The Safehouse was quiet, a buried lung breathing stale, recycled air.
Ogdi sat on the floor of his quarters—a small, concrete cube that smelled of damp limestone and old sweat. He wasn't sleeping. He couldn't sleep.
Ever since the mill, ever since he had accepted the Exchange and taken the spike to the chest for Yleath, his body felt… porous.
He looked at his hands. In the dim light of the single bulb, they seemed solid enough. Skin, bone, scars. But when he closed his eyes, he felt the draft blowing through them. He felt less like a man and more like a sketch that someone had started to erase.
"You are leaking even more," Azad's voice drifted through the room.
It wasn't the urgent shout of combat, nor the cryptic whisper of a guide. It sounded bored, flat—like a master mechanic watching an apprentice strip the head of a screw.
Ogdi opened his eyes. "I'm at 73% Integrity. I know. I'm a cracked vessel."
"No," Azad corrected.
The shadows in the corner of the room coalesced. They didn't form a man, but a silhouette—a dark tear in the room's lighting—that sat casually on the edge of the cot. The shadow had no face, but the posture was unmistakably arrogant.
"The 73% is your soul's stability," Azad lectured. "The leaking… that is because you are trying to play a grand piano while wearing boxing gloves. You are slamming on the keys of reality instead of playing the notes."
Ogdi looked at his black-stained palm, the sigil of the Dragon pulsing faintly. "I edited the friction. I edited the trajectory. It worked."
"It worked because you paid for it with blood," Azad scoffed. "Crude. Messy. If you want to trap a King who wants to become a God, you cannot afford to pay for every brick of the prison. You will run out of blood before he runs out of ambition."
The shadow leaned forward, and the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
"Do you want to see it? The thing you are actually touching when you speak a Command?"
Ogdi hesitated. He felt a spike of fear—a primal fear of seeing something too big for his biological hardware to process. He knew this vision would be a glimpse into the raw structure of existence. To look at the gears of the universe risked shattering the illusion that kept his mind sane.
But the Editor in him needed to see the draft.
"Show me," Ogdi whispered.
Azad snapped his shadowy fingers.
The world didn't fade; it was stripped.
The concrete walls didn't vanish, but they lost their opacity. The cot, the floor, the air—it all stripped away its texture. The colors drained out of the world like water down a drain, leaving behind a stark, blinding whiteness.
And then, the lines appeared.
They were everywhere. Trillions of them. Infinite.
Thin, glowing filaments of sapphire light intersected at impossible angles. They formed the structure of the room, the geometry of the air, the structure of Ogdi's own body.
It was a wireframe universe. A cage of infinite complexity.
"Behold," Azad whispered, his voice resonating from everywhere at once, vibrating along the strings of light. "The Lattice."
Ogdi gasped. The sheer volume of information hit him like a physical blow. He didn't just see the ceiling; he saw the mathematical probability of it collapsing (0.00004%). He saw the tension in the oxygen molecules. He saw the geological history of the stone in the walls.
"This is the rebar of existence," Azad lectured, walking through the lines. The filaments bent around him, acknowledging his authority, parting like tall grass. "Reality—the colors, the smells, the physics—is just the concrete poured over this frame. Most mages paint the concrete. They make fire hot; they make ice cold. Child's play."
Azad turned to Ogdi, his shadow form disrupting the perfect geometry.
"We? We bend the frame."
Ogdi reached out. His hand passed through a cluster of lines. They vibrated, singing a low, discordant note that set his teeth on edge.
"When you make a wish," Azad explained, "you are grabbing a handful of these lines and yanking them. If you yank too hard, or if your grip is weak—that is your 73%—the lines snap back."
Azad plucked a thread. It vibrated violently, sending a shockwave through the room.
"That recoil? That is the Chaos. That is the Repercussion made visible. It is the Universe's immune system correcting an infection. The structure detects a disparity between the Reality (the concrete) and the Lattice (the steel). It eliminates the instability to balance the equation."
Ogdi swallowed hard. "The bullet killing the bystander."
"Exactly," Azad said. "The Universe didn't care about the bystander. It cared about the math. You deflected a vector without accounting for the energy. The Lattice balanced the account by charging someone else."
"So how do I stop the snap?" Ogdi asked, mesmerized by the deadly beauty of the lights.
"You don't yank," Azad said softly. "You harmonize."
The shadow moved its hand. Instead of pulling the string, Azad strummed it. The vibration wasn't violent; it was resonant. The reality around the string shifted smoothly—the air became denser—but there was no snap. No recoil.
"To harmonize is to manipulate the Lattice so precisely that the change feels natural," Azad said. "The Universe doesn't fight you, because you convince it that the change was always meant to be there."
The shadow pointed to a knot in the Lattice—a tangled, ugly mess of jagged red lines near the door.
"That is Murik's barrier from the rooftop. See how messy it is? It's a scribble. It holds, but it stresses the frame. It screams at the universe."
Then, Azad pointed to the corner, where Yleath was sleeping in the next room.
Even through the wall, her Lattice signature was visible. It wasn't a knot. It was a perfect, rhythmic spiral of golden light. The lines around her weren't forced; they were dancing.
"She weaves," Azad noted with a rare hint of respect. "She doesn't fight the tension; she redirects it. That is why she is the Weaver. That is why she sees the riddles. She reads the code, whereas you act like an editor with a red pen, slashing at the page."
Ogdi looked down at his own chest.
The lines there were scarred, welded together in a clumsy lump where the spike had hit him. The initial Exchange was a monumental act of Reality Editing—an external change forced upon his internal Lattice. The scar was the cost of bad math.
"And the King?" Ogdi asked. "What is he doing?"
Azad stopped. The shadow grew taller, colder. The sapphire lights dimmed.
"The King is not weaving. He is not editing. He is consuming."
Azad waved his hand.
The vision zoomed out.
Ogdi felt a sensation of vertigo as his consciousness was pulled upward. The view transcended the local Lattice of the safehouse. He saw the city of Calmarith—a complex web of millions of lines. He saw the region. He saw the country.
And he saw the East.
In the places where the black smoke was rising from the slums, the Lattice wasn't just agitated. It was missing.
Great, gaping holes in the wireframe. Void spots where the sapphire light had been chewed away.
"He is burning souls to sever the Lattice from the physical plane," Azad hissed. "He wants to detach the country from the laws of the universe. To create a pocket dimension where he is the only writer. If he succeeds, Ogdi... there will be no Lattice to edit. There will only be his Will. You will not be able to wish for air if he decides breathing is illegal."
The horror of it settled in Ogdi's gut like lead.
The Isolation Field they planned... it wasn't just a strategy. It was a tourniquet. They had to lock the Lattice before the King dissolved it entirely.
"Exchange," Ogdi realized. "To lock a whole country... to impose a new rule on a structure this big..."
"The cost will be astronomical," Azad agreed. "You cannot pay it with your body. If you tried to channel that much structural change, you would vaporize. Your biology is too small for the physics."
"I need a lens," Ogdi whispered.
"Yes," Azad said. "You need a focus. An amplifier. Something that can take the load of the command so you don't have to."
The vision snapped off.
SLAM.
Reality rushed back in—grey, textured, heavy, and smelling of damp limestone.
Ogdi sat on the floor, gasping for air, sweat soaking his shirt. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The hum of the world was louder now. He could hear the walls groaning under the weight of existence.
He looked at his hands. He didn't just see skin anymore. He saw the blueprint underneath.
"I need an amplifier," Ogdi repeated, his voice shaking.
"Yes," Azad said, his voice fading back into the recesses of Ogdi's mind. "And I suspect your new friends know exactly where to find one."