The sword ticked again.
Not louder.
Closer.
The technician's hand froze inches from the hilt, fingers trembling despite Kaelvar conditioning. His breath came shallow, eyes unfocused, as if he were listening to a voice only he could hear.
"Step back," the Inquisitor ordered.
He did not.
The sword did not move.
That was the worst part.
Expectation thickened the air, a pressure without direction, like a held breath stretched past safety. Tareth felt it coil along his spine—not pulling at his qi, not demanding obedience, simply waiting for something to misstep.
The technician blinked.
Then smiled.
Not widely. Not unnaturally.
Just… incorrectly.
"My fault," he said softly. "I thought it was finished."
The Inquisitor drew.
Steel flashed, precise, economical.
The technician's head left his shoulders before the smile could fade.
The body collapsed soundlessly.
The sword remained still.
No resonance. No hum. No flare.
The Inquisitor wiped her blade on the dead man's sleeve, eyes never leaving the weapon. "Note," she said calmly, to no one in particular. "Cognitive deviation preceded physical response."
The remaining technician backed away, pale, nodding rapidly.
Tareth exhaled through clenched teeth. "It didn't make him do anything."
"No," the Inquisitor agreed. "It waited for him to want to."
Above them, Ironreach groaned again. This time the sound was different—not structural strain, but misalignment. Towers leaned by degrees too small to see, streets subtly re-angling themselves until familiar paths no longer met where they should.
A swordmaster sprinted past the gallery mouth, shouting orders that unraveled mid-sentence as his blade snagged on nothing and everything at once.
Correction had lost its reference point.
House Kaelvar's greatest strength—absolute consistency—was rotting from the inside out.
In the Demon Realm, the ancient entity inhaled deeply.
"Yes," it whispered. "Now we hunt."
Demons crossed borders without crossing them. Contracts activated not by invocation, but by confusion. Old promises misinterpreted themselves. Boundaries weakened not through force, but through semantic drift.
A warlord of Covenant smiled as three cities along Vaalbara's western edge realized—simultaneously—that their wards disagreed on where "inside" ended.
Reality did not tear.
It misfiled.
In House Myrr, Sereth Nael watched as spell matrices drifted apart by imperceptible margins.
"Stabilization?" a councilor demanded.
Sereth shook her head. "There's nothing to stabilize against. The baseline is moving."
She turned away from the projection, already calculating. "We need the source. Not the sword—the bearer."
In the Deep Galleries, the Inquisitor made her decision.
"Change of protocol," she said. "We are not transporting him upward."
Tareth's eye snapped open. "Then where?"
She looked west.
"Down," she said. "Past the galleries. Past record. Into the Sub-Cuts."
Tareth felt a cold twist in his gut. Even Kaelvar legends spoke of that place only in euphemism—where Ironreach buried contradictions too fundamental to erase.
"That place doesn't have exits," he said.
"It has endings," the Inquisitor replied. "And we need to see which kind you represent."
The sword ticked again.
This time, the walls answered.
Stone seams glowed faintly, new lines etching themselves across old surfaces, forming paths no Kaelvar map had ever recorded.
The Deep Galleries shifted—not collapsing, not opening—
Rearranging to accommodate pursuit.
Somewhere below, something old and patient adjusted its course.
Not the edge.
Not the presence beneath it.
Something else.
A predator that understood systems well enough to know when one was wounded.
And it had finally scented blood.