Embodiment. Material contradiction. The spirit encountering resistance through flesh.

Kimia preferred: she scratched herself.

That was enough.

But the hand still fascinated her.

She held it up once more.

Opened. Closed. Command. Response.
So immediate that it appeared to prove unity.

Yet earlier she had inserted a magnetic core into a terminal and forgotten why before completing the action.

The same hand had known what to do after the purpose disappeared.

Action continuing after intention.

Kimia felt a small chill despite the coffee.

She remembered the terminal.

MOUNT?

The input waiting. Her hand beside the keyboard. No reason left behind it.

The thought passed through her.

What if the actor sometimes continued after the person forgot the scene?

Kimia lowered her hand.

“No.”

The word came aloud.

The indrel clicked.

Kimia looked at the book again.

She had become tired enough that philosophy could mutate into superstition if permitted.

She knew this.

Good.

Knowledge remained.

She reopened the book. Read another page, then another.

The argument moved toward phantasms as socially shared constructions.

Money. Status. Borders. Honor. Institutions.

Things invented by minds which became materially real because enough minds acted as though they were.

A title could not stop a bullet, but a title could command someone else to fire one.

Therefore the title was imaginary and real simultaneously.

Kimia stared.

Duchess. House Chityala. House Ivenmoth. Dalasi. Val Salia. The Heart.

All abstractions.

All capable of crushing people.

The philosopher called this the second birth of phantasm: when imagination acquired administrative machinery, gaining traction. 

Kimia thought of the revenue consultation. Numbers. The council. Tilmuhl. Privateers becoming families. Tradehouses becoming countries. The actor becoming a duchess. The role building a palace around itself.

Her head hurt more.

Enough philosophy.

She closed the book.

The lamp illuminated the cover.

Her coffee had gone lukewarm. Kimia drank anyway.

Outside the study window, the city was almost entirely dark except for lamps and industrial glow.

Somewhere beyond those lights, people slept.

Others worked. Factories ran. Televox transmitters sent voices across impossible distances. Money moved between accounts. Guards walked borders drawn by dead people.

The entire world seemed briefly composed of phantasms that had acquired payroll departments.

Kimia smiled despite herself.

That was probably the coffee, or exhaustion that had come from oversleeping. 

She looked at her hand.

The nick had stopped bleeding.

A tiny wound, already irrelevant.

She flexed the fingers.

Still hers.

She decided not to ask what hers meant. Not at three in the morning.

Some questions became less intelligent according to the hour.

The indrel's mask clicked again.

Kimia looked over.

The soldier stood beneath the dim edge of lamplight.

Its huge form possessed no relation to the philosophy book sitting on the desk.

Or perhaps it did.

The indrel had a role.

Bodyguard. Soldier. Creature. Person.

Kimia wondered how many selves existed inside it. Whether indrels asked these questions. Whether they had any need.

Perhaps pheromones resolved what philosophers complicated.

She almost asked, but didn't. Instead she opened the book again.

Not because she wanted answers, but because the words gave her something to stand on until the sun returned.