could live in luxury… And even Merlin Hermes.. The wandering magician, the most free I've felt in a long time.” He outwardly lampooned. "Now I know what I am, and somehow that makes it harder.”
Arrodes did not interrupt.
Klein let the silence stretch, then exhaled something that almost resembled a laugh.
“I suppose it’s ironic. I’m surrounded by belief, and I’ve never felt more… outnumbered.”
“By whom?” Arrodes asked.
“By myself,” Klein said softly. “Or by the versions of me people think exist.”
He glanced toward the distant fog, toward a world that could not see him even as it called his name.
“I wonder sometimes if anchors can really replace connection,” he said. “Or if they’re just echoes pretending to be voices.”
The mirror shimmered again, slower this time.
“Anchors stabilize, Great Master.” Arrodes said. “They do not replace.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Klein murmured.
Silence settled again, heavier now, layered with unspoken things. The fog rolled gently at his feet, catching faint glimmers of gold light before letting them fade.
Then Arrodes spoke again, its tone softer than before, almost careful.
“If you are still you,” it asked, “why are you afraid of being seen?”
The question hung in the air, weightless and immense all at once.
Klein did not answer.
He stood there, in the heart of his domain, surrounded by a world that waited for his will, and felt something fragile stir in his chest. Not fear. Not pain.
Something closer to recognition.
The fog did not move.
The mirror did not speak again.
And in the quiet that followed, the question remained, unchallenged, unescaped, resting gently against him like a hand he did not pull away from.
‘Because I'm a liar. A fraud.’ He inwardly scolded.