Long after the arguments about Kael softened into anecdotes, scholars tried to catalog the change.
They failed.
Not because records were lost, but because there was no clean moment to point to. No decree. No revolution. No line where before cleanly became after.
Every attempt to write a "Foundational Text" stalled halfway through.
Footnotes outnumbered conclusions. Margins filled with objections. Readers argued with the author, then with each other, then rewrote the whole thing differently.
And somehow, that became the tradition.
Children were taught history as a series of attempts, not destinies. Leaders were elected with expiration dates. Laws were written with space left deliberately blank at the end, labeled simply:
To be argued later.
Occasionally, someone would try to resurrect certainty—package it neatly, sell it as relief. It never lasted long. People had learned the feel of borrowed answers, and they no longer fit comfortably.
As for Kael—no monument was ever raised.
The closest thing was a saying, passed around without attribution:
If the solution needs you to stop thinking, it isn't finished.
No one knew who first said it.
That, too, felt right.
Far beyond the world, the Custodians archived the last observation and closed the file—not because the experiment had ended, but because it no longer behaved like one.
The universe moved on to simpler problems.
This world did not end. It did not ascend. It did not resolve.
It continued—uneven, argumentative, unfinished.
And in that unfinished state, it endured.