They didn't linger in the valley.
Eris could still feel the place where reality had thinned, like a bruise in the shape of the world. The grass had its color back, the sky its weight—but something about the air carried the memory of absence.
Lysa kept glancing over her shoulder. "You know when you almost get hit by a cart and your body stays tense for an hour after?"
"Yes."
"This is that, but for existence."
They walked until the land rose into low hills and the valley disappeared behind them.
Only then did Eris finally slow.
His legs gave a little. He leaned on a rock, breathing carefully.
Lysa crouched in front of him. "Okay, hero. Inventory check. You alive?"
"Yes."
"Bleeding?"
"No."
"Glowing ominously?"
"…Not anymore."
"Good. I prefer my companions not glowing ominously before breakfast."
Eris smiled weakly. "I don't think I get a choice."
She studied him, expression softer now. "What you did back there… that wasn't just power. That was stubbornness."
"Is there a difference?"
"Big one," she said. "Power breaks things. Stubbornness makes things stay."
Eris considered that.
The charm stone in Lysa's pocket pulsed once—warm, then still.
He frowned. "Did you feel that?"
She touched the pocket. "Yeah. Like it approved of you or something."
They sat in the grass for a moment, letting the world be normal again.
Then Eris noticed the scar.
Not on his body.
On the horizon.
A thin, pale line where the sky didn't quite match itself. Where blue shifted too suddenly into lighter blue.
The world had healed—but not perfectly.
"What happens now?" Lysa asked quietly.
Eris followed her gaze. "Now the things that edit reality know they can be resisted."
"And that's bad… right?"
"It's dangerous," Eris said. "For them."
She laughed under her breath. "I like that answer."
He stood slowly, feeling the faint ache of overused power settle into his bones.
"We keep moving," he said. "Find places that still believe they're real."
"And if more tears show up?"
Eris looked ahead, toward the road winding into the hills.
"Then we teach the world to push back."
Somewhere far beyond the scarred horizon, something vast recalculated.
Not how to erase him—
But how to understand him.
And that uncertainty…
Was the first real wound it had ever received.