He laughed.
A dry, broken thing—Merlin's throat had scorched itself from chanting, casting, forcing raw ether into impossible equations, again and again. His mana was drained. His lungs burned like old parchment kissed by fire. But he laughed anyway.
The sky around him trembled, fractured like stained glass beneath invisible weight. Mana storms flickered along the edge of his robes, casting shadows that danced like ghosts. Beneath his boots, the air itself warped, refusing to carry him cleanly now. Too much energy had been spent, drawn from forbidden reservoirs, from his bones, from the marrow of old regrets.
Still, he laughed.
"Just one more minute," he whispered, not to Loki, not to the world—but to himself. The spell was almost complete. The culmination of years. No—decades. The spell that would defy time, rewrite the weave of causality itself. A spell born not from ambition, but from obsession. The last child of a dying mind.
Fifty-two seconds.
