The deck of the airship groaned under the weight of pressure and magic, its hull alive with warding glyphs and the sails blazing with arcane propulsion. Krungus stood at the helm like the figurehead of a myth, white robes twisting in the windless current, his long fingers flicking out glowing, what he called "Strands of Command" across the deck. Some people talked with their hands. Krungus had come up with a spell to exaggerate that, as well. They somewhat had the function a laser pointer would have at a college lecture, and they were flickering around the deck of the ship like a light show.

  “Bahumbus,” he barked, “take your sentries to the Eastern flank—buy us six minutes, not seven. No ornamental tinkering. I want function. Pure, brutal function.”

  Bahumbus gave a gruff nod and vanished into a mechanized lift.

  “B’doom, reinforce the walls. Use anything you can—fungal binding, stone roots, ancient rituals I forgot existed. I want those barriers holding longer than their claws expect.”

  The elephantine druid gave a low rumble, half-sermon, half-growl. “I will speak to the bedrock,” he said. “The mycelium remembers the shape of protection. I’ll weave the old growth between stone seams and lash the mortar with spore-thread. The city will wear armor grown from below.”

  Krungus gave a single sharp nod, eyes flicking toward the horizon. “Do it fast,” he said. “They aren't going to hold much longer.”

  He turned to Utopianna, who shimmered in floral robes beside the mast, speaking to birds that relayed coordinates. “Coordinate with the Threadwalkers. Their nodes are sluggish. Whip them into a river. Tell them this is now or never. If we can't get those nodes working we can't get reinforcements here as fast as possible.”

  Utopianna kissed two fingers and touched them to her forehead in a gesture older than the Weave.

  Krungus pointed toward the lower deck. “Reg-E, assist Bahumbus. Deploy whatever he needs.”

  Reg-E responded immediately, voice flat and metallic. “Acknowledged.” He turned and marched off without hesitation.

  One by one, the members of the Number vanished through Weave-gates or leapt gracefully into battle from the rails, their assignments as familiar as ritual, even though it had been a few millennia.

  Krungus turned to Eugene, the last still beside him. His tone softened just slightly. “Now, listen closely, I need you to—”

  Something flickered past his peripheral vision. Not a spell. Not just a shimmer. A glimmering dot, erratic and luminescent. A pixie.

  But they didn’t have pixies. No one did. Pixies were gone—hoarded, drained, extinct. Seeing one was like seeing a ghost with breath.

  His instincts screamed.

  He tracked the pixie for a fraction of a heartbeat.

  When he looked back—he was inside a sphere.

  A perfect, shining dome of stillness had swallowed him whole. It wasn’t just light bending. It was time. Glass dipped in oil, warping the air around it. Outside, Eugene’s mouth moved in panic, his hands battering at the shell. Reg-E thundered toward him, metal fists slamming the barrier hard enough to leave dents.

  Everything outside the dome appeared to Krungus to be moving in normal time: the fire, the Weave currents, even the blinking lights of the ship’s navigation runes. But inside the sphere, Krungus could move—he could breathe, think, cast, scream. Time still flowed here, just on a separate track, a different metronome. One likely defined scrupulously if Krungus' suspicions were correct.

  He glanced out. Eugene’s mouth was moving, but not toward him—yelling perhaps, calling out for help—but not meeting Krungus’s eyes. Reg-E pounded at the barrier, trying brute force. To them, he realized, he looked utterly still. Frozen in place, like a wax statue.

  Krungus narrowed his eyes. That meant time was passing out there. Whether that was advantageous for him or not, he didn’t know—but it was passing.

  Inside the bubble, however, another presence had appeared. Something else was in here with him.

  A voice behind him.

  “I was starting to think you’d forgotten me.”

  Krungus closed his eyes. He knew that voice. It was too smooth, too deliberate, each syllable over polished. As if the point of speaking itself was to punish the listener for not learning to speak as well as the speaker.

  “Sharrzaman.”

  Krungus the Forgotten turned to face the one who imprisoned him for 9,000 years.

  There he was. Cloaked in robes as black as collapsed stars, their trim catching stray light and refracting it with a slick, oil-on-water sheen. His posture was relaxed, but it was the relaxation of someone who had already calculated every possible move. Braided black hair spilled down his back, a single thick cord that reached below his waist, each segment interwoven with thin threads of silver. His facial hair was a precise work of grooming—sharp angles at the jaw, a mustache trimmed to symmetrical perfection. In his right hand he held a staff, long and black, shaped like a spade—flat and broad at the top, as though someone had pressed a shovel until it became two-dimensional. His eyes carried the same unbearable sharpness as ever—a scalpel, not a gaze. He didn’t smirk. He didn’t frown. He just waited.

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  Krungus attacked.

  He hurled out a Dreamwalk Needle, honed to spear directly into the subconscious and extract fears like teeth—his go-to incursion method for destabilizing overconfident minds. It unraveled immediately. Not repelled. Not shielded. It simply disintegrated, as though launched into a vacuum. Dreams required movement: drift, memory, subconscious elasticity. And there was none. Time had strangled the dreamfield down to a frozen dot.

  Undeterred, he layered in a Lucid Curse, his voice overlaying Utopianna’s—a recursive chant of dissonant tenderness meant to evoke emotional disarray. It had once, using a different voice, sent a necromancer into fetal sobs.

  Sharrzaman blinked. That was it.

