Chapter 5: The God of Small Joys

Chapter 5: The God of Small Joys

The silence in Glitterati’s penthouse was a living thing, a predatory emptiness that preyed on noise and purpose. It was the sterile quiet of a server farm, a place where immense power operated without emotion. The woman on the throne-like chair was its epicenter, a queen reigning over a kingdom of nothing.

"You're not here to arrest me," she said, her voice a dry whisper, like leaves skittering across pavement. It was the first time she’d spoken, and the sound was startlingly fragile. "The ABI doesn't send their ghosts after cases they've already buried."

My desire was for the truth, and her vacant eyes told me it was a commodity she hadn't traded in for a long time. "The ABI doesn't know what kind of case this is," I replied, taking another step into the room. The obsidian stone in my pocket felt cold, a small piece of absolute certainty. "They think it's a murder. It wasn't."

I let the statement hang in the air. This was my only card to play, the secret knowledge Lux’s parting gift had granted me.

A flicker. For the first time, a genuine emotion sparked in her haunted eyes: surprise. "How?"

"I don't see things the way other people do," I said, a bitter shorthand for the curse that was my Lítost. "I saw his story. The end of it, anyway. He chose it. He went to that restaurant to be erased. Why?"

The dam of her composure didn't just crack; it disintegrated. A shudder wracked her thin frame. The vacant goddess persona fell away, revealing the terrified puppet beneath. "Because he was tired," she choked out, tears welling in her eyes, real tears that traced clean paths through the invisible layer of fame clinging to her skin. "He was a story from another time, a simple melody in a world that only wants noise. He couldn't compete. He just wanted it to be over."

The obstacle I thought I was facing—a powerful, murderous celebrity—vanished, replaced by a much more terrifying one: she was a prisoner. Her power, the force that had built this fortress of screaming memes and shifting trends, wasn't hers to command.

"You feel it, don't you?" she asked, her voice gaining a desperate strength. "This place. It's not mine. It's a cage built from the belief of millions, but I don't hold the key. I'm just the antenna. The signal comes from somewhere else."

This was the core of it. The result of my confrontation was not a confession but a plea for help. "Who?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "Who holds the key?"

"I don't know its name," she confessed, wrapping her arms around herself. "I only know what it does. It's an Editor. A Censor. It found me when my fame was just beginning to peak. It offered me everything, the power to be more than a person, to become a living idea. But the power flows through me, not from me. It uses my followers' belief, their adoration, as a weapon. It finds old, fading ideas… and it consumes them."

My mind raced back to the monochrome corpse, the hole in his chest not a wound but a deletion. This "Editor" wasn't just a killer. It was a predator of narratives, a metaphysical parasite growing stronger by devouring the city's history.

"Dapper Dan," I said, giving the cartoon man his name. "What was he?"

"He was a god," she said, a sad smile touching her lips. "Not a big one. Not like me, a loud, hollow god of trends and celebrity. He was a God of Small Joys. Of the simple pleasure of a shared cartoon, of cheap candy that tasted like childhood, of a tune you could whistle without thinking. He was a god of nostalgia." Her gaze drifted to my jacket pocket, the one Lux had emptied. "His reliquary, the thing that anchored his story to the world… it was a silly little toy, wasn't it? A Pez dispenser."

The pieces slammed into place with dizzying force. The cheap plastic duck wasn't just a clue; it was a sacred artifact. It was the last, stubborn remnant of a forgotten deity, a bastion of simple, harmless joy. And the Editor was hunting them. Harvesting these gentle, forgotten concepts to fuel its own rise, erasing the city's quiet moments to make more room for its noise. It was a new kind of god, a Meme-God of rage and irrelevance, and it was starving its predecessors out of existence.

A feeling of profound loss hit me. I had held the key, the very heart of a dead god, and let it be stolen by a whimsical Fae.

"She took it," I said, the words tasting like ash. "A shapeshifter named Lux."

Glitterati's face fell, the last of her hope seeming to drain away. "Then it's over. Without that anchor, his story will fade completely. The Editor will have won."

"The game is far from over."

The new voice, a layered melody of amusement and danger, came from the window. We both turned. Lux was leaning against the floor-to-ceiling glass as if she’d been part of the decor all along. The city lights of Aethelburg formed a halo around her shifting silhouette. She wore a dress that looked like a shattered mirror, each piece reflecting a different angle of the room.

"Your security is appalling, Glitterati, darling," Lux said with a dazzling, insincere smile. "All that noise and fury, and you didn't even notice me walk in." She pushed off the glass, her movements fluid and silent. Her eyes, currently the color of amethysts, were fixed on me.

"Give it back, Lux," I said, my voice hard. "This isn't a game."

"Oh, but that's where you're wrong, Jack Vektor," she countered, gliding towards us. "It was always a game. But before, it was a simple murder mystery. A tad boring, really. But now?" She gestured around the room, at the captive goddess, at the concept of a narrative-eating villain. "Now we have mythology. We have forgotten gods and cosmic parasites. The stakes have been raised magnificently."

She stopped in front of me, her playful smirk firmly in place. This was the turning point, the moment where her chaotic neutrality would tip one way or the other.

"It's no fun if the most interesting player is missing his most important piece," she said.

She opened her hand. Resting in her palm, gleaming under the penthouse lights, was the red Pez dispenser. The chipped yellow beak of the duck seemed to mock the sterile grandeur of the room.

The surprise of it left me speechless. She wasn't just returning it; she was escalating. She was choosing a side, not out of morality, but out of a thirst for a better story.

I took it from her hand. The plastic felt warm, and as my fingers closed around it, a faint energy pulsed from within—a tiny, resilient spark of joy and nostalgia, refusing to be extinguished. It was no longer just a clue. It was a responsibility.

"The Editor has hidden what's left of Dapper Dan's story," Glitterati whispered, looking at the dispenser with reverence. "It has smeared the ink, corrupted the file. To find out why he chose this, to find the Editor's signature, you would have to find the ghost of his narrative."

"And where," I asked, my gaze shifting between the captive celebrity and the chaos Fae, "do you find the ghost of a story?"

Lux’s smile widened, her eyes gleaming with delicious promise. "Why, where all broken and forgotten stories go, of course." She pointed a slender finger towards the polished black marble floor, where our reflections stared back, distorted and unreal.

"You go into the Weeping Mirror."