RAMEN AT THE EDGE OF CREATION

Their vessel required repairs near the Eidos Verge, a chain of markets built across the ribs of an extinct cosmic beast.

Ren'ō disappeared within ten minutes.

Izanara found him at a food stall overlooking a violet nebula. He sat on a metal crate with three bowls stacked beside him and a fourth in his hands.

"You left without telling me."

"I followed a critical signal."

"The smell of broth."

"Critical."

The vendor, a six-armed woman with translucent skin, placed another bowl beside him. Ren'ō thanked her in a dialect he had learned twenty minutes earlier.

Izanara sat reluctantly.

"You are eating an organism classified as semi-sentient."

Ren'ō stopped with the noodles halfway to his mouth.

The vendor laughed. "She is joking."

He looked at Izanara.

Her expression remained perfectly calm.

Ren'ō set down the chopsticks. "That was cruel."

"You survived the Void."

"The Void never ruined noodles."

She almost smiled.

The market became one of the first places where Ren'ō allowed himself to exist without a mission. He listened to merchants argue, watched children race between stalls, and purchased a black cloak with a high collar after discovering he disliked strangers staring at the golden lines beneath his skin.

Izanara watched him bargain the price down by pretending not to care.

"You could create clothing from light," she said.

"And rob this woman of an honest sale?"

"You threatened to walk away over two copper marks."

"Negotiation builds character."

At the edge of the market, an old refugee recognized the geometry on Laana's pendant. Her people had once served the War God before fleeing his armies.

She gave Ren'ō a name for the region beyond the mapped cosmos.

The Throne Beyond Time.

"No army reaches it," she said. "No prophecy sees inside. The god sits there and selects which worlds are permitted to continue."

Ren'ō's humor faded.

"How many serve him?"

"Enough to bury suns."

"Then we will need a larger vessel," Izanara said.

Ren'ō looked at the busy market around them. Ordinary people eating, trading, complaining. Life continuing beneath impossible stars.

"No army," he said.

Izanara studied him. "You intend to confront him alone."

"I intend not to turn frightened people into ammunition."

"They may choose to fight."

"Then I will choose not to spend them."

The answer was pure Ren'ō: quiet, immovable, and shaped by every soldier he had watched die in front of Laana's laboratory.

He finished the broth.

"Besides," he added, "armies complicate meal schedules."