The swarm of silhouettes blacker than darkness were clamoring in a frenzy. Within their screams of sorrow, now louder than ever, was the young man who had lost all pleasure and vanished from the world. And watching them was a pair of red eyes.
“So your doubts led you to chant despair…,” Kitty the All whispered softly. “You hoped Reason would counter the Skeptic…?”
It seemed less like an observation of the situation and more like a solemn admission that the inner workings of the youth’s mind had exceeded Kitty’s expectations.
Kitty slowly looked up at Park City. His red eyes, so clear they hardly glittered, spotted the massive building there. The castle containing the God Tree—the unyielding, infallible symbol of God’s enclosed paradise.
“So…you’re locking the bird in a cage without making it chirp?”
Kitty’s eyes suddenly moved—an action even he wasn’t aware of. His crimson, sagacious gaze fixed on something without him even intending to, and a moment later, the image became clear.
It was a Cateyes man.
He was cloaked in the darkness, standing there paying no attention to the storm around him, walking straight toward the Dearth March.
Kitty kept following him with his eyes. His night vision clearly made out the pipe in the man’s hand. He blew out a puff of illusory smoke, and as it vanished so, too, did the man’s form, fading into the darkness. By the time it fully registered in the Rabbitia’s mind, he was nowhere to be found.
It came across as an ostentatious way of vanishing, like he’d only chosen to disappear because he felt Kitty’s gaze on him. And indeed, despite the poor visibility of this rainy night, Kitty did sense that the man had spotted him from afar right before he vanished.
“My word, you’re even more theatrical than I am…,” Kitty said with a mixture of sentimentality and sarcasm. “What manner of Reason will the bird you put your hopes in bring to this city…? It is now that you and I will truly have to judge that…”
Kitty’s enigmatic words were drowned out by the noise of the shadows. And with that, the Rabbitia surrounded by calculations that shielded him from the wind and rain also disappeared into the night.