Vane walked away from the ruined engine without a backward glance. Behind him, the High Inquisitor's screams of "Heresy" had devolved into a series of panicked, incoherent barks at his knights. The soldiers were still scrambling, their boots slipping on the marble that had turned to glass beneath the Rift's touch.
"Vane," Sylva hissed, catching his sleeve. Her eyes darted toward the line of armored men forming a blockade at the square's exit. "The exit. They're closing the gates. We're trapped."
"No one is ever trapped, Sylva," Vane said, his voice as calm as a frozen pond. "They are simply looking at the walls instead of the gaps between them. Stop looking at the armor. Stop looking at the spears. Look at the shadows."
He didn't slow his pace. He walked directly toward the line of twenty silver-clad knights. They had lowered their visors, their lances leveled in a bristling wall of steel. They were breathing heavily, their heartbeats a frantic, rhythmic drumming that Vane found incredibly distracting.
"Hold!" the captain of the guard roared, his voice trembling. "In the name of the Light, stay where you are!"
Vane ignored him. He moved into the Furniture State.
To the guards, something shifted. It wasn't that Vane disappeared; it was that the threat disappeared. One moment, they were staring at a dangerous heretic who had just unmade their machine; the next, their eyes seemed to slide right off him. He became a flicker of grey, a shadow moving across a wall, a detail so mundane that their brains refused to prioritize it.
Vane walked straight through the center of their formation.
A lance tip brushed his cloak, but the guard holding it didn't even thrust. He looked confused, his eyes searching the air three feet to Vane's left. Vane stepped between two knights so closely that his shoulders nearly touched theirs, yet they remained frozen, their spears leveled at a phantom they expected to see, not the man already behind them.
Sylva followed in his wake, trying to mimic his rhythm. She felt like a ghost. She watched a guard blink, his gaze passing directly through her as if she were made of glass.
Once they were a block away from the square, tucked into the cooling shadows of a narrow alley, Vane finally stopped. He leaned against a brick wall and pulled the Heart of the Saint from his pocket. The gold light was dim now, buried deep beneath the stone's surface.
"The rift is gone," Sylva whispered, leaning against the damp brick to catch her breath. "The monsters... they didn't follow."
"Of course they didn't," Vane said, looking up at the sky. The violet stain was fading, replaced by the orange hues of a normal sunset. "The door slammed shut. But when you kick a door in that hard, the hinges don't just magically fix themselves. The lock is broken, Sylva. Reality in Aethelgard is currently held together by habit and hope."
He turned the Heart over in his hand. It looked like an ordinary, heavy river stone.
"Nothing will come through tonight," Vane continued, his eyes darkening. "Or tomorrow. Or even next month. The Void is patient. It doesn't rush into a room; it waits for the cracks to widen. It might take years—decades, even—before the first 'shiver' starts again. But the script has been edited. The ending of this city is already written; we're just living through the middle chapters now."
He looked at her, his violet eyes flat and unreadable.
"You're a god," Sylva whispered. "What you did to that machine... what you did to those men. You aren't just a Void-walker."
"I am a man who spent ten thousand years in a place where nothing existed. When you spend that much time in the silence, you learn how the noise is made. I don't create, Sylva. I simply edit. I saw the error in their machine, and I deleted it. I saw the error in the guards' perception, and I bypassed it."
He pushed off the wall and began walking deeper into the maze of the city, moving toward the Lower District.
"Come, little bird. We have plenty of time. The world isn't ending today. It's just beginning to fray at the edges, and I'd like to find a place where the tea is actually hot before the first thread pulls loose."
The silence that followed Vane's departure from the square was more deafening than the machine's roar had ever been. It was the sound of a thousand people holding their breath, waiting for a sky that had just been torn open to finish falling.
The High Inquisitor remained on his knees, his fingers digging into the gaps between the marble tiles. He stared at the empty brass housing of the Purity Engine. To his eyes, the world hadn't just been "edited"—it had been desecrated. The "Holy Light" he had promised the people had been tucked into a stranger's pocket like a common coin.
"He took it," the Inquisitor whispered, his voice cracking. "He reached into the Light and... he turned it off."
"Your Eminence," a captain of the guard stammered, his armor still clanking from the tremors in his limbs. He knelt a respectful distance away, his eyes darting toward the now-closed sky. "The interloper. He walked through the gate. My men... they say they saw him, but they couldn't see him. They say he was just... there. And then he wasn't."
The Inquisitor turned, his face a mask of pale, twitching fury. "Because you are fools! You were looking for a demon to fight, and he made himself part of the wind! He mocked us! He treated the Sanctified Ether as if it were nothing more than smoke!"
He stood up, his robes stained with the soot of the engine's failure. Around the square, the citizens were beginning to murmur. The fear was transitioning into something worse for the Church: doubt. They had seen the "unbeatable" power of the Inquisition bypassed by a man who looked like he was heading for a stroll in the park.
