It happened in silence.

  No warning, no storm, no tremor. Just the sudden stilling of breath, the soft exhale of a thousand spells dying mid-word. Above the City of Cities, the sky seemed to sag, as though an unseen thread had snapped and the weight of reality was left to dangle.

  The Weave was gone.

  It took less than a second.

  Runes etched into streets went dark. Floating towers lurched and dropped like stones. Defensive wards fizzled. Hospitals powered by arcane sigils flickered and collapsed. In the Velvet Veil infirmary, a heartstone shattered as its Weave-tethered magic ceased, the patient beneath it gasping once, then still.

  Transportation grids vanished. Songstones went mute. Arcane lights winked out, plunging entire districts into unnatural dusk. Monuments enchanted to repel decay suddenly cracked under centuries of ignored erosion.

  All over the city, bags of holding belched forth their contents—books, coins, limbs, potions, clothes—the arcane anchors no longer present to contain their interior spaces. Even Krungus' bag unraveled, vomiting nine thousand years of collected madness into a nearby canal. Scrolls like autumn leaves danced in the wind, while ancient relics struck the stone with dull, accusatory thuds.

  Null's army was the next to fall. Their bodies did not die; they dissolved. As if their sinews had been sculpted from false magic, they melted into greyish-blue slop, pooling like wet paint. The shapes writhed for a moment, as though in confusion, before the goo hissed and vanished into nothing.

  But not all power vanished. Warlocks of the Jennies still stood tall. Eugene felt it immediately—the quiet hum of his pact still strong in his chest, Cozimia's presence not diminished but intensified, like a lantern made clearer in the dark.

  And Null did not dissolve. The army Sharrzaman had helped him to construct was not made with Jennie magic.

  He stood among the fading wreckage of his forces, unbothered, perhaps even smiling. A fire behind his eyes, ambition manifest. Whatever deal he'd made with his Jennie still held. He met Eugene's gaze across the broken square. Neither moved.

  High above the city—ten thousand feet or more—Sharrzaman staggered as the world came apart beneath him. The Weave failed, and his pocket sanctuary suspended in air began to disintegrate. Runes blinked out. Gravity returned. The floor gave way.

  He and Na’atasha plummeted.

  His bag of holding burst open beside him, scrolls and relics whipping away in the high-altitude winds. He clawed desperately through the flurry of parchment and silk, fingers trembling. One scroll spun close. A scroll of recall. He snatched it.

  Below him, Na’atasha screamed, her limbs flailing as she tumbled through the sky. "Sharrzaman!"

  He met her eyes, scroll already unrolling.

  "Help me!"

  She reached.

  He vanished.

  The gold light of the scroll winked out, and Sharrzaman was gone. No speech. No farewell. Only retreat.

  Na’atasha fell alone.

  Then came the aging.

  The Number, once ageless, trembled. Their bodies, held still in suspended time by Weave-bound magic, began to bend. Hair turned silver. Spines curled. Joints popped.

  It took seconds. And it cost them everything.

  The legendary presence of The Number collapsed like a stage set crumbling. They were still themselves, but dimmed, diminished. A myth made mortal.

  Utopianna did not speak. She touched her face and turned it away from the others. Her fingers trembled as she clutched it to her cheek. Her eyes, once radiant with foresight, stared hollow and unfocused.

  "I can see nothing," she whispered to no one. "Not even tomorrow."

  Krungus stood still, alone at the center of the square.

  He had felt it before the others. The moment the Weave vanished, he felt it as a hook pulled from deep within his chest. His magic stuttered, reeled, collapsed. The endless grid of arcane patterns that had sustained the City for millennia had simply—stopped.

  But before that—before the silence—there had been madness. Ten minutes of brilliance and screaming color, of invincibility and perfect logic twisting like a spiral staircase toward catastrophe. A high unlike any he'd known. No drug, no potion, no spell had ever touched that altitude.

  What had happened to him?

  Was it the sting? Something unleashed, perhaps? A hallucination? A poison? Or was it something deeper?

  He didn’t know. Na’atasha was gone—fallen, maybe dead. He hadn’t seen what became of her. He didn’t even know if she had anything to do with it.