  “Still favoring the sentimental weapons,” he said, tone infuriatingly calm.

  Krungus dropped posture and shifted forward—teleportation next. Phase Step Loop, a spatial echo technique to bounce across half-formed coordinates.

  He vanished. He returned. Vanished again. Returned.

  He remained in place.

  Every exit was an entrance. The coordinates had been deliberately folded. The teleport spell succeeded—but Sharrzaman had rewoven the spatial endpoints so that the loop only fed back into itself. Krungus was a rat in a teleportation bottle.

  He roared and reached deeper—Unthread the Node. Not the spell’s content, but its foundation. The anchor to the Weave, the latticework of causality. He could unbind it, reverse the stitch.

  But there was no stitch. There was no thread. This place didn’t connect to the Weave at all. It was built from something else—like an abstract painting that had never touched canvas.

  “A cage made of theory,” Krungus muttered.

  “Trying to out-theorize me?” Sharrzaman cocked his head. “I wrote the paper on recursive null-topologies.”

  Krungus changed disciplines. Constructive Sorcery—his most recently mastered school, self-taught over centuries of madness and clarity within the boundless pyramid of Syzzyzzy. It had not existed when he was sealed away. Sharrzaman shouldn’t even know he could do this. He assembled a Chrono-Anchor—an ontological compass, not built from matter but from metaphor, an invention born from solitude and desperation. Its function: to drag the caster toward unpaused time by binding him to a universal constant, a truth immune to temporal drift.

  It flickered into shape—beautiful, precise. And then it devoured itself.

  Temporal constants, it turned out, didn’t exist here. They’d been defined out of the space.

  He tried again: a thought-shell of oppositional force, an echo-loop trap constructed from inverted magical syllogisms. In theory, it should have created a paradox stable enough to crack the bubble.

  It dissolved before the third syllable completed. There was no syntax here—Sharrzaman had severed the language of cause and effect.

  Krungus pulled deep from his mental grimoire. He launched a layered displacement weave, designed to fracture dimensional overlap. Had it worked, he would’ve stood in a dozen versions of himself, one of which could have escaped.

  The spell executed. Nothing happened. No fragments. No selves. The construct had no permission to propagate—no branching points were allowed.

  He clenched his teeth, bleeding magic now. His fingertips tingled from oversurge.

  Final gambit: the Unwriting. He sliced into the boundaries of the pocket with a fundamental cancellation vector, designed not to dispel but to negate the architecture of the magic itself.

  It rebounded like a thrown knife off marble.

  “Cozimia!” he called out. “Potential!”

  For a breath, the air flickered. Not resistance—acknowledgment.

  The dome shuddered. Once.

  But Jennie magic required variables. It demanded motion, context, transformation.

  This space had none. It was a frozen proof. A solved equation with no unknowns.

  Even the Jennies, made of imagination and futures and might-have-beens, could not bend an event that had already been defined.

  Krungus staggered.

  “You studied me,” he growled.

  “You could have tried harder,” said Sharrzaman.

  And then the dam broke.

  Krungus screamed—not a wordless howl, but a crescendo of fury and heartbreak.

  “YOU ONLY EVER MANIPULATED HER!” he bellowed. “You USED her because you couldn’t CONTROL me! She pitied you, Sharrzaman! And you thought that was love. You took her softness and twisted it.”

  Krungus stepped forward. His hands were empty now, fists clenched like curses.

  “You locked me away because I beat you. Because she chose to love me, she chose to walk with me, she chose me over you every time unless I allowed you to manipulate her.”

  He hurled names, memories, scars—some shouted, some whispered. Dates neither of them had said aloud in 9,000 years.

  His voice cracked. Tears burned. Not sadness—frustration. Ancient, cosmic frustration.

  His knees nearly buckled.

  Sharrzaman didn’t move. But his face faltered. Not pity. Not guilt.

  Confusion.

  The wounded bewilderment of a child being scolded and not understanding why it hurts.

  He stood silent for a long time.

  Then finally, flatly:

  “You were always clever, Krungus. But cleverness is just desperation in a longer robe.”

  Krungus said nothing. He had nothing left.

  “I didn’t come here to fight,” Sharrzaman said, turning. “I came to remind you that you’ve already lost.”

  He began to become transparent, preparing to exit the time bubble.

  Krungus stepped forward, eyes wide with disbelief, anger reigniting. “LOST WHAT??” he screamed. “You trapped me in my own dimension and forgot I was alive. I showed kindness to the woman you obsessed over, and that was my crime? You hated me for being decent to her.”

  Sharrzaman paused, turning slowly, but not theatrically. Deliberately.

  “You think I hated you for being kind?” he said. “No, Krungus. I hated that your kindness left wreckage. Every time you cast without thinking, someone paid for it. Every experiment, every improvisation—disaster followed. Collapsed corridors, warped apprentices, ruptured Weave nodes. You think you’re a genius unchained. I think you’re a loaded wand in a crowded theater.”

  He stepped closer, his face unreadable. “You have to be directed. Controlled. Or you burn cities by accident and cry about how no one understands you.”

  He gestured to the air around them. “This isn’t vengeance. It’s management. And you can’t stop me.”

  He began to become transparent, preparing to exit the time bubble.

  “Good luck with all this, you doddering old putz.”

  He smiled, the cruelest smile possible—one that didn't understand it was cruel, one that truly believed it was doing the right thing.

  “I’ll be watching.”

  And then he was gone.