The clearing pulsed.
Not visibly—there were no tremors, no radiant flares—but Erasmus felt it beneath his boots, a quiet, subterranean pressure, like standing atop the hollow skull of something long-dead yet still dreaming. It was not the force of gravity that tethered him to this broken place, but the weight of observation—the sense that something vast and unseen had turned its eye, not in curiosity, but in calculation.
Behind him, the shattered loop lay in ruin. Reality had cracked and spilled its contents like marrow from a broken bone. The illusion was dead, and what remained was the raw, bloodless truth beneath it. Before him, the air had thickened—not with mist or heat, but with intent. Every breath felt like it had to be earned.
He did not move.
This wasn't hesitation. It was control. The kind that stands still not out of fear, but dominance. The kind that studies a closing trap to understand the mind of its maker. Erasmus knew better than to interrupt a system unraveling under its own contradictions.
Then the presence spoke.
"You resisted longer than most."
The voice was not sound. It moved like gravity—undeniable, fundamental. It pressed into the cracks of thought, filled the absences between neurons. A voice that hadn't learned language, but had birthed it.
Erasmus allowed the silence to stretch like wire between them. In his hands, silence was a tool, a lens, a blade. When he finally responded, it was with the weight of deliberation.
"I was not resisting," he said. "I was observing."
There was no reaction from the world—no birds to flee, no wind to shift—but the clearing itself seemed to tense, as though the fabric of the place recognized the significance of that answer.
"Most adapt," the voice mused. "Most forget. You... dissect."
"I judge."
And the world listened.
Roots stirred beneath the soil like tendons. The sky above was not black, nor was it starless. It was missing, a perfect absence shaped like a dome, where no thing had ever been and no thing could return. The void above mirrored the silence below—expectant.
Then, from the air itself, something began to coalesce.
It was not born, not summoned, but bled into form—as if memory had been punctured and its contents were trying, desperately, to resemble something meaningful. Shapes flickered in and out: Rei's silhouette, Riven's upright stance, Mira's voice muttering words with no mouth to shape them, Brin's wide, terrified eyes stitched where a brow should be. It was a collage of familiarity, a false idol of context—a test pattern in the shape of a soul.
"You are not like the others," the entity said.
Erasmus tilted his head slightly, studying the thing. "No."
"You do not mourn their pain. Not even the one who looped until his body broke."
"Why should I?" Erasmus asked, and his voice was devoid of cruelty. It was simply fact. "He was irrelevant."
The entity did not bristle. It simply understood. This exchange was not emotion. It was math.
"You are anomaly," it said. "Unshaken. Detached. You break the pattern by refusing to participate in its intent."
"Patterns are for those who follow," Erasmus replied. "I measure."
"And what do you measure now?"
"Possibility."
The entity flickered at the edges, its stability cracking, like it had not anticipated someone defining themselves outside of its parameters. And Erasmus watched with clinical interest as the last shreds of the false Ilya collapsed inward—not disintegrating, but unmade, like an equation withdrawn from a chalkboard.
"You are a dangerous calibration," it said.
Erasmus stepped forward. His gait was steady, unfazed. "Then recalibrate."
And the world shuddered.
For a breath—one long, impossible breath—everything broke again. Not into chaos, but into clarity. Behind the paper-thin curtain of this illusory world, Erasmus saw it all: loops stacked like sedimentary layers of failure, memory-versions of the trial echoing across dead timelines. Every path, every branch, every outcome played and replayed until even causality seemed exhausted.
Most broke. Most succumbed to fear, or hope, or the seduction of pattern. But not him.
He saw Jory again—flickering between death and the moments before it, trapped in an accelerating recursion of pain and resurrection, a soul gnawed down to a reflex.
He saw Mira—torn and rebuilt, stitched together with half-memories and soothing lies, forgotten even by herself.
He saw Riven—screaming, begging, pleading to versions of Erasmus who never answered, never turned, never cared.
Each version died. Each version failed. And none of them mattered. They were input. Failed variables. Irrelevant iterations in a flawed system.
Then came something else.
Black wings.
Suspended mid-air, impossibly still. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of shadow-moths hung in space, not fluttering but hovering, not animated but present. They did not shimmer. They did not breathe. They did not occupy. And yet, where they were, space bent away in surrender. They did not belong to the trial. They were the error that the system itself could not understand.
They were the memory of something unremembered. A paradox with wings.
Erasmus approached without pause.
Where another might have been gripped by awe or dread, he saw only utility. He reached out, slow and deliberate, his fingers brushing the edge of one moth—and in that instant, it vanished. Not into his hand, not into air, but into him. Into something deeper than possession. As if the moth had not been taken, but had recognized something familiar—and stepped into it.
No one saw.
No one noticed.
But the world remembered.
—
"You seek to escape," the entity said again, more quietly this time.
"No," Erasmus answered. "I seek jurisdiction."
There was a pause. Longer now. A stillness that felt more like calculation than silence.
"You would judge this system?"
"I already have."
"And you would replace it?"
"If necessary."
"You'll face resistance."
Erasmus turned his head. Not to the voice. To the data returning.
And they came—like broken variables resolving themselves. Mira, limping and half-conscious. Brin, hollow-eyed and silent. Sir Calden, dragging Rei like a broken puppet. And finally, Riven, emerging from the edge of unreality with the weary gait of someone who had been unmade and returned.
They were alive.
But Erasmus felt nothing.
They were variables. Figures in an equation that now needed rebalancing. Their suffering, their confusion, their survival—all data points in a grander logic. He turned slightly to observe them, not out of concern, but to confirm they had returned.
Riven stepped forward. "What… did you do?"
Erasmus did not meet his eyes. "I ended the error."
The entity stirred again, like a shadow uncertain where it begins.
"You would create a new trial," it said. "One no longer guided by mercy."
"Mercy," Erasmus said, "is a design flaw. A relic of those who feared consequence."
"And what will yours fear?"
Erasmus glanced at the entity.
"Only imbalance."
And the world—what remained of it—groaned. Time stuttered. Space flexed.
And then, it began to change.