The sky did not break.
It shifted.
Across Malan, the change was subtle enough that most people dismissed it as fatigue or imagination. Clouds formed half a degree off their usual paths. Star charts required minor correction. Migratory beasts hesitated mid-journey, then chose routes that had never existed before.
Nothing collapsed.
Which was precisely the problem.
In the Covenant's uppermost astral array, calibration failed for the third time in a single hour. Not catastrophically. Not enough to trigger alarms.
Enough to force recalculation.
An overseer frowned at the projection. "The sky's alignment is off."
A technician checked the data twice. "By all models, it shouldn't be."
"But it is."
The problem was not elemental. Fire behaved as fire. Light remained light. Darkness still obeyed depth and consumption.
Only one vector refused classification.
Movement without directive.
Flow without command.
Change without cause.
"The heavens aren't resisting us," the overseer said slowly. "They're… disagreeing."
That distinction unsettled the room.
Sky alignment had always been passive. Even dragons, for all their dominion, negotiated with the sky rather than controlled it outright. The Covenant had relied on that consistency when erecting their global lattice.
Now the lattice still held—
—but the sky was no longer cooperating.
Far above the continents, ancient watchers noticed first.
Dragons who had slept through centuries opened one eye. Constellations they remembered as fixed had shifted ever so slightly, like a blade nudged out of its sheath.
"This isn't erosion," one elder dragon murmured. "This is adjustment."
Elves noticed next.
Not through instruments, but through memory. Forest canopies leaned in unfamiliar ways. Moonlight filtered through leaves at angles that recalled songs no one sang anymore.
"The old paths are breathing again," an elven archivist said quietly.
Demons noticed last.
Because demons noticed intent, not environment.
In sealed halls and contract-bound chambers, several entities paused mid-conversation as the same realization surfaced independently.
The world was no longer being optimized.
It was being allowed.
Asmodeus Noctyrr smiled to himself, chains humming faintly as they adjusted to a reality that had shifted its assumptions.
"So," he murmured, "the sky remembers."
Vale stood beneath that sky as dusk bled into night. Two moons rose—one pale, one fractured—casting overlapping shadows that did not quite agree with one another.
He felt no surge of power.
Only alignment.
The wind moved differently now. Not freer—more honest. It did not rush to fill space. It waited, as if aware that it no longer needed to prove its existence.
Vale exhaled.
Somewhere far away, instruments screamed softly.
The Covenant logged the phenomenon under a new internal designation.
Event Type: Structural Deviation
Status: Ongoing
Risk: Escalating
They did not write the real conclusion.
That the sky, once corrected by force and doctrine, had begun correcting itself.
And once the heavens misaligned—
—the ground would follow.