Night settled slowly over the highlands.
The ruins slept uneasily, stone cooling beneath a pale, ancient moon that had watched civilizations rise and fracture long before names were carved into history. Aethric stood apart from the campfire, seated on bare rock, staff resting across his knees. He had drawn no words. He did not need them.
This place remembered him.
He closed his eyes.
The moonlight deepened not brighter, but older, its glow thinning the veil between present and past. Aethric inhaled, letting his breathing fall into a rhythm refined over centuries. Memory stirred, not as emotion, but as data.
Patterns.
He let them surface.
A battlefield under a red sky.
A council chamber split by argument.
A city cheering as reality itself bent to spectacle.
The First Era had not fallen because of a single enemy.
It had collapsed under confidence.
We can fix this later.
We understand enough.
Nothing like this has ever failed before.
Aethric had heard those words spoken by archmages whose names were now dust.
He opened his eyes slightly, gaze lifting to the moon. "Hubris," he murmured. "Always the same flaw."
Behind him, Nyra sat quietly, pretending to sleep. She had learned enough already to know when not to interrupt.
Aethric traced a sigil in the air, small, contained, purely mental in function. Threads of remembered futures aligned themselves, branching and recombining. He did not see the future.
He saw ranges.
"The agent chose proximity, not lethality," he said aloud, mostly to himself. "Observation before escalation. That narrows the timeline."
Nyra shifted. "You're… predicting them?"
"I am eliminating improbabilities," Aethric replied calmly. "The Hollow Sovereign never strikes blindly. It layers inevitability."
He saw it clearly now.
First: destabilize relic sites.
Second: identify resonant individuals.
Third: provoke reaction, not war.
The First Era playbook.
His jaw tightened faintly.
"I believe I will repeat my old mistakes," he said. "Overcommit. Attempt total containment. Isolate myself."
Nyra sat up. "Won't you?"
Aethric looked at her.
"No," he said. "I already tried that once."
The moonlight shifted.
Without warning, the world fell away.
Aethric did not resist the vision. He recognized the sensation immediately as a forced overlap, not prophecy but intrusion.
The sky tore open.
Not violently. Deliberately.
Cities drowned in silence as magic failed mid-cast. Towers collapsed, not from an attack, but from absence. Vast Nullcraft zones spread like frost, swallowing enchantment, knowledge, and identity.
At the center of it
A broken hierarchy artifact.
Incomplete.
Weaponized.
Aethric felt the future press against him, testing for weakness.
He responded by observing.
He saw cult banners raised where academies once stood. He saw Grave-Weave rituals turning memory into fuel. He saw the Hollow Sovereign not whole, not yet, but reaching.
And he saw Nyra.
Not crowned.
Not exalted.
Standing at a fault line, holding two incompatible truths together by sheer will.
Aethric's breath slowed.
"So that is the pivot," he whispered.
The vision shattered.
He opened his eyes.
Nyra was staring at him, eyes wide, breath unsteady.
"You saw it too," he said softly.
She nodded. "Not clearly. Just… pieces. When you went still, something in me reacted. Like a door opening on its own."
The hum inside her chest pulsed, then answered.
Aethric felt it instantly.
The air around Nyra bent not dangerously, but meaningfully. Moonlight clung to her outline, tracing glyphs that were not visible a moment before.
Aethric rose to his feet.
"That should not happen," he said.
Nyra swallowed. "I didn't do anything."
"I know."
He studied her carefully, not as a mentor now, but as a variable the First Era had failed to account for.
"The visions are beginning to use you," he said. "Not show you. That means the conflict has crossed a threshold."
The moon dimmed slightly.
Far away, very far, something answered.
Aethric turned his gaze to the horizon.
"Rest," he told Nyra. "Tomorrow, we will move faster. I will no longer assume we have time."
She hesitated. "And if the future you saw."
"It is not fixed," he said firmly. "That is the one lesson worth surviving centuries to learn."
Nyra lay back down, though sleep did not come easily.
Aethric remained standing, silhouetted against the moon.
The past had tried to repeat itself.
This time
He intended to interrupt the pattern.
Aethric glimpses a catastrophic future shaped by Nullcraft, Grave-Weave, and a broken hierarchy artifact and realizes the enemy is following an old First Era strategy. As Nyra begins reacting to visions she did not summon, one truth becomes clear: the future is no longer waiting to happen. It is already pressing back.