  But the timing felt too exact, too cosmically cruel. He’d been flying, and then—then the world broke. And now he couldn’t tell where the breaking had started: the world’s or his own.

  He didn’t know how. Not exactly. But he knew it had something to do with him.

  The high was gone. The righteous fury, the plan, the brilliance. He had touched something beyond himself—and now it had recoiled.

  People began to whisper.

  They whispered in alleys, on rooftops, in fallen towers. About recklessness. About betrayal. About the old man who came out of the void and broke the world.

  And through it all, Eugene remained standing. The last magical protector.

  His Jennies pulsed softly within him, threads of potential and hospitality still warm. Where others had lost their light, his burned on. He turned slowly, scanning the square. He didn’t feel victorious. He felt watched.

  Above the city, the sky remained still. Empty.

  Unwoven.

  Krungus sat down hard, not from injury, but from absence. The rush, the surge of purpose and blinding brilliance that had carried him through battle—it was gone. All of it. Like waking from a dream with blood on your hands and no memory of how the knife was drawn.

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  The high had lasted maybe ten minutes. A heartbeat. A blink.

  And in that time, he had dismantled the Weave itself.

  He didn’t mean to. Or maybe he had. Or maybe it had always been waiting for someone reckless enough to pull the final thread.

  He buried his face in his hands.

  What had he done?

  The silence did not answer. The sky did not move. And the Weave did not return.

  Krungus blinked through his fingers, thoughts skittering like loose tiles across a broken roof. The Weave was gone—but what did that mean? Beyond wards and walls, beyond glowing glyphs and summoned light?

  What else had depended on it?

  His mind turned to the long-ago work he and Sharrzaman had done on The Number. Two spells. Two great feats of magical architecture. One to freeze them in time, to preserve their appearances, their legend. The other to halt death itself. Immortality, as long as the body held.

  The first spell had failed instantly. Wrinkles. Weakness. Time caught up like a vengeful tide.

  But the second...

  He was still alive.

  Why?

  The immortality spell still held. Shouldn’t it have failed too, if it was tied to the Weave?

  Was it not Weave magic after all?

  Had they used something else? Had Sharrzaman anchored it in a deeper force, one Krungus hadn't noticed?

  He felt a tremble at that thought. Not fear—not yet. But unease. A sense that he had peeled back a layer of the world and glimpsed something beneath it.

  A sound behind him.

  He turned.

  Utopianna. Bahumbus. B'doom. Eugene. All standing among the rubble, the same place where the Weave had died. Their faces were not angry—they were worse. Hurt. Stunned. And aged.

  Utopianna's once-youthful features were now lined with delicate wrinkles, like the folds of a dried flower. Her hair, though still golden, had dulled to a softer hue, her back slightly hunched beneath the weight of unseen years. Bahumbus's once-broad shoulders had shrunk inward; his beard had turned white, and deep creases framed his eyes, no longer mischievous but weary. B'doom’s mossy brow drooped over dimmer eyes, his vines slack where once they bristled with vigor.

  Only Eugene stood unchanged. Young. Whole. Untouched by time's cruelty.

  They looked at Krungus—not as students to a master, not even as comrades—but like the last survivors of a sinking ship, wondering who had cracked the hull.

  "You gave us the Weave," Utopianna said softly, her voice brittle. "And now it is gone."

  Bahumbus folded his arms. "Was it an accident? Or a tantrum?"

  "I didn’t mean to," Krungus muttered.

  "And yet," B'doom said. "It is."

  They circled him without encroaching. Waiting for clarity. For something wise. For some final clause to fix what had shattered.

  Krungus didn’t answer. But a flicker of memory surged through the fog in his skull—a moment during the high, sharp and strange, like a needle sliding into flesh. Had something stung him?

  His hands moved with sudden purpose, tugging at his robes. Lifting the layers. Searching.

  He exposed a patch of skin just beneath his ribs.

  "There," he said.

  A mark, dark and circular. A bruise made of perfect, concentric rings. Faintly purplish, almost ritualistic in geometry.

  No one spoke.

  Not even The Number had seen anything like it.

