A week had passed.

  Time here didn’t move like it should—it bled, fractured, and recoiled—but within the confines of this warped domain, Ascheritt found a rhythm. He now lived in the remnants of a half-collapsed cathedral, a monument once dedicated to forgotten gods, its spires broken and weeping starlight.

  The woman who had taken him in—Lyria Caelestis—was unlike the Watcher. She did not speak in riddles or hide behind cryptic prophecy. She offered shelter, warm meals conjured by sorcery older than language, and, perhaps most unnerving of all, kindness.

  She treated him like… a person.

  Not a paradox. Not a threat. Just Ascheritt.

  She claimed her family had once been archivists of divine law—keepers of the Axis, before it fell. But when the decree began collapsing under its own contradictions, her bloodline vanished into obscurity. She remained, choosing solitude over servitude.

  He asked why.

  Her answer was simple:

  “Because something was coming. And I wanted to see it.”

  At night, she would play music from an old device—half-machine, half-magic. The melodies were haunting, yet beautiful, as if sung by a world that had already forgotten itself.

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  He asked her once why the songs sounded sad.

  Her smile did not reach her eyes.

  “Because they remember what we’re not allowed to.”

  Ascheritt had begun feeling… something. A sense of weight not from the world, but from within. Restlessness. Buried instinct. Like his existence was a bowstring drawn taut, waiting for the moment to release.

  And then it came.

  A ripple in the sky. A scarlet note, vibrating across the heavens like a scream barely heard. The stars dimmed. The winds reversed. Lyria dropped the cup in her hands, eyes wide.

  “They found you.”

  Before he could respond, the walls of the cathedral screamed. A circle of crimson glyphs ignited around its perimeter—banishment runes, written in a tongue lost before creation.

  From the void stepped a figure: a knight clad in shattered mirror-armor, his helm smooth and faceless, reflecting every possible future but claiming none.

  He was a Harbinger—a fragment of divine law given form.

  The knight raised a hand. Reality bent toward it like metal to magnet.

  “By order of the Living Law, the Unwritten shall be undone.”

  Ascheritt didn’t move. He couldn’t.

  His heart thundered. The music Lyria had played earlier echoed in his head—soft, sorrowful notes, like a lullaby for a dying star.

  He felt the pull of fate again—cold, inevitable. But then… her voice.

  “Don’t give in.”

  He turned.

  Lyria stood with arms outstretched between them, her body already unraveling as the knight’s decree took hold. Her presence, so deeply intertwined with old law, could not resist the edict.

  But she smiled anyway.

  “Exist because I chose to believe in you. Not because they allowed it.”

  The world blinked.

  And then the music changed.

  Ascheritt stepped forward, and the crimson glyphs shattered underfoot.