Cyril looked at Amon, who was smiling and waving at him from not far away. A strange calm suddenly settled over him, like he'd just drunk expired pesticide.
After a brief silence, he asked curiously:
"When did you catch up with me?"
Amon hopped down from the windowsill and smiled.
"Just now, when you were praying to the Fool. What a shame..."
He didn't say what was a shame, but Cyril guessed he meant that the Fool hadn't answered him. Otherwise, Amon might have been able to pull some kind of trick and try to pinpoint him, even if it probably wouldn't have worked.
Snap!
Cyril raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Not far away, the sheets of paper piled on the desk floated into the air.
Most were blank, but a few already bore portraits. At that moment, though, every one of those portraits wore a monocle.
Cyril saw the mocking monocles in the portraits but paid them no mind. He summoned them all the same.
"Are you trying to give yourself a dignified suicide?" Amon asked curiously.
Before he'd finished speaking, a blinding silver-white light suddenly flared in the cloudless sky outside.
Rumble!
The thunder, powerful enough to shatter the air, sounded a beat later.
The silver-white lightning, charged with savage destruction, lasted less than half a second before fading amid the thunder.
In that half-second, the attic's roof, walls, and floor, along with everything inside, were carbonized and vanished beneath the terrifying lightning. All that remained were tiny currents crackling and darting in every direction.
Cyril and Amon stood facing each other in midair, as though gravity had no hold on them. Neither was affected by the currents around them.
One had a translucent body flecked with colorful starlight, and row upon row of transparent, film-like