The gods reacted in six different ways.
Erynd counted them as he walked.
Panic was the first. The inspection square still screamed behind him—priests shouting commands that no longer synchronized with the divine lattice. When one pillar of light failed, the others overcompensated, burning brighter, hotter. A poorly designed redundancy. Predictable.
Fear came second. He felt it in the way people avoided his gaze, the way space opened around him as though reality itself had decided he was a hazard.
Confusion followed. The system hated undefined variables.
Then came anger.
That one took longer.
Erynd reached the edge of Greyreach before the first correction attempt began.
The air tightened.
Not pressure—intent.
[Divine Notice Detected]
Source: Minor Aspect — Order
Status: Inquiry
Erynd didn't slow. He adjusted his breathing, counting steps, aligning his pace with the residual pulse of the lattice. He could still feel it—faint now, like an echo after a bell stopped ringing.
Inquiry meant the gods weren't sure what he was.
That meant he still had time.
"Deny," he said softly.
The word wasn't a command. It was a classification.
The intent slid past him, searching for something that obeyed the old definitions.
It found nothing.
Behind him, a section of the street fractured as if struck by an invisible hammer. Stone split. Light leaked.
A warning shot.
Erynd turned into the lower districts, where buildings leaned close enough to touch and divine sight blurred under accumulated human presence. Gods disliked clutter. Too many variables. Too much noise.
His vision swam.
The penalty was asserting itself.
Loss of future certainty didn't mean blindness. It meant something worse.
He could still see outcomes.
He just couldn't tell which ones were his.
Erynd stopped beneath a rusted archway and pressed two fingers to his temple.
Think. Don't assume continuity.
The system had flagged him as Null Anchor. That meant the unfinished oath wasn't passive—it was listening. Feeding him authority in a dormant state, waiting for stress to justify activation.
A classic escalation trigger.
"If I were a god," Erynd murmured, "I'd test me."
The alley darkened.
No light vanished—light simply stopped being relevant.
A figure stepped out of the shadow where shadows shouldn't overlap.
Humanoid. Almost.
Its face was smooth, unfinished, as though sculpted by someone who knew the idea of a face but not its purpose. Symbols crawled beneath its skin, correcting themselves as they moved.
A Fate Warden.
Not a god.
Worse.
[Causal Anomaly Confirmed]
Correction Authorized]
Erynd didn't run.
Running assumed pursuit. Pursuit assumed intent.
The Warden raised a hand.
Reality aligned around that gesture.
Erynd stepped left.
Then right.
Then didn't move at all.
The Warden froze.
Its mandate required deviation—resistance, defiance, or submission. Erynd offered none of those. He was moving inside the tolerance threshold, a statistical stutter rather than a rebellion.
The symbols on the Warden's arm jittered.
"State," it demanded, voice layered with timelines.
Erynd met its blank gaze.
"I am unresolved."
The phrase wasn't defiance.
It was accurate.
The Warden hesitated.
That hesitation was everything.
Erynd reached inward—not for power, but for structure. He felt the scar forming behind his sternum, the shape of fear that wasn't his anymore.
[Authority Available: Fear — Dormant]
Activation Conditions: Existential Threat]
"Activate," Erynd whispered, and for the first time, there was intent in his voice.
The alley filled with absence.
The Warden staggered.
Fear, for a being like this, wasn't terror.
It was uncertainty.
Its calculations unraveled. Probabilities blurred. The certainty of correction dissolved into recursive doubt.
Erynd walked past it.
Each step carved a deeper groove into reality, not by force, but by contradiction.
Behind him, the Warden collapsed into static symbols and unfinished commands.
Uncorrected.
Unresolved.
Erynd didn't stop walking until dawn stained the sky a dull grey.
He crossed the river without paying the toll. The ferryman didn't notice him. Not invisibility—misclassification. The system saw a person-shaped absence and discarded it.
Only when the city was far behind did Erynd sit.
His hands were shaking now.
Not fear.
Aftershock.
[Authority — Fear: Level 1 Unlocked]
Side Effect: Reduced Emotional Range
Scar Stability: Low
"So it begins," Erynd said quietly.
He stared at the horizon, trying to imagine a future and finding only fog.
For the first time, his intelligence met something it couldn't fully model.
And for the first time—
He smiled.
High above, where divine logic intersected with certainty, the Radiant Conclave convened in silence.
A new designation appeared in their records.
Not a name.
A warning.
UNWRITTEN
And the gods, for all their power, began to plan.