Gotim feels the pulse through the layers of distance and time. The Black Crown feeds, and its rhythm is wrong. Whoever holds it now uses it like a child uses fire — hungry and careless, burning through power with no thought to control. The hunger grows stronger with each pulse. Gotim has waited longer than the crown has existed, and he can wait longer still. But waiting has its limits. He stands before the throne carved from obsidian, his throne, positioned where the currents of shadow converge. The crown's pulse reaches him here like ripples across dark water. Each throb reveals more — the holder grows drunk on power, letting the crown amplify their chaos instead of directing it. Darkness pooled around the wrong hands spreads like spilled ink. Gotim watches the shadow patterns spread across the floor at his feet. They twist outward without purpose, without design. The crown is teaching its unworthy bearer nothing except appetite. Gotim places one clawed hand on the throne's arm. The obsidian responds to his touch, warming. The throne has stood here since before the current age, waiting for its rightful occupant. He does not sit. Not yet. Sitting means claiming, and claiming means the time for patience has ended. The crown's pulse quickens again, stronger now. Its holder is learning to draw deeper. Soon they will draw too deep and either break or become something worse. He moves away from the throne and walks to where the shadows pool thickest. The crown must be claimed before its bearer learns true mastery or destroys themselves and the crown with them. Either outcome is unacceptable. Gotim extends his hand and the shadows respond, gathering around his fingers like loyal hounds. They know him. They have always known him. The time for observation ends. He will move now, not with haste but with certainty. The crown will answer to its master.

Gotim steps from the throne room into the cold air of Frostshade. The shadows at his feet follow him like water finding a slope. He lifts a small device from his belt, a round thing of metal and glass that hums against his palm. Its lens spins open, and a purple swirl forms inside it. The radar reads the currents, and the currents are bleeding. Something has torn the dark open. Not the crown's careless bearer this time. Something else. A failed ritual, close by, its edges still smoking in the unseen layers. Gotim follows the reading. He does not hurry. He never hurries. He finds the wound at the edge of a ruined mansion's east wing. A tall column of swirling shadow rises from the broken floor, twisting up into the night. It is not a doorway. It is a tear. He studies it the way a surgeon studies a cut. Through the breach, he feels the shape of two who were there before him — a mirror-girl and the hungry one beside her. Their names sit in his mind without weight. Mary. Void. They tried to bind hunger to flesh, and hunger refused. The radar pulses harder. Gotim turns. A trail leads away from the tear, carved into the frozen ground. Wherever the escaped hunger has passed, it has left a pit ringed in jagged stone teeth, full of dark water. Each pit points the same direction. Toward the crown. Toward the bearer he will not name. Gotim kneels at the nearest maw. He places his clawed hand into the cold water and speaks one word into it. The shadows in the pit go still. He cannot stop the hunger from reaching the crown. It is too far ahead, and it moves through layers he would have to tear himself to follow. So he does not try to stop it. He listens to it instead. He learns its scent. He rises. The hunger will arrive at the crown before he does, and the crown will feed it, and the unworthy bearer will grow worse. That is the cost of this hour. But Gotim now has a thread to follow that does not lie, a trail of pits that lead straight to what he wants. He lowers the radar and begins to walk.