The city did not panic when the sky flickered.
It argued.
Kael learned this from the reports that followed—not of riots or prayers, but of disagreements that refused to settle. Scholars debated priests. Merchants questioned guild edicts. Soldiers asked why before asking how.
Michael read through the accounts with a slow, incredulous smile. "You've turned instability into discourse," he said. "That's… extremely inconvenient for anything that thrives on certainty."
Seris wasn't smiling. "It's also fragile. Argument can become fracture."
Kael nodded. "Which is why we don't push."
Aurelian tilted her head. "You intend to wait?"
"I intend to listen," Kael said. "Fault lines reveal themselves under pressure. We don't need to create more."
Pressure arrived anyway.
By evening, messengers brought word from the north. The war-priest—now calling himself Saint Varric—had marched on a river town that refused his authority. No massacre. No miracle. Just discipline enforced with steel and sermons.
"He's compensating," Michael said. "When the feed weakens, proxies escalate."
"And the coast?" Kael asked.
Seris exhaled. "The silver-voiced woman has stopped speaking in public. Her followers are… restless."
Aurelian's expression darkened. "Charisma without reinforcement decays into fear."
Kael studied the map, then placed a marker not on Varric's path, but beside it. "We won't confront him directly."
Seris frowned. "He's conquering."
"No," Kael said. "He's performing conquest."
Michael snorted. "There's a difference."
Kael turned to him. "You said echoes can't adapt."
"They can't," Michael agreed. "But people around them can."
Orders went out—not to muster armies, but to send mediators, healers, record-keepers. To open granaries ahead of Varric's march. To publish accounts—unedited—of what happened in towns he'd already passed.
"Sunlight," Michael murmured. "You're weaponizing transparency."
Two days later, the first fracture appeared.
A captain in Varric's host refused an order that contradicted last week's sermon. The refusal spread—not as mutiny, but as confusion. The rhythm broke.
On the coast, the silver-voiced woman spoke again—once. Her voice faltered mid-speech. Not cracked by opposition, but by an unexpected question from the crowd.
"Who are you without us?"
She had no answer prepared.
That night, Michael found Kael alone in the archive room, surrounded by histories half-finished and treaties rewritten in the margins.
"You know this gets harder," Michael said. "The closer you get to the core, the more personal the system makes it."
Kael didn't look up. "It already has."
Michael hesitated. "How so?"
Kael closed the book gently. "It's stopped treating me like a problem."
Michael's humor vanished. "Then what?"
"Like a precedent," Kael said.
Outside, a distant bell rang—one of the old ones, rung by hand, not omen or order. A community calling itself together.
Fault lines were appearing, yes.
But not where the system expected.
And as the ground shifted, Kael understood the next truth of power:
It wasn't the breaking that mattered.
It was who learned how to live with the cracks.