Falling did not feel like descent.
It felt like subtraction.
Stone, sound, even gravity peeled away in layers as Tareth dropped through the fissure, the world simplifying itself around him. The blade burned in his grip, not hot, not cold—insistent. It vibrated with a rhythm older than pulse, older than breath.
Below, the presence waited.
Not reaching.
Not rushing.
Certain.
The Sword God's voice echoed faintly from above, stretched thin by distance and collapsing space. "Tareth—listen to me. That thing doesn't want balance. It wants clarity. And clarity destroys what it cannot categorize."
Tareth twisted mid-fall, barely controlling his orientation. "Isn't that what Kaelvar taught?" he shouted back. "Remove deviation. Excise excess."
A bitter sound followed—half laugh, half fracture. "We taught controlled cuts. What waits below you is not controlled. It is absolute."
The darkness surged upward, swallowing the last remnants of the chamber. The fissure sealed behind him with a sound like a book snapping shut.
Now there was only Tareth.
And the edge.
And the thing that had invented distance so that closeness would mean something.
The fall ended without impact.
He stood on nothing—and was not falling.
Around him stretched a vast plane of intersecting lines, cuts layered over cuts, forming a lattice that extended infinitely in every direction. No up. No down. Just division made visible.
The presence manifested—not as form, but as convergence. Lines thickened, intersected, and where they met, awareness cohered.
"You hesitate," it observed. "That is new."
Tareth steadied his breathing. Kaelvar discipline still held—barely. "You want the blade back," he said.
"I want myself finished," the presence replied. "The blade is a syllable. You are the breath that speaks it."
The sword throbbed violently, qi flaring in chaotic bursts. Images assaulted Tareth again—worlds splitting cleanly, continents drifting apart without war, gods losing relevance as boundaries enforced themselves without petition.
It would be… efficient.
Too efficient.
"And what happens to Ironreach?" Tareth asked. "To Vaalbara?"
A pause.
Then, honesty. "They will be clarified."
That was answer enough.
Tareth lowered the blade slightly.
The presence noticed.
"Do not confuse reluctance with defiance," it warned. "You stand here because the system above you failed. Because Kaelvar refinement hollowed itself out until only obedience remained. I am the correction."
"No," Tareth said quietly. "You're the overcorrection."
The lattice shuddered.
For the first time, uncertainty rippled through the cuts.
"You dare—"
"I was made to remove deviation," Tareth continued, voice steadying as something inside him aligned—not with the blade, not with the presence, but against both. "But deviation is how systems breathe. You don't want balance. You want silence between pieces."
The sword screamed.
Not in protest.
In fear.
Because it understood what Tareth was about to do.
The presence surged, lines thickening, converging toward him. "You cannot hold me incomplete," it snapped. "I am difference itself."
"Then learn restraint," Tareth said—and drove the blade into himself.
Qi detonated inward.
Pain erased thought.
The blade did not cut flesh—it cut alignment. Severed the resonance between itself and the presence, slicing through the invisible thread that had been pulling it toward completion.
The lattice fractured violently.
Lines screamed as they split, intersecting incorrectly, collapsing into paradox. The presence recoiled, not wounded, but interrupted.
"What have you done?" it demanded.
Tareth collapsed to one knee, blood dripping from his mouth, vision blurring. "I chose to be the mistake."
The sword fell from his hand, clattering across nothingness, its light guttering.
Above—far above—Ironreach felt it.
The city lurched as pressure vanished abruptly. Towers stopped collapsing mid-fall. Wards flickered back to life in broken, inconsistent patterns. Kaelvar masters staggered, suddenly unsure which way was forward.
In Myrr territory, Sereth Nael exhaled sharply. "He severed the recall," she whispered. "But not cleanly."
In the Demon Realm, the ancient entity snarled, amusement gone. "Idiot," it hissed. "Now it's unstable."
The presence withdrew, lines unraveling, retreating into the lattice like a wounded principle licking its abstractions.
"This is not finished," it warned, voice fading. "You have denied completion. The world will compensate."
The plane collapsed.
Gravity returned with a vengeance.
Tareth fell again—this time fast.
Stone rushed up to meet him as the Deep Galleries reasserted themselves violently, walls slamming back into existence, corridors snapping into alignment they had never held before.
He hit hard.
Bones cracked. Breath fled.
The sword landed beside him, inert, dull, almost ordinary.
Alarms wailed above—real ones now. Structural failure. Dimensional instability. Unclassified breach.
Tareth lay on the cold stone, blood pooling beneath him, staring at the blade that no longer hummed.
He had not finished the edge.
He had broken it further.
Somewhere deep beneath the world, something fundamental adjusted its stance.
And systems—wounded, humiliated systems—began preparing their answer.