The borderlands did not welcome travelers.
They evaluated them.
Tareth felt it immediately—the way the ground responded unevenly to his weight, some patches firm as oath-bound stone, others soft as soil that had not yet decided whether it wished to exist. The wind tugged at his cloak, then released it, then returned again from a slightly different angle, as if recalculating his outline.
Without qi, every step was negotiation.
He walked until Ironreach was no longer visible—not hidden by distance, but by irrelevance. The towers simply stopped asserting themselves against the horizon. In their place rose low ridges of cracked earth, scattered ruins half-swallowed by dust, and roads that forked without explanation.
The sword at his side remained silent.
That silence pressed harder than any hum.
By nightfall—if dusk could be called night here—he reached the outskirts of a settlement that had not yet decided what it was. Wooden structures leaned against stone foundations stolen from older ruins. Lanterns glowed with inconsistent light, some burning blue, others orange, a few flickering between states like indecisive thoughts.
A border city.
Not Kaelvar.
Not Myrr.
A place built by people who survived by agreeing just enough with the world to be tolerated.
Eyes found him immediately.
Not hostile.
Wary.
He felt it—attention tugging at the raw edges of his existence. Here, people watched first and defined later.
A guard stepped forward, spear angled low. "State your business."
Tareth opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
Not because he lacked words—but because his name no longer fit cleanly into the space where names were expected to land.
"I'm passing through," he said finally.
The guard frowned—not at suspicion, but confusion. "From where?"
Tareth turned slightly, gesturing back toward nothing in particular. "East."
That answer satisfied something. Barely.
The guard nodded, stepping aside. "Don't cause trouble."
"I won't," Tareth said.
That was not a promise.
It was an observation.
Inside the settlement, the instability grew subtler—and more dangerous. Conversations paused when he passed, then resumed with altered cadence. A merchant weighed the same coin three times, frowning each time at a scale that refused consistency. Children