The sky did not finish breaking.
It paused, as if reconsidering the permission it had just granted itself.
Threads of light hung frozen above Eidolon Reach, suspended mid-fall like veins torn from the heavens and left undecided. The city below trembled—not violently, not dramatically—but with the restrained instability of something pretending to be solid.
Aster felt it in his bones.
The city was listening.
The girl in white stood at the center of the plaza, her presence anchoring the impossible calm. The air around her warped subtly, not bending space but prioritizing her existence over everything else.
Lyra took a careful step forward.
"You said another him came here," she said, keeping her voice steady. "When?"
The girl tilted her head.
"Before this version of the world learned how to hesitate."
That answer landed wrong.
Raven's grip tightened on his blade. "Define another."
The girl's gaze flickered—briefly, almost imperceptibly—toward Aster's shadow.
"A divergence that was not corrected," she said. "A path that should have collapsed, but didn't."
Aster felt pressure build behind his eyes.
"So I survived where I wasn't supposed to," he said. "That's not new."
The girl shook her head slowly.
"No. You arrived where you were never meant to exist."
The ground beneath them pulsed.
Lanterns along the street flickered in unison, as if reacting to a signal only they could hear. The shadowless citizens paused mid-movement—laughter stopping, footsteps freezing—before resuming again, slightly out of sync.
Elias whispered, "They're desynchronizing…"
"They're degrading," Lyra corrected. "Memory decay."
The girl in white turned toward the surrounding buildings.
"This city is held together by sustained recollection," she said. "Every second it exists, it consumes certainty from elsewhere."
Aster's shadow stretched, thin and sharp.
"So that's why timelines are vanishing."
"Yes," she replied. "They are not destroyed. They are spent."
Aster exhaled slowly.
"And you're the one feeding it."
"I am the one rationing it," the girl said. "Without me, Eidolon Reach would collapse instantly—and take several adjacent realities with it."
Raven cursed under his breath. "So we either let it exist and bleed the world dry… or erase it and cause a cascade."
The girl looked at Aster again.
"That choice was presented before."
Lyra snapped her head toward him. "You didn't tell us that."
Aster didn't look away.
"Because I don't remember making it."
Silence spread through the plaza.
Then the Seventh Note stirred.
Not loudly.
Not violently.
But with recognition.
The city reacted immediately.
Cracks spider-webbed through the stone beneath Aster's feet—not breaking, but rearranging themselves into unfamiliar patterns. Symbols surfaced briefly, then sank back into the pavement as if ashamed of being seen.
The girl stepped back for the first time.
"You're closer than you were before," she said softly. "Closer to becoming a fixed point."
"That sounds like a compliment," Aster replied.
"It isn't."
The sky finally finished its motion.
The threads of light fell—not downward, but inward, converging toward the city's core. Somewhere beneath Eidolon Reach, something ancient shifted, acknowledging a presence it could no longer ignore.
Far beyond the plaza, bells began to ring.
Not alarms.
Announcements.
Lyra felt it then—the unmistakable sense of being observed, not by a single entity, but by a system recalibrating its attention.
"Aster…" she said quietly. "We're out of time."
He nodded.
"I know."
The girl in white met his gaze one last time.
"If you stay," she said, "this city will bind itself to you."
"And if I leave?"
Her expression softened—not with mercy, but with inevitability.
"Then Arc Two will proceed without restraint."
Aster stepped forward anyway.
The city exhaled.
And somewhere beyond causality's edge,
something vast finalized its interest in him.