The moon was a full, cold eye that night. He went down to the river, as always, to catch that one fleeting moment of purity — when darkness erases everything unnecessary, leaving only essence. And silence. His silence.

And there it was, the essence. At the water’s edge. A face twisted by pain, a body broken. He froze, observing. It wasn’t pity. Pity was for those who still believed the world could be fixed. He knew better: the world couldn’t be fixed. You could only impose your own order on it.

But in this chaos, in this senseless cruelty, there was something... offensive. Dirt. Formlessness. Meaninglessness. Those who had done this carried no idea, only primitive greed. Their very existence sullied everything around them. They were a mistake that, at another time, he might have felt compelled to correct — decisively.

But not tonight. Tonight, he saw in the battered body not a victim, but an artifact. A trace of someone else’s imperfect violence. And his own meticulously constructed universe, where everything had purpose and place, rebelled against this disorder.

His fingers reached for the wounds almost against his will. It was the gesture of an architect touching a desecrated statue. His own violence was always ritual, a transformation. But this... this was mere decay.

And he made a decision. Not to save. No. To restore. To give form to this element of chaos, only to expel it from his world afterward. To cleanse the picture. He carried it home, into his sterile space where everything obeyed his will. He treated the wounds with cold, methodical precision, with the same focused attention he gave to sharpening a blade. He wasn’t healing a person. He was erasing the consequences of bad taste, wiping away the traces of someone else’s filthy hands.