The embers of the Emberglass Twins' disappearance still hung in the cold air, fading into the shifting fog like half-remembered dreams. Viridion's lungs burned with each ragged breath, but it was the silence afterward that pressed heaviest.
Oriven stepped forward, his gaze steady as he touched the fractured ground where the web of possibilities had been severed. "Each of those threads was a future erased, a moment stolen before it could breathe."
Viridion's eyes narrowed, tracing the twisting lattice beneath their feet. "How many futures could I lose before there's nothing left of me?"
Oriven's voice was low, almost somber. "The Engine does not take—it reclaims. Every paradox carries a cost. Sometimes, that cost is your very existence."
The fog thickened again, curling like a living thing, wrapping the spiral tower in its embrace. Viridion's senses strained to catch a shape, a whisper, anything beyond the shifting gray—but found only silence and the faint pulse beneath the lattice.
A distant sound rippled through the air—soft, like a breath held between heartbeats. It was a vibration that tugged at something deep inside Viridion, a thread unseen but felt.
"Do you feel that?" Viridion asked, voice barely a whisper.
Oriven's eyes glinted, reflecting the fading light. "The Engine's rhythm. The pulse between moments. It's not just a machine—it's a symphony of paradoxes, playing in the spaces reality forgets."
Viridion swallowed the rising weight in his chest. "Then why am I the one caught in the music?"
"Because you are the fracture," Oriven said. "A locus where unfinished truths converge. The Engine hums stronger wherever paradoxes swell."
Viridion's thoughts raced back to the black feather, its fragments, and the Law of Infinite Approach—the ceaseless dance of moments that never complete.
"Am I to become part of the Engine? Or to break it?"
Oriven's expression tightened, the weight of knowledge heavy in his eyes. "Neither. You must walk between creation and destruction. The line is thinner than a breath, and far more dangerous."
A sudden shiver ran through the lattice beneath them. The spiral tower seemed to pulse in time with that distant rhythm—steps fracturing endlessly upward, unreachable but beckoning.
Viridion looked up again, catching a fleeting glimpse of copper eyes once more—glinting from the fog's edge like a promise or a threat.
The Engine's pulse grew louder, deeper, filling the space between heartbeats with a song that was both ancient and unborn.
"We move forward," Oriven said quietly, "but the path is no longer just ours to choose. The Engine watches—and waits."
Viridion tightened his grip on the Segment Blade, resolve hardening like steel. "Then we walk the space between the steps—where no future is fixed, and every moment is ours to claim."
The fog shifted again, folding and unfolding, a breath held in eternity. The dance of paradox had only begun.