The echoes began to fail in small, human ways.
One preacher forgot a line.
Another contradicted himself mid-sentence and froze—not confused, but stalled, as if waiting for an instruction that never came. A guild spokesman repeated the same argument to three different crowds and was laughed out of the third tavern for sounding like a pamphlet instead of a man.
Kael watched the reports pile up without satisfaction.
"This isn't victory," Seris said, scanning the summaries. "It's… erosion."
Michael nodded. "That's what happens when ideology doesn't have feedback loops."
Aurelian looked uneasy. "You are unraveling something sacred."
"No," Kael said quietly. "I'm revealing that it was never sacred to begin with."
Still, the system did not retreat. It adapted.
That evening, the pressure returned—stronger, sharper, no longer subtle. Kael staggered as the warmth inside him surged painfully, not hungry, but strained.
Michael was at his side instantly. "Okay. That's new. It's pushing load directly into you."
Aurelian's eyes widened. "The Veiled Star is forcing consolidation. It's trying to collapse the distributed structure back into a single locus."
"Into me," Kael said through clenched teeth.
Seris drew her blade. "Can we stop it?"
Michael shook his head. "Not externally. This is internal architecture."
Kael closed his eyes and did something none of his predecessors ever had.
He let go.
Not of power—but of ownership.
He opened the bonds he carried, not to sever them, but to share the strain. Seris felt it first—a sudden clarity, a steadiness that was not hers alone. Somewhere in the city, others felt it too: confidence without command, resolve without instruction.
The pressure fractured.
Kael fell to one knee, breathing hard, but alive. The warmth inside him reorganized—not centralized, not scattered, but networked.
Michael stared. "You… you just violated a core assumption."
Aurelian whispered, "He decentralized the divine."
Outside, the sky flickered—not lightning, but something deeper, as if a star had blinked.
Far away, the war-priest's miracles faltered. The silver-voiced woman's adoration dimmed, no longer feeding upward cleanly.
The system had pushed.
Reality had pushed back.
Kael rose slowly. He felt weaker in raw force—and stronger in every way that mattered.
"This won't end quickly," Michael said quietly.
Kael nodded. "It shouldn't."
That night, for the first time since the gift awakened, Kael slept without dreams of thrones or wheels or stars.
Somewhere beyond sight, the Veiled Star recalculated again.
But now, it was doing so under conditions it had never been designed to survive.