Inside, the crowd was already seated.
The floor sloped down to a low round stage held in a single cool spotlight. Everything past it was shadow and the warm orange lanterns Adam couldn't find the source of. An usher in red led them to two seats near the front, kept empty. Adam noted it and said nothing.
Zeren bounced on the bench, head turning.
The spotlight narrowed. The murmur died on its own.
A man walked out.
He stood center stage in a dark, well-cut coat, hands at his sides. "Good evening. For this evening, you can call me, Taumiel," he said, his voice quiet, yet it carried without effort to the very back walls. He didn't speak again, letting the silence stretch until it had weight. Then he raised his right hand, empty, palm up.
A red apple sat in it.
No motion Adam could catch. One blink the hand was empty; the next it held the apple, bright and whole.
He lifted the apple and bit it. The crunch carried to the back rows. He lowered it, turned the bite mark to the room, and tossed it away from him.
It stopped in the air. It hung there, turning slowly, the white of the bite facing the crowd.
Taumiel reached into the empty space beside it, and a card was between his fingers. Then a second. Then his hands opened and cards spilled out of them, more than any hands should hold, fanning and folding and gone. He closed a fist on a fan of them and opened it on a single white ball; closed it and the ball was a fan again. They spun around him, over his shoulders, behind his back, a blur with no seams in it.
Adam leaned forward.
Smoke curled up off the performer’s fingers. He threw the whole deck into the dark above the stage, stepped under it, and caught. The ace of spades. Flip. The two. Flip. The three , pulling a clean run out of the falling chaos faster than the eye could follow, until he held the sequence fanned in one hand and the rest had not yet touched the floor.
He gathered the deck whole and hurled it at the back wall.
The cards struck and held. They didn't scatter or drop. They fixed to the dark in a spreading mosaic, and the shape they made was a hand , open, palm out, fingers spread, filling the wall.
The room gasped, then broke into noise.
In it, he reached up and took the apple from the air where it had hung the whole while. He turned the bite mark to the crowd, looked them over without a drop of sweat on him, and bowed.
Adam was clapping before he told his hands to.
The noise was still settling when a man stood up in the tiers.
"Wires," he called. Broad, well-dressed, the sort used to a room turning when he spoke. "Wires and a confederate in the rafters. I've paid good gold to be cheated cleverer than this." A few uneasy laughs. He'd decided to be the man who saw through it, and he wanted company.
Taumiel turned toward the voice, unhurried, and smiled.
"You're the only one in the room still thinking," he said. "Come down. Prove it. I'll even help you."
The man came down. He stamped down to the stage flushed and certain. The performer walked a slow circle around him.
"You think there's a trick," he said. "There isn't. That's the part you'll hate." He stopped at the man's shoulder, raised the open hand, and held it an inch from his temple. He closed his eyes. "You came alone tonight. You told your wife the council sat late." A pause. The man's face shifted. "There is no late council. There's a room above the cooper's on Vellan Street, and a woman in it, and guild money keeping her there. Eleven sovereigns last month. Against a ledger you balanced yourself."
"Stop."
The crowd had turned on him now, a low ugly laughter starting at the back. The man had gone grey.
"Of course," he said, gentler. "You're embarrassed. Let me take it back." The open hand, still beside the man's temple, turned over , palm rolling up, the gesture of lifting a coin off a table.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this man right here, is about to forget who he is."
Adam, out of pure instinct, concentrated his resonance around his eyes to be able to perceive through the act, as if by pure guts, he felt something was wrong.
The performer lifted his hand, and a gauntlet appeared out of nowhere; it was black, and had an open mouth in its palm, the gauntlet itself extended through half his forearm. He then put it over the man’s face for a second, then lifted it up.
Everyone watched the action itself, but Adam was in complete shock, the performer was a normal human, Adam couldn’t see a resonance around him that would suggest he was cursed, however, right now when he just did this action, around his hand, an aura, as light and hard to perceive as it was, manifested for a fraction of a second, and the more disturbing part is that it wasn’t even his palm, it was the gauntlet itself.
Could it be…
The man went still. He looked around , the lights, the crowd, his own open hands , slow, finding no landmark in any of it. He didn't speak. He didn't appear to know that he could.
The performer watched him, pleased.
"What's your name?"
The man's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
"Where do you live? Have you a wife? What did you eat this morning?"
Nothing. The man only looked at him, waiting, the way you wait on a person who is about to tell you something you need.
"No matter." The performer turned to the room. "I'll answer for him." And he did , the man's name, his street, his trade, the wife at home and the years they'd been married, the bread and dripping he'd had at dawn , reciting a stranger's whole life to a crowd that had never met him, while the man stood hollow at his side and listened to himself like a story.
The granary applauded. The cleverest mind-reading any of them had seen.
He let it run. Then he raised the gauntlet once more and laid it flat across the man's face.
