My dear friend Bracus Lume has been deployed, likely to some miserable theater in Sol as part of Caiatl's efforts to stymie the Hive. If my father had any passion left, I would believe Lume's deployment to be part of a plot to stop me. A favor asked for and granted. A reminder that my efforts, clients, accounts, and so on, are given to me by him. The generosity of an overbearing father: my life, from his largesse.

However, my allies within Tex Mechanica have not been able to source any missives, directives, or dictates from Father's office to stop my project. He spends his time tinkering on museum pieces and Vanguard baubles. I wonder if he even knows the world exists beyond his workbench; his cruelty is bottomless. He is a clever coward, and this retreat from the world is a favorite tactic of his.

I think he wishes for me to rot in the family estate and be quiet again. I was a quiet child and he, a colossus. I would shroud myself and slip through the cold halls of our home, fleeing the muffled sounds of his rage—a phantom by choice, to protect myself. When mother grew ill and died, my father fell silent, listless. This was his first retreat. Father ignored me so profoundly that I truly believed myself to be invisible. It made me think that I had died with my mother. That was even more terrifying than his rage; I was losing my father as well.

But now, I am older and braver. Father may or may not have clipped my wings. I don't care. I will take care of myself. I am used to being alone. But I also have been exploring other ways of being, even those prohibited by the Vanguard.

There are fascinating texts in this world. Volumes and folios that speak of clarity in purpose and the methods to attain it. I have tried many—meditation, religion, self-actualization—but they all failed, save for one: an old text of assured providence, an exegesis on the sermons of Twin Bird, of the Binary Star. Agony and pain exist, Twin Bird once said, but not all pain is meaningless. Some pain hones. It hammers bladed agony into shape, and an edge is made. Utility formed as a survival mechanism, making the afflicted sharper.

So I began to run. Thousands of steps, each a moment of pain. Each a nail, pinning me to the present. The pain worked. The pain guided me. The pain led me to power. The Vanguard and Twin Bird both called it Darkness. I call it a new path.

The Light comes for you in death, and only if it chooses. But Darkness is always there, within, waiting for you to grasp it and pull it to the surface. And so I had a revelation: I needed to attempt communion. I planned routes to run that took me deeper into the City. Down among the people, in their parks, in their streets, full of sound and life and beings—others who did not fear life but made it, composed its raw cacophony, all a part of a pattern so vast, I could not perceive it. But I was, too, one of its parts; the petri dish is a pandemonic universe to the single cell, but utterly still to the human eye.

I think the Light is selfish. To see the state of the Last City below the Vanguard's Olympian refuge is to understand this. The Light sends out its little Ghosts and elevates only the dead whom it deems worthy, never touching the desperate living. It pulls them up to the graceful decks of the Tower, damning the rest to live without its gift. This story is common among the citizens of the Last City. I should know: It happened to me, too.

My mother died and was returned and abandoned me. My father consigned me to the annals of his memory and moved on as if I, too, were already dead. But in the City, the people welcomed me. The dockworkers, the vagrants, the shopkeepers, everyone hurrying on every errand, all denied the Light's gift, but were subject to its rule. I disappeared among them, but I was not consciously forgotten by them. I was not spurned by them. At any moment on one of my excursions, I could stop and talk to someone, to have a moment of connection, to see them as well. I moved among them as one of them, an equal in dreams and aspiration, seen and heard.

The Traveler has the power to shape reality, and yet there are beggars in the low districts of the Last City. There are children that go hungry. The streets are policed. From where do violence and crimes of desperation spring? The individual rendered miserable before their birth, or the great systems above them that maintain the status quo? My own wealth—though it can be stripped from me—is not a shield. It is not a weapon. It is fiat. Exchange, only as long as I play within the bounds of the Light's rules.

There is a pattern to who the Light picks. I think it chooses based on how jagged the hierarchy of pain will become when it intervenes. I think the Light wants to hurt me. But the Darkness wants me to do something with that pain.