The light of dusk entered at an angle—broad, almost liquid—slipping through the cracked window and splitting the room into two muted bands of color.

  A still air, suspended.

  The palace had stopped trembling long ago, yet the chamber still bore the imprint of the upheaval.

  A vase had fallen and lay on the floor, broken into three clean fragments.

  One of the curtains hung crooked from its rod.

  Thin fissures ran along the wall like dried veins.

  The chair beside the bed was overturned, one leg bent from the vibration.

  The bed was in its place.

  The sheets wrapped around Katherina almost entirely, an uneven cocoon that left only half her face exposed.

  She lay on her side.

  Perfectly still.

  Her breathing barely perceptible beneath the fabric.

  Her eyes were open.

  Motionless.

  Not fixed on anything in particular, but not empty either—just too still, as if the room itself were holding them in place.

  She was trembling.

  It wasn’t cold.

  The light touched her without truly illuminating her, grazing her softly, faintly, carrying a warm tone that didn’t warm her at all.

  A faint sound — the soft rustle of hands wiped against clothing — came from the recessed parallelepiped where the private bathroom lay, exactly in the corner toward which Katherina’s dull gaze was directed.

  Micheal stepped out of the bathroom.

  He brushed his hands over his pants one last time, quick, indifferent.

  Behind her, the massive presence that had remained silent the entire time Micheal was washing his hands began to move.

  Metal Mike pushed himself upright, the bed creaked, he leaned forward and kissed her right cheek.

  A cold kiss.

  A kiss without human warmth.

  A kiss that felt more like a simulated gesture than a true contact.

  Then he delivered a sharp, violent slap to her backside.

  The blow wrenched a short, startled squeak from her — almost a hiccup — followed by an instinctive grimace.

  The metallic simulacrum rose from the bed and followed its flesh-and-blood counterpart toward the door.

  How could one even classify what had just happened in the room?

  A cuckold enjoys watching their partner during sex, but here the “relationship” was between a master and an abused prisoner of war.

  And typically, a cuckold watches their partner with another human being, not with a simulacrum of metal and stone wearing their own face.

  A bizarre form of auto-eroticism.

  A scene no category could contain without cracking.

  Dmitrij would have loved to lose himself in the search for the perfect definition, to debate it with his friends until exhaustion, to turn it into a taxonomic problem.

  But that wasn’t why he came to mind.

  *

  “Come on, move, for fuck’s sake,” Micheal said — that peremptory impatience of his always one breath away from collapsing into gratuitous violence.

  Katherina dragged herself up the steps leading to the elevated pergola.

  Her legs trembled in that strange, uncertain way, as if each step had to be negotiated individually with a body that no longer recognized her.

  She wore a red robe.

  On her, it looked like a restraint garment.

  Cadaverous.

  When she reached the top, she met her tormentor’s gaze.

  There was no fear.

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  Not Stockholm syndrome.

  Just resignation — the terminal stage of resignation.

  Her self-preservation instinct, once bent, then cracked, was now dilapidated, a broken shell that couldn’t even pretend to hold a spark of survival.

  Useful only for craving her own memento.

  Micheal jerked his head toward the table.

  The table was there: the same one Katherina had once used to observe the distant caravans, back when Arcadia was still Arcadia.

  She tried to reach it.

  She walked with her legs apart, awkward, with a goose-like gait — like someone with a poorly diagnosed myopathy, or something worse.

  Every step was a sound of friction, of muscles unwilling to bend.

  Sitting down was a slow agony.

  She had to lower herself with micro-spasms, dismantled expressions, involuntary grimaces cutting across her face.

  All of this irritated Micheal visibly: her slowness annoyed him, made him twitch like a predator forced to wait for a prey that refuses to behave.

  But he had other plans.

  Katherina, finally seated, let her gaze slide toward the panorama.

  The first time since she had been dragged into the palace and locked in her room.

  How long had it been?

  She had no idea. Time now breathed without her.

  To her left, the city was no longer a city.

  It was a widened crater, an open wound.

  All districts closest to the battle had been pulverized, compressed, smashed by the immense geological spectacle Micheal had staged.

  Blocks of homes reduced to hollow shells; entire neighborhoods gutted like carcasses; streets transformed into canyons of debris.

  The lateral fa?ade of the palace — the one facing that side — had been struck by multiple fragments: plaster shattered, frames torn out, a balcony bent in on itself like soaked cardboard.

  The great greenhouse farther ahead showed the same fate: shattered glass, twisted metal supports, the slightly opalized panels now splintered like ice struck with a hammer.

  To the right, the landscape wasn’t better.

  Not annihilated — but damaged.

  Houses with missing roofs, cracked walls, windows blown in by shockwaves.

  Dusty areas, piles of rubble stacked like frozen lava flows.

  The colors — still vivid — were the only clue that it had all happened recently.

  Without them, Arcadia would have looked abandoned for decades, a poorly maintained archaeological relic.

  Lower down, in the empty streets, Micheal’s soldiers wandered.

  Not in battle order — in scavenger mode.

  They broke into houses, rummaged through whatever remained, looted as if their commander had declared private property a matter of aesthetic preference.

  Some laughed.

  Some threw dishes out of windows just to see what noise they made.

  The background sound was that of a vandalized desert.

  “I’ll give you five minutes to think about your last words.”

  A thick silence settled between them, almost rubbery.

  Katherina stared at him without giving the slightest sign she had understood.

  Then something flickered.

  A spark of life.

