Alias was so busy observing the way the humans tilted their heads to catch a breeze that he almost didn’t notice the commotion coming from a nearby bakery stall.

"Hey! Stop him!"

Something, or someone rather, sprinted past Alias, nearly knocking him off his feet. It was a boy—lean, athletic, and covered in a layer of dust that couldn’t hide the deep, dark tone of his skin. He looked to be about seventeen, with wild black hair and blue eyes that flickered with a fierce, desperate intelligence.

In his arms, he clutched a large, crusty loaf of bread as if it were a treasure.

"Thief! Someone grab the brat!" the baker roared, waving a wooden paddle. "Where are the guards?!"

Alias watched, frozen. On the scrolls, this would have been a tiny blip of ’social disorder’. But here, he could see the sweat beading on the boy’s forehead and the way his chest heaved with effort. The boy—Theo—skidded around a corner, his eyes briefly meeting Alias’s.

In that split second, Alias saw a spark of life so bright it rivaled the sun above, and his breath hitched. What was that just now? In that boy...

Driven by an impulse he couldn’t explain, Alias began to move. He ran after the boy, his uncoordinated mortal legs pumping as he followed the boy into the narrow, winding alleys of the city.

...

High above, Norx sat on the edge of a celestial railing, his red eyes peering through the veil between worlds. He watched the silver-haired Architect stumbling through the dirt, chasing after a common bread thief.

"You really went and did it," Norx murmured, his playful smirk twitching. He reached up, absentmindedly tugging on one of the long tails of his black hair. "You went down there to study the ’climate,’ and the first thing you do is get your feet dirty for a mortal."

Norx’s grip on the railing tightened, his tanned knuckles turning white. He had expected Alias to get bored within an hour, to realize how messy and loud humans were, and come back to the quiet of the scrolls. But Alias wasn’t looking at the sky or the weather patterns.

He was looking at the boy. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

"Be careful, Architect," Norx whispered, a dark, violet spark flickering in his crimson eyes. "If you stay down there too long, you might forget that the dolls you’re playing with weren’t meant to last forever. And even if you forget," His grip on the railing hardened even more. "I will just have to remind you,"

...

Alias had never known what it was like for his heart to race. In the heavens, his pulse was as steady as the rotation of the stars, and if he wanted to get anywhere, like the highest point of his library shelf, he simply needed to blink, and he was already there, floating mid-air.

But now, without divinity, his body was suffering. He had created the concept of stamina, but never knew the feeling of when it ran out. Now, he was experiencing it firsthand,

As he turned the corner into a cramped, sun-baked alleyway, his chest felt like it was being hammered from the inside.

He was just about to give up because he could not give up when he found the boy at the end of a dead-end passage, trapped between a high mud-brick wall and a stack of empty crates.

The boy, Theo, didn’t look scared. He looked ready to fight. He held the loaf of bread behind his back with one hand, while the other reached for a small, notched knife tucked into his waistband. His dark skin was slick with sweat, and he was breathing in jagged, heavy gulps.

"Stay back," Theo spat. His voice was deeper than Alias expected for someone who looked so young, roughened by the dust of the South. "I’m not giving it back. That fat bastard at the stall has enough flour to feed the whole district for a year. He won’t miss one loaf."

Alias stopped a few paces away. He was breathless, his fine white silks now stained with gray dirt. He looked at the boy—really looked at him—without the filtering lens of a Heavenly Scroll. Up close, he could see the fine grit of sand in the boy’s eyelashes and the way his knuckles were scraped raw.

"I didn’t come to take it," Alias said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears—thicker, more physical.

Theo narrowed his eyes, scanning Alias from head to toe. The stranger stood out like a sore thumb. His skin was so pale it was almost luminous, and his hair was a silver so bright it seemed impossible. He looked like a nobleman who had lost his way, or perhaps something even more out of place.

"Then what are you doing chasing me?" Theo asked, his grip on the knife loosening slightly, but his posture remaining tense. "You some kind of guard in a fancy dress?"

"I wanted to see," Alias replied honestly. He took a small step forward, his eyes fixed on the bread. "You risked a beating for a piece of wheat and water. Is it... is it that important?"

Theo let out a harsh, dry laugh. "Important? It’s lunch, pal. For my sister and me. If I don’t risk the beating, we don’t eat. That’s how the world works. Or did you drop in from the moon and miss the memo?"

Ah, he was close. But not the moon, the heavens.

Alias looked at the sun-cracked ground. He had designed the scarcity of this region to encourage trade and movement, a logical equation to keep the population active. He hadn’t accounted for the fact that ’scarcity’ meant a seventeen-year-old boy had to become a thief just to survive the afternoon.

"I am... new here," Alias offered, trying to mimic the way humans spoke. Casually. "The heat is very strong. I did not realize it would be this difficult to move."

Theo’s expression shifted from hostility to a sort of baffled amusement. He tucked his knife away and took a big bite of the bread, tearing the crust with his teeth. "New is an understatement. You look like you’re about to melt. If you stay in this sun much longer with skin that white, you’re going to peel like a boiled onion."

He leaned against the mud wall, sliding down until he was sitting in a sliver of shade. He gestured to the dirt beside him with the half-eaten loaf.

"Sit down before you faint, Moon-boy. The guards won’t come back here; they’re too lazy to move in this heat."

Alias hesitated, then awkwardly lowered himself into the dust. The ground was hot, even through his silks, but the shade felt like a sudden blessing.

For the first time in an eternity, the Architect of the world sat in the dirt, watching a human eat bread, and felt the quiet, heavy rhythm of a life he had never truly understood.

"So, are you rich?" Theo asked. "With silk that expensive, I assume you are loaded. Have you been mogged? Where are your luggage?"

Alias was a bit lost. How would he respond to that? He knew the concept of rich and poor, but...