The world did not celebrate their victory.
It absorbed it.
Snow continued to fall with quiet indifference, blanketing the scar where the tower had stood, smoothing over the absence as though nothing exceptional had occurred. To an untrained eye, the frozen plain would appear untouched—just another stretch of winter-bound land beneath a pale sky.
But East felt the tremor ripple outward.
Not through stone or ice.
Through structure.
The Cycle adjusted—not snapping back, not resisting, but recalibrating, like a machine encountering an input it had never been programmed to accept yet could not reject. Somewhere deep within reality's oldest layers, a question had been introduced where none had existed before.
What if inevitability could fail?
