Two years had passed since the night of the Unraveled Square. To the citizens of Aethelgard, the "Great Anomaly" was now a fading memory, tucked away in the archives of the Inquisition as an isolated incident. But for Sylva, the world had become a thin, transparent veil.
She stood at the edge of a bustling market in the southern docks, watching a group of dockworkers struggle with a heavy shipping crate. Two years ago, she would have seen men and wood. Now, she saw the Friction. She saw the way their panic made their movements jagged, and the way the heavy crate seemed to fight them simply because the men expected a struggle.
"Stop focusing on the weight," Vane's voice echoed in her mind, cool and detached. "Look at the empty spaces the weight hasn't claimed yet."
Sylva closed her eyes for a heartbeat, calming her pulse until she felt that familiar, clear silence. She adjusted her posture, sliding into the Ghost State. A patrol of Inquisitors marched past, their silver armor clinking. One looked directly at her, but his eyes slid away instantly—she was just a shadow against a brick wall, as unremarkable as a discarded crate or a weathered pillar. To his mind, she was simply part of the background.
She was no longer the frantic girl who had fled the library. Her movements were fluid, her gaze steady. Vane had spent seven hundred days teaching her to "edit" her own presence—to move through the world without leaving a ripple. But more importantly, he had taught her how to see the Core Design of everything around her.
Later that evening, they sat in the ruins of an old observatory overlooking the sea. Vane was, as always, preoccupied with a small kettle and a set of mismatched cups. The Heart of the Saint sat between them, glowing with a soft, rhythmic amber light.
"You're leaving," Vane said. It wasn't a question. He didn't even look up from the tea leaves.
"The city is hurting, Vane," Sylva said softly. "You see the cracks as structural flaws, but I see them as people falling through. You told me the 'noise' is building up. If no one prepares them for the silence, they'll go mad when the sky eventually breaks for good."
Vane poured a stream of pale green liquid into a cup. "I taught you how to survive the collapse, not how to build a church. Why bother? In a hundred years, the world will fail regardless of how many people are praying to the dark."
"They won't be praying to the dark," Sylva replied, standing up. She looked out at the flickering lights of the city. "They'll be learning the Void Path. I'm going to teach them what you taught me. How to be still. How to find the gaps in the world. If reality is going to fray, they shouldn't be screaming when it happens."
Vane finally looked at her. His violet eyes held a flicker of something that might have been respect, or perhaps just a mild curiosity at a choice he hadn't expected.
"You're establishing a religion based on a man who doesn't care if he's followed," Vane remarked. "That's a very strange use of your time."
"It's not about you, Vane. It's about the truth you represent," she said, adjusting her travel pack. "The Inquisition calls you a demon. I'm going to tell them you're the shadow that shows where the light is broken. I'm going to call it the Order of the Void."
Vane reached into the folds of his cloak and tossed something toward her. Sylva caught it out of the air—it was a small, smooth shard of the crystal housing that had once held the Heart. It hummed with a faint, resonant vibration.
"If you're going to start a following, you'll need a way to know the time," Vane said, returning his attention to his tea. "That shard is tied to the Heart. It will stay warm as long as the foundation of this reality is still holding. When it turns cold... that's when the middle chapters are over and the end begins."
Sylva gripped the shard, feeling its steady warmth. "And where will you be?"
"I'll be right here," Vane said, leaning back against a crumbling stone pillar. "Or perhaps I'll find a better tea shop in the East. Time is a very loose concept for me, Sylva. I have plenty of it to spend."
Sylva bowed her head—not to a god, but to a teacher. Then, she turned and walked into the shadows. She didn't use the stairs; she simply stepped off the ledge of the observatory. To anyone watching, it would have looked like a fall, but Sylva moved with the grace Vane had taught her. She glided down the side of the cliff, a ghost in the moonlight, heading toward the slums to find her first followers.
Vane watched her go, a small, nearly invisible smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
A religion, he thought, taking a sip of his tea. How very crowded. But I suppose every masterpiece needs a few people to explain it.
Sylva's journey away from the observatory was not a frantic flight, but a measured descent into the layers of Aethelgard that the sun-drenched Upper District chose to forget. She traveled through the "Seams"—the narrow, soot-stained gaps between the towering industrial warehouses where the air was thick with the smell of coal and desperation.
For weeks, Sylva moved as a shadow among shadows. She didn't stay in inns or public houses; she slept in the hollowed-out hulls of abandoned riverboats and under the eaves of spice-mills. She was practicing the Ghost State constantly. She learned that it wasn't just about being still; it was about matching the "frequency" of her surroundings. In the docks, she became as heavy and salt-worn as the pylons; in the markets, she became as frantic and invisible as the wind-blown trash.
She traveled further than she ever had before, crossing the Grey Canal into the "Low-End," a sprawl of haphazard architecture where the city's logic had already begun to fail long before the Purity Engine's collapse. Here, the streets didn't always meet at right angles, and people lived in a state of quiet, weary acceptance of the world's harshness.
She found the spot on a rainy Tuesday in a district known as The Sink. It was a massive, subterranean cistern that had been forgotten by the city's engineers centuries ago. The entrance was hidden behind a crumbling brick facade of a former tannery.
As she descended the moss-slicked stairs into the vast, echoing chamber, the crystal shard in her pocket flared with a deep, pulsing warmth.
The cistern was beautiful in its decay. Huge stone arches reached up into the darkness, and a shallow pool of black water sat at the center, as still as a mirror. The air here didn't carry the "noise" of the city above—the clanking of gears, the shouting of guards, the frantic pulse of commerce. It was silent. It was a pocket of the world that had already surrendered to the stillness.
"This is the center," she whispered, her voice rippling across the water.