"Seal the district!" the Inquisitor bellowed, his voice echoing off the scorched cathedral walls. "Scour the Lower District. Every tavern, every cellar, every tea house. If a man breathes with a violet hue in his eyes, I want his head on a pike by dawn!"
"And the girl, Eminence?"
"The girl is the vessel," the Inquisitor hissed, his eyes narrowing. "She carries the resonance. But the man... he is the source of the friction. He didn't just steal the Heart; he broke the very logic of our faith. He must be erased."
As the Inquisition began its frantic, heavy-handed search, the square itself remained changed. A group of scholars from the Academy approached the site where Vane had snapped his fingers. They found a circle of cobblestones exactly three feet wide that had been rendered perfectly transparent.
One scholar reached out to touch the stone, but his hand stopped an inch above the surface. It wasn't that there was a physical barrier; it was that the concept of touching that specific spot had been deleted from the area.
"He didn't just stop the machine," the scholar whispered, his face pale. "He left a scar on the world's geometry. The hinges of reality aren't just loose—they're missing."
Far above, the stars began to come out, but they looked slightly different through the haze of the Upper District. They didn't twinkle; they pulsed with a slow, rhythmic gold, mirroring the heartbeat of the stone now resting in a dark room in the slums.
The Inquisition thought they were hunting a thief. They didn't realize they were trying to catch a man who had already decided they didn't matter.
Vane and Sylva stood on the roof of a weathered clock tower on the edge of the industrial district. It wasn't a hideout—just a high vantage point where the soot-stained gargoyles offered a modicum of privacy. Below them, the city of Aethelgard looked like a disturbed anthill.
Rows of torches snaked through the streets like glowing orange veins as the Inquisition began their frantic, systematic sweep of the Lower District. The distant sound of iron-shod boots and barking orders carried on the wind, but up here, the air was still and smelled of cold stone.
"They're burning half the district looking for us," Sylva said, her voice barely a whisper. She was huddled against a stone pillar, her eyes fixed on the flickering lights below. "They'll find this place eventually. They're checking every attic and cellar."
Vane wasn't looking at the torches. He was leaning casually against the clock's massive copper minute hand, which had long ago ceased to move. He was looking at the sky—or rather, the places where the sky felt a bit too thin.
"They are searching for two people," Vane said, his voice smooth and utterly devoid of concern. "People occupy space. They create friction. They leave footprints. But if you simply decide not to be a 'person' of interest, you become part of the background. To those guards, we are currently no more significant than the rust on this clock."
He reached into his cloak and pulled out a small metal tin and two mismatched porcelain cups he'd snatched from a street vendor on the way up.
"You're making tea," Sylva said, her tone a mix of disbelief and mounting hysteria. "There's an army of silver-clad zealots half a mile away with orders to execute us, and you're boiling water."
"Panic is a very loud frequency, Sylva. It's the easiest thing in the world to track," Vane replied. He didn't use a fire. He simply held his hand over the tin, and the air around it began to shimmer with a dull, localized heat. Within seconds, the scent of bergamot and dried leaves began to drift between them. "If you want to survive the next few decades, you need to learn that the world only hits what it can feel. Sit. Drink."
He poured the tea. It was perfectly clear, despite the lack of a proper strainer.
"The Rift," Sylva said, taking the cup with trembling hands. "You said it would take a long time for the monsters to return. But the sky... it doesn't look right. The stars are moving."
Vane followed her gaze. She was right. To the untrained eye, the night sky was normal, but to someone who understood the "logic" of the world, the stars were drifting in slow, sickening spirals, as if the heavens were a reflection on the surface of a whirlpool.
"The architecture is settling," Vane explained, taking a slow, appreciative sip. "When the Inquisitor forced that machine to run, he didn't just tear a hole; he stripped the threads. Think of reality as a grand tapestry. They pulled a loose string. The image is still there for now, but the tension is gone. Eventually, the whole thing will start to sag."
He looked down at the Heart of the Saint, which he had placed on the stone ledge between them. It pulsed with a rhythmic, golden light that was synchronized with the distant, slow turning of the stars.
"For the next twenty years, perhaps fifty, the world will pretend nothing happened," Vane continued. "The Church will rebuild their engine. The people will go back to their trades. But every so often, a shadow will move when it shouldn't. A door will lead to a room that doesn't exist. The 'noise' is building up behind the silence."
"And us?" Sylva asked. "What do we do for a fifty years?"
Vane looked at her, his violet eyes flashing with a spark of genuine, albeit cold, amusement.
"We wait for the tea to steep," he said. "And I suppose I should start teaching you how to walk through walls. It's a useful skill when the hallways start forgetting where they go."
He looked back out over the city. The Inquisition's torches were moving further away, heading toward a sector they had already cleared. They had passed right over the clock tower's shadow, their eyes never once rising to the roof.
To the world, Vane and Sylva had already ceased to exist.