Habits, Nymera had learned, were decisions that had stopped asking permission.
The city hovered on that edge now.
Rhen sensed it in the way meetings opened—faster, smoother, familiar. The questions were still asked, but sometimes by reflex rather than curiosity. People knew the language of restraint well enough to speak it without feeling its weight.
"That's how it happens," Skelda muttered one afternoon, watching a proposal pass with little friction. "We get good at the motions."
Nymera didn't argue. She felt it too—the ease creeping in, the comfort of competence.
Competence was dangerous.
The proposal that exposed it was almost invisible.
A scheduling reform. Minor. Sensible. It would align review cycles across departments, reducing repetition and saving hours each week. No one objected. Why would they?
Rhen paused over the document, brow furrowing. "When does it end?"
Skelda glanced up. "End?"
"Yes," he said. "What's the release condition?"
Silence fell.
The author of the proposal blinked. "It's… a process improvement."
Nymera leaned forward. "Processes are the hardest things to dismantle."
The room shifted—attention sharpening.
The author flushed. "We didn't think it needed—"
"—permission to stop," Nymera finished gently. "That's exactly the moment before habit."
They did something unprecedented.
They slowed a good idea.
Not to kill it.
Not to punish it.
To ask the question that had begun to fade from muscle memory:
How does this end?
The proposal was revised—release conditions added, review dates named, criteria for dismantling written as carefully as criteria for adoption.
When it passed the second time, the room felt different.
Quieter.
More awake.
The deep noticed the pause.
You interrupt efficiency, it conveyed. At the point of success.
"Yes," Nymera replied. "Success is when forgetting feels justified."
Forgetting reduces cost, the deep observed.
Rhen shook his head. "It defers it."
A pause.
Deferred cost compounds.
Nymera smiled faintly. "We're finally agreeing."
That week, the city held an unusual exercise.
Not a drill.
Not a simulation.
A reversal.
They chose three standing practices—useful, accepted, uncontroversial—and suspended them for forty-eight hours. No emergencies. No crises.
Just absence.
The first day felt awkward. People stumbled, missed steps, cursed softly. By evening, improvisations appeared. Notes were taped to doors. Conversations replaced checklists.
On the second day, something unexpected happened.
Relief.
Not everywhere. Not for everyone.
But enough to matter.
When the practices were restored, they were not the same.
Two returned unchanged.
One was redesigned entirely.
No speeches followed.
The ledger recorded only this:
HABIT INTERRUPTED — INSIGHT GAINED.
Nymera walked the unbuilt space that night, listening to water lap at stone that had learned to stay empty. Rhen joined her, hands in his pockets.
"We're close," he said.
"To what?" she asked.
"To letting this become automatic," he replied.
She nodded. "Which is why we have to keep naming the moment before."
He smiled. "The moment before habit."
"Yes," she said softly. "That's where choice still breathes."
The deep spoke again, quieter than ever.
Your vigilance increases overhead.
"Yes," Nymera replied.
Overhead reduces growth.
Rhen answered, "But preserves agency."
A pause.
Agency resists optimization.
Nymera looked out at the water, steady and alive. "Good."
In the days that followed, the city did not become slower.
It became intentional.
People learned to recognize the subtle comfort of routine and greet it not with suspicion, but with questions. The habit of asking how does this end? spread—not as policy, but as instinct.
And that instinct changed everything.
Because it meant the city no longer waited for crisis to remember how to choose.
It remembered before.