Spring returned unevenly.
In some valleys, snow lingered stubbornly. In others, flowers bloomed too early and paid for it with frost. Farmers argued with the sky the way people had before anyone promised answers.
Kael liked that.
He was in the old forum when Michael found him, sitting on the stone steps with a stack of letters—actual paper, creased and smudged.
"You've become a correspondence problem," Michael said.
Kael glanced up. "That sounds serious."
"It is. You're being asked for advice by people who don't want permission. They want language."
Kael looked back at the letters. They came from everywhere. Questions about borders without walls. About justice without spectacle. About what to do when everyone agreed something was wrong but disagreed on how to fix it.
"I don't have a framework for this," Kael said.
Michael smiled. "Exactly."
The council proposed something new—not a charter, not a law.
A clause.
They called it the Unwritten Clause.
It was simple, almost offensively so:
Any decision made here may be questioned later without punishment.
No conditions. No hierarchy. No sacred exceptions.
"It's not enforceable," one councilor argued.
"It's not supposed to be," Seris replied. "It's a promise, not a mechanism."
The clause spread faster than anything else had. Not because it worked—but because it invited work.
Aurelian watched it with wary hope. "This is faith," she said quietly. "Just without an object."
Elsewhere, the Custodians watched something unprecedented stabilize—not around certainty, but around revision. Their projections did not fail dramatically anymore.
They failed softly.
That frightened them more.
A message arrived—not projected, not manifested.
Written.
It appeared on Kael's table one morning, ink dry, script precise.
> OBSERVATION STATUS: NON-INTERVENTION APPROVED (PROVISIONAL)
RATIONALE: INTERVENTION COST EXCEEDS SYSTEM COHERENCE
NOTE: PRECEDENT ACKNOWLEDGED
Michael read it, then read it again. "That's… a retreat."
Kael folded the paper carefully. "No," he said. "It's an admission."
That evening, the city gathered—not for a festival, not for crisis.
For a debate.
No Kael at the center. No final word.
He sat among the crowd as people argued badly, passionately, sometimes unfairly. Someone changed their mind. Someone else refused to.
The world did not end.
As the sun dipped below the rooftops, Michael leaned over. "You know," he said, "this is the part no epic ever writes."
Kael smiled. "Good."
Above them, the stars burned on—unchanged, unconsulted.
For the first time in history no one would record properly, a civilization moved forward without a clause promising salvation.
Only one that allowed them to be wrong—
and to keep going anyway.