Erasmus wasted no time. He stepped forward, his hands steady despite the unnatural force pressing down on him. With deliberate motion, he drew the golden scale from his pocket. Its surface gleamed faintly in the shifting twilight of the eldritch forest. The weight of reality seemed to grow heavier in the air as he raised the scale, feeling the resistance rippling through the very fabric of existence around him.
He had seen the threads of fate, not as a linear progression, but as splinters of possibility. Yet none of them had provided the answer. None of them had revealed the way forward. No, Erasmus had crafted his own path, carving it from the jagged rock of uncertainty and potential. Each fragment of the future was a shard of a broken mirror; only by gathering them together could he assemble the image that would guide him.
The Watcher—if it could even be called such—didn't have a physical form. It was a conceptual entity, a force that blurred the lines between being and nothingness. Erasmus could feel it in the air: the subtle distortion of reality, the faint tug of things being erased, as though they had never existed at all.
It didn't act, didn't shape the world; it merely observed, a passive spectator to the chaos and destruction around it. And that, in Erasmus' eyes, was its greatest sin.
To be passive was to deny change. To do nothing was to refuse to move, to stagnate, to die. Action, movement—these were the only means by which one could truly earn something, by which one could achieve greatness. Anything less was a betrayal of life itself.
He had come to understand that nothing—no force, no entity—could exist without purpose, without action. To earn something, to shape reality, required effort, required movement. Passive observation was a denial of growth, the ultimate form of self-destruction.
To sit back and let the universe decide was to abandon one's agency, to surrender to the whims of fate. Erasmus had no patience for surrender. Passive observers rotted in their own stagnation, forever waiting for the tides of the world to change, but never daring to reach out and guide them.
He inhaled sharply, the suffocating force around him only heightening his sense of urgency. "Doing nothing is a sin," he whispered to himself, his grip tightening around the scale. "To be passive is to refuse change. To refuse change is to refuse life itself."
—
The world around them flickered. Trees—if they could even be called trees—blinked in and out of existence. One moment, a towering, barkless trunk stood nearby, its gnarled limbs stretching skyward. The next, it was gone, replaced by an empty void that seemed to swallow the very light. Patches of ground warped, forming ghostly shapes that appeared only to vanish the moment they touched the knights' boots. The Watcher had begun to erase the world in real time, fading everything around them into nothingness.
The knights and squires were still charging toward the anomaly, though their movements had grown sluggish, their steps faltering as the ground beneath them shifted and faded. They pressed forward despite the doubt flickering in their eyes—flesh compelled by loyalty and duty, though the very world beneath them seemed to be slipping away.
Erasmus didn't care about them. They were tools. They had no true understanding of the force they faced. They moved only because that was what they were made to do. They followed orders. They fought to protect, but they couldn't see beyond the surface.
He didn't need them. He needed the scale. He needed control.
Erasmus steadied himself, focusing once more on the anomaly. The Watcher.
"You are not beyond definition," he muttered, his voice calm, unshaken by the suffocating weight pressing down on him. "You are not beyond control."
His mind raced, pulling together the fragments of possible futures, his ability to piece them together guiding his next move. The Watcher, a force of absolute erasure, was unpredictable, yet it could be influenced. Erasmus would make sure of that.
The scale trembled, its golden surface rippling as though responding to the disturbance in the world around them. Erasmus focused, pushing his will into the scale, concentrating with single-minded purpose.
"Balance."
The word was a binding. A claim on the Watcher's essence, a defiance of its inherent passivity. It was more than a declaration; it was a command.
For a moment, the world held its breath. The trees—once flickering—began to stabilize, the ground beneath their feet reshaping itself, no longer ghostly but solid once more. It wasn't complete, but the creeping erasure paused, halted by the concept Erasmus had forced upon the Watcher.
He felt the weight of it, a resistance far greater than anything he had encountered before. Reality itself seemed to fight back, as though his control over concepts wasn't enough to challenge such a timeless force. But Erasmus was resolute.
"You are..." His mind grasped for the right word, the one word that would trap the Watcher in its own nature. He couldn't define it too broadly, for that could open the floodgates to something far worse. But he couldn't allow it to remain undefined either.
And then it hit him.
"You are The Witness."
The name struck like a hammer. The Witness was not merely an observer; it was bound by its role, trapped in the act of witnessing. No longer a passive force, it was now limited by the very act of observing. It could not erase freely. It could only bear witness to the world's inevitable fading.
For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happened.
Then, a ripple tore through the air, snapping the atmosphere back into focus. The suffocating aura began to lift. The knights, whose movements had been dulled by the Watcher's influence, seemed to regain a flicker of clarity. The flickering trees held steady once again, and the ground—though warped—resumed some semblance of reality.
The Watcher—now The Witness—shuddered, its form twisting, as if unable to reconcile the concept that had been imposed upon it. It was a force that had always existed outside the bounds of definition, but now, it was defined. Bound by its own gaze, it could no longer erase freely.
Erasmus exhaled, his grip tightening on the scale. The weight had lessened, but the battle was far from over. The Witness still remained, its influence still bled through the world. But for now, Erasmus had bought them time. Time enough to make his next move.