Chapter 28
The sky broke without warning.
It did not split like before, nor did it collapse under overwhelming power.
It hesitated—as if reality itself was uncertain whether it was allowed to continue.
Orion felt it before it happened.
A tightening in space.
A misalignment in time.
A single thread of causality being pulled far too hard.
Alice staggered.
He caught her instinctively, one arm wrapping around her waist as her knees nearly gave out. For a heartbeat, her weight vanished—like she was no longer fully anchored to the present.
Her breath came sharp. "Orion… something's wrong."
He already knew.
The island—no, the world beyond the island—had finally noticed her.
The silence that followed was worse than thunder.
Then the horizon folded.
A vertical fracture appeared in the air, stretching from sea to sky, edged in pale resonance like moonlight dragged through glass. From within it seeped a pressure that did not belong to gods, Domains, or even Pillars.
It belonged to Correction.
A voice echoed—not loud, not soft, but absolute.
> "AN ANOMALY HAS PERSISTED TOO LONG."
The ground beneath Blackshores groaned. Ancient wards flared awake, sigils igniting across cliffs and ruins that had not stirred since before history learned to count itself.
Alice clutched Orion's sleeve.
"That voice…" she whispered. "It feels like it's calling me."
Orion's expression darkened.
It was.
She was never meant to exist this way.
Not as someone who could be saved.
Not as someone who could choose him.
The fracture widened, and from it descended a shape—indistinct, wrapped in layered afterimages, as though it occupied several timelines at once. No face. No body. Just an outline carved from inevitability.
The Watchers would have called it an Arbiter.
The Pillars would have called it a Necessary End.
Orion called it what it was.
"A janitor of a broken system."
The thing turned.
Not toward Orion.
Toward Alice.
> "RETURN TO NULL."
Alice gasped as invisible chains wrapped around her existence—not her body, but her presence. The air screamed as causality attempted to peel her away from the moment she stood in.
Orion moved.
There was no flare of power.
No dramatic transformation.
The world simply… obeyed.
Space bent inward, collapsing the distance between him and the Arbiter into nothing. Time locked—not frozen, but denied permission to proceed.
Orion stood between Alice and the fracture.
"You don't get to touch her."
The Arbiter reacted for the first time, its outline shuddering.
> "PILLAR-CLASS INTERFERENCE DETECTED."
The sea rose.
Not as a wave—but as a wall of suspended water, every droplet held in place by warped gravity. The sky dimmed, light folding into an eclipse halo behind Orion's back.
His presence deepened.
This was no longer just a man standing in defiance.
This was authority asserting itself.
"I don't care what you were designed to erase," Orion said quietly.
"But she is under my protection."
The Arbiter unleashed correction.
Reality inverted.
A blade of rewritten causality tore toward Alice—an attack that bypassed defenses by targeting the moment she first existed.
Orion raised a hand.
And space refused to carry the attack.
The blade dissolved, unmade not by force, but by denial. Time recoiled. The fracture spasmed violently, cracks spreading outward like fear.
The island answered.
Blackshores awakened fully.
Ancient mechanisms buried beneath the land surged to life—records, seals, and memories from thousands of years ago aligning into a single will.
The island remembered this choice.
> "ERROR," the Arbiter intoned.
"PROBABILITY COLLAPSE—"
It never finished.
Orion stepped forward once.
The world recentered on him.
He did not strike.
He overrode.
The Arbiter shattered into fragments of failed timelines, each dissolving into harmless light as they fell. The fracture sealed itself with a sound like a sigh of relief.
Silence returned.
Alice was shaking.
Not from fear.
From realization.
"That thing…" she said slowly, "it wasn't trying to hurt me. It was trying to fix something."
Orion knelt in front of her, meeting her eyes.
"Yes."
She swallowed. "By erasing me."
He nodded once.
Alice laughed weakly, then pressed her forehead against his chest. "You're unbelievable."
His arms tightened around her.
"This won't stop," he admitted. "The closer we get to the end of this arc… the more the world will resist you existing beside me."
She tilted her head up. "Then why save me at all?"
Orion didn't answer immediately.
Above them, unseen by most, something shifted.
A title—not yet claimed, but approaching recognition.
Keeper of Space and Time.
Not because of power.
But because he chose one person over a system that demanded sacrifice.
Orion brushed Alice's hair from her eyes.
"Because I already made that choice," he said.
She didn't know his full truth yet.
She didn't know what he would become.
But she smiled anyway.
"Then don't let go," she said softly.
He didn't.
And far beyond the sky, something ancient took note—
Not with anger.
But with anticipation.
The world was about to be challenged again.