In later years, philosophers would argue about whether the world had lost something essential.
They pointed to the absence of miracles, the lack of final answers, the way history no longer curved neatly toward meaning. They called it a deficit. A void. A wound that never healed.
Others disagreed.
They pointed instead to smaller things.
To neighbors who argued fiercely and still shared meals.
To councils that failed publicly and tried again without hiding the record.
To children who asked dangerous questions and were not punished for it.
They called it mercy.
Uncertainty, they argued, had become a kind of shelter—not from pain, but from domination. No single story could trap everyone inside it anymore.
Once, during a particularly bitter winter, a famine nearly took hold in the north. There were no saviors. No prophecies of survival.
People organized anyway.
Some plans failed. Some succeeded badly. Enough worked.
The famine passed.
No one celebrated. They simply remembered how close they had come, and adjusted.
Far beyond the stars, the Custodians still existed—but this world no longer produced the signals that demanded response. It generated no clean data, no stable hierarchies, no scalable obedience.
It was inefficient.
It endured.
And if Kael was remembered at all in those years, it was only in passing—in the quiet understanding that the most important mercy ever given to the world was not protection…
…but the freedom to be uncertain and continue regardless.
The story ended nowhere.
Which meant it could be lived everywhere.