The first week was the hardest.
Not because of enemies or reprisals—but because nothing dramatic happened.
Kael learned quickly that the world, when not being pushed by prophecy or systems, did not pause to admire freedom. It kept moving. Messily. Inconveniently.
He walked the streets of Virell without escorts now. Some people recognized him. Some didn't. A few stared too long, unsure whether they were supposed to bow.
Most just kept going.
At first, that stung more than he expected.
"You're detoxing," Michael said as they shared bread at a street stall. "From relevance."
Kael raised an eyebrow. "You make it sound like an addiction."
"It was," Michael replied easily. "For all of us."
They passed a group of children arguing loudly over a game whose rules changed every few seconds. No one won. No one cared.
Kael smiled without meaning to.
Seris, meanwhile, was busy in a way she had never been when serving under banners. She helped establish a rotating council—temporary seats, fixed limits, mandatory dissent written into its rules.
"You're building friction into governance," Kael said when she explained it.
"Yes," Seris replied. "Power should chafe."
Aurelian did something no one expected.
She stopped teaching doctrine.
Instead, she taught history—not as a sacred sequence, but as overlapping mistakes. Failed rulers. Broken systems. Moments where people chose badly, then chose again.
"The Star gave answers," she told her students. "I give context."
News still came from beyond Virell.
Not all of it good.
In the south, a warlord tried to imitate Saint Varric—less divine, more brutal. He lasted three months before his own lieutenants abandoned him.
In the east, a city rejected councils altogether and crowned a tyrant "for stability." They learned quickly what stability without accountability cost.
Kael listened. He did not intervene.
That was the second hardest lesson.
"You can't save every version of the world," Michael told him one night, as they watched lanterns drift over the river. "Even when you could, you shouldn't."
Kael nodded. "I know."
He didn't always believe it.
The Custodian did not return.
That worried Michael more than if he had.
"Silence means recalculation," he said. "They're watching emergent patterns."
Kael looked at the water, reflecting broken lines of light. "Let them."
"What if they decide to prune harder next time?"
"Then they'll learn," Kael said calmly, "that pruning isn't the same as understanding."
One evening, as autumn crept into the air, Kael felt something unexpected.
A pull.
Not from above. Not from beyond.
From a person.
A young woman approached him hesitantly near the old forum—the same place where he had first refused certainty. She carried a bundle of papers, hands ink-stained, eyes nervous but determined.
"They said you'd listen," she said.
Kael gestured to the bench beside him. "I can try."
She sat. Unrolled the papers. Maps. Notes. Questions.
"I don't want power," she said quickly. "Or followers. I just… I see patterns. In trade routes. In famine cycles. And no one in the council wants to hear it because it doesn't sound heroic."
Kael studied her work.
It was good. Careful. Uncomfortable.
"What do you want from me?" he asked.
She swallowed. "Permission, I guess. To be taken seriously."
Kael smiled—not as a leader, not as a node, but as someone who understood what it meant to wait for approval that never should have been required.
"You don't need mine," he said. Then paused. "But I'll sit with you when you present it."
Her eyes widened. "That's it?"
"That's it," Kael said.
When she left, Michael appeared from nowhere, as usual. "You realize what you just did."
"I didn't grant authority," Kael said.
"No," Michael agreed. "You shared attention."
Kael leaned back, looking up at the dimming sky.
The world was not saved.
It was arguing. Failing. Learning slowly.
And somehow, that felt like progress.
Far beyond sight, mechanisms shifted. Probabilities recalculated. The Custodians observed a universe that no longer produced clean data.
Not because it was broken—
—but because it had learned to choose in ways no system could fully predict.
And that, quietly, terrified them.