The man came back all at once.
He flinched as though struck. His eyes found focus and filled , with the lights, the crowd, the figure standing over him , and he made a sound that wasn't a word. He stumbled back, went down on the boards, scrambled up on his hands, and ran. Off the stage, up the aisle, out through the curtain, gone.
The room came apart laughing. The performer turned to them and bowed.
Adam hadn't joined the noise. His hands had gone cold.
Taumiel raised a hand, and the laughter smoothed into an expectant hush.
"Magic, as you see, is a story," Taumiel said. "A shifting of perspective. But tonight, I am merely your narrator for this final act. The true storyteller... is her. I present to you, The Lilith."
He stepped back. From the shadows beyond the spotlight, a little girl walked onto the stage. She wore a dark, heavy coat, slightly oversized, and her face was framed by soft, fluffy black hair with distinct blue tips and underlayers. Her expression was calm, almost serious, featuring large, deep blue eyes and a bandage across her nose. Across her chest, a bandolier of small, blank scrolls was slung, and a massive, heavy scroll was strapped to her back. She stopped in the center of the stage. She didn't smile. She didn't speak. She stopped in the center of the stage and pulled a long, narrow scroll from her belt, unfurling it horizontally across the floorboards. A thick brush dropped from her sleeve, its tip dripping with a strange, silver-flecked ink.
Adam narrowed his eyes.
This little girl, she is cursed.
Her hand moved in a blur. Through the glare of the lights, Adam caught only glimpses of the geometry, perfect circles overlapping, sharp intersecting lines, and sweeping arrows guiding the flow, all slashed across the paper with impossible precision. The moment the brush lifted, she slammed her open palm flat against the wet ink.
The silver tore itself free from the parchment. It didn't just rise; it erupted. A torrent of shimmering, liquid silver burst upward, but instead of splashing to the stage, it hit an invisible ceiling and curled. It formed a floating, rushing river of water and light that looped through the air, weaving above the heads of the front row in a perfect, continuous circuit.
The room gasped.
Before the awe could settle, the little girl reached into her heavy coat and withdrew a handful of tiny, pre-drawn parchment squares. She flung them upward into the rushing, floating river.
The moment the paper touched the liquid, the geometry activated. The floating river flashed violently. The water crystallized in mid-air, shattering into dozens of translucent, glowing glass swallows. The birds burst from the stream, diving and spiraling over the audience, shedding a trail of cold, harmless fire before they melted back into mist near the rafters.
"A world of light is beautiful," Taumiel’s voice drifted over the mesmerized crowd. "But every world requires a king."
She then unhooked the massive scroll from her back and kicked it violently across the length of the stage. It unrolled with a heavy thud, revealing a staggeringly complex labyrinth of interlocking rings, binding borders, and central crests.
She dropped to her knees. With a single fluid motion of her brush, she painted one final, intricate mark into the exact center of the parchment, sealing the array. She pressed both of her small palms flat against it.
The stage rumbled. The ink boiled, peeling off the floorboards in thick ribbons that snapped together in three-dimensional space. In seconds, the silver solidified into a towering, translucent chimera. It threw its head back and let out a silent, booming roar that sent a harmless shockwave of wind through the room.
But the spell wasn't finished.
The beast slammed its heavy front paws onto the stage. From the point of impact, the silver ink violently rippled outward like roots tearing through soil. The wooden floorboards transformed. In the span of a breath, the stage was overgrown with a glowing, ethereal garden, silver thorny vines twisted around Taumiel's ankles, and massive, luminous lotuses bloomed in the shadows. The chimera paced through its new domain, turning to glare at the audience with eyes of burning white light, utterly lifelike, yet born entirely of ink and geometry.
The granary erupted into deafening cheers. Taumiel bowed deep among the glowing silver vines, and the little girl stood perfectly still beside her monstrous creation, as it started to dissolve back into nothing, since the creation was only an illusion.
The lights came up, and it was over.
The crowd filed out warm and loud, lighter than they'd come in, certain they'd had a bargain. Zeren tugged Adam's sleeve, and Adam said yes, and got him moving toward the curtain.
He looked back once at the stage.
The mosaic hand was still fixed to the wall, palm out, holding nothing.
Below it, the silver garden had vanished. Lilith was kneeling near the edge of the stage, quietly rolling up her massive scroll. As if feeling the weight of his stare, the little girl paused. She turned her head and looked directly at Adam.
Adam froze. There was something deeply, fundamentally wrong in the little girl's eyes, a hollow, shifting weight that didn't belong to a child, mirroring the exact, disturbing coldness he had never seen in eyes so young.
The little girl refered to as the Lilith then went into the back stage, following Taumiel, but before she got behind the curtains, she looked back one last time at Adam, then she continued.
And without hesitation, Adam went out into the night directly into the backstage.