  A tiny tremor in her eyes.

  “No… please… I don’t want to die.”

  Micheal looked at her for a few seconds, unmoving, impassive, visibly bored.

  Then he stood up and walked to the parapet, resting his forearms on the edge with a slow, deliberate gesture, as if he’d just received a piece of news too dull to matter.

  The moment the memento became concrete — palpable, immediate — it surpassed in an instant the craving for the memento itself.

  Abstraction gave way to fact: she was going to die.

  And nothing would alter that outcome.

  A flood of pre-formed mental patterns surged all at once.

  Between the clear memories tied to that world and those from her first life, a strip of extranoematic intuitions stretched out, dark, difficult to clarify and just as difficult to endure.

  It was true, she thought, that when the end of the world arrives, knowing English or remembering the exact intension of the word deixis is worth fuck-all.

  The only thing you want to hold onto is the reason you once tore yourself apart studying, and later in political life: to accumulate memories capable of building a self-narrative worth recalling — not necessarily before death, but somewhere, for someone.

  Now her mind could only graze that mosaic.

  A scatter of flashes, fragments of important life moments, rising blind from her pre-fantasy past like fish surfacing in water too shallow.

  Without even realizing it — absorbed in her frantic search for mnemonic footholds, grasping for scraps to anchor herself to — the five minutes, assuming he had truly given her five, were over.

  Micheal stepped closer and grabbed her by the arm.

  He pulled her just enough to force her to face him.

  “Well?” he asked, in that flat voice that stank of a verdict already delivered.

  Katherina held his gaze.

  More steadily than she had in days.

  And with a calm that didn’t seem human, she said:

  “I sincerely hope you haven’t become the strongest of them all.”

  Micheal answered with one of his grins.

  The kind that announced the worst.

  Then the pergola — and with it the entire palace, and the ruins of the city below — began to tremble.

  From the ground, enormous tentacles of earth started to rise, climbing along the base of the structure, coiling, twisting around one another.

  A phenomenon that one could almost call geological thigmotropism.

  There were many.

  Too many.

  Thick as trucks at their widest points, pulsing with an obscene telluric force.

  It looked as if a kraken and a Graboid had mated, and the offspring of that interspecies union had grown even larger than either parent — now trying to swallow the entire palace whole.

  The tentacles wrapped around the structure in seconds, tightening.

  Compressing it partially, like a hydraulic press shaping metal before crushing it.

  Katherina was terrified.

  How was he going to kill her?

  Would he crush her too?

  Her head throbbed.

  She was shaking.

  Her heart was a pneumatic hammer gone berserk inside her chest.

  The tentacles wrapped around the palace until it disappeared completely, as though they had become its natural outer shell. Then they advanced toward the panoramic pergola.

  Their tips had already reached the structure in the form of dense, compact filaments — thick enough to suggest enormous strength — moving with a chilling, almost surgical precision. They destroyed the pergola the same way they had destroyed the palace: crushing it, dragging it down from its columns, grinding it into a tangle of fragments.

  Then it was Katherina’s turn.

  The filaments coiled around her feet first.

  Then they climbed up her legs, clinging to her skin like tentacles of living clay.

  By the time they reached her torso, her sensory perception in the engulfed areas had begun to dissolve — not abruptly, but in stages.

  First a torpor.

  Then a loss of density.

  Then a strange, disturbingly pleasant warmth.

  And they kept rising.

  They reached her arms, her shoulders, her neck.

  Every new zone swallowed by the filaments dimmed as if it were being slowly lowered into warm water.

  Her gaze — still free — caught the panic spreading among Micheal’s soldiers scattered through the ruins. They had no idea what was happening. Micheal, of course, hadn’t informed them of anything. Their expressions — mouths hanging open, eyes bulging — were a grotesque counterpoint to the advance of that monstrous metamorphosis.

  Micheal had stayed beside her the entire time.

  Hanging onto the earth and onto her like a climber studying a ledge before making his next move.

  Calm.

  Focused.

  Almost contemplative.

  Katherina’s face was changing: part earth, part rock, part a mosaic of minerals she wouldn’t have known how to name. And yet she was still conscious.

  Reality, however, had taken on the grainy texture of a hypnagogic state: like waking up in the middle of a lucid dream and no longer remembering which part is waking and which is dreaming.

  A soft, alien serenity spread through her final moments.

  At least she wasn’t suffering.

  She knew she would die — but in the sweetest way she could have imagined.

  Her ego was dissolving like a fly drowning in honey.

  New, impossible sensations moved through her as the boundary between her body and the geology around her frayed.

  A smile appeared on her lips.

  A smile of genuine bliss.

  A final smile.

  Just before her existence was swallowed by the ground, Micheal slipped into her peripersonal field of view like a shamanic vision, tilted his head slightly, and said:

  “You were definitely my favorite toy.

  I wish it could have lasted longer.”

  And across his face — that forever unreadable face — passed a shadow.

  A trace of sadness.

  An emotion no one would ever associate with psychopathy.

  Black.

  *

  Where the palace once stood — architectural nexus, political heart of the city — there was now a cocoon of earth and minerals, an unnatural promontory cracked by ochre and iron-gray veins.

  Around it, the ruins: collapsed facades, shattered streets, debris layered like scales.

  Atop the cocoon, a statue. Female. Slavic features: high cheekbones, sharp chin, a hint of a smile. A disturbing serenity, almost angelic.

  An involuntary monument.

  A geological epitaph.