  Utopianna stepped forward, instinct overtaking despair. She reached out and attempted to cast a healing spell—an old one, one she'd used since before the fall of The Number. The air shimmered faintly, then stuttered. Nothing happened.

  She tried again. Still nothing.

  Her lips parted in shock. "It won’t take," she whispered.

  Bahumbus knelt beside Krungus, squinting at the mark. "What is that? What kind of magic leaves a bruise that doesn’t heal?"

  B'doom tilted his head. "Or resists divination. Even now... I feel nothing from it. No aura. No echo."

  Bahumbus shook his head. "No, B'doom. It's not resisting anything. Nothing's working. Not healing, not divination, not even basic cantrips. Ever since Krungus cast that spell... it's like the whole system flatlined."

  They were no longer demanding answers. They were afraid of them.

  Krungus looked at them all—older, wrinkled, diminished. The faces of giants now hollowed by time. They needed him. Not feared him. Needed him.

  He remembered when they were young. Before the Weave. Before the City. Before immortality made them careless.

  Utopianna, fierce and full of song, guiding them with glimpses of a hundred possible futures. Bahumbus laughing, drenched in soot, holding a smoking contraption he swore would change everything. B'doom standing in the first gardens they ever grew, his roots still tangled with wonder instead of wisdom.

  They hadn't built the Weave. They had rediscovered it. Ancient, humming beneath the world, hidden in the folds of forgotten time. And when they found it, they didn’t create— they plugged it in. Krungus had helped trace the pathways, reopen the nodes, guide the current into the City like threading a needle through a sleeping titan.

  And now it was gone.

  And they were old.

  He had to do something.

  "Alright," he rasped. "We're going to test it. All of it. Every school."

  They began.

  Divination. Utopianna raised a hand. Nothing came.

  Evocation. Bahumbus tried a blast. Not even a flicker.

  Restoration. B'doom invoked the oldest healing charm. No shimmer.

  Oneiromancy. Utopianna whispered into the void of dreams. Silence.

  Telemancy. Krungus himself cast out his hand. No thread, no ripple.

  Illusion. Conjuration. Transmutation. Chronomancy.

  Each spell cast like a prayer to a god that had gone deaf.

  Nothing answered back.

  Minutes passed.

  Then, Bahumbus grunted and dug through the debris. "What about potions?" he asked, uncorking one with shaking hands. He downed it in one gulp. Nothing. Not even a tingle.

  Krungus shook his head. "If it's brewed through Weave processes, it's dead."

  But Bahumbus was already kneeling beside a scorched scroll near where Krungus had landed. He brushed soot from its surface, squinting. "This one’s old. Yours."

  He read the title aloud. "Scroll of Enlargement."

  Before anyone could stop him, he activated it.

  The scroll dissolved into the air, gold script unraveling—and Bahumbus shot upward, doubling, tripling in height. His robe strained at the seams. Twelve feet tall. At least.

  Everyone froze.

  "That... worked," Utopianna breathed.

  B'doom’s eyes widened. "The scrolls. The scrolls still work."

  In seconds, The Number scattered, scrabbling across the rubble like children after candy, gathering the arcane leftovers spilled from Krungus’ ruptured bag of holding.

  Krungus watched them, his heart unsure whether to feel hope—or dread.

  Why did that work? Why the scrolls, and nothing else?

  He turned the question over like a puzzle box, clicking through memories, theories, dead ends. Scrolls were finite. Pre-written. Cast once and gone. Anchored differently. Maybe they held their own spell-logic, sealed before the Weave ever mattered.

  His eyes drifted.

  To Eugene.

  To the lantern at his side.

  A flicker of understanding moved behind Krungus's eyes.

  The Jennies.

  They still worked.

  The scrolls and the Jennies.

  He stood slowly, something new tightening in his chest: not dread, not hope.

  Curiosity.

  "Eugene," Krungus said, eyes narrowing, "you might be the most powerful magus in all of the City right now."

  Eugene blinked. "I... what?"

  Krungus nodded slowly. "Maybe we can use that to finish Null. He's still out there. He still has his Jennie."

  The others turned to Eugene, something like hope flickering behind their exhaustion. For the first time in what seemed like forever, they had something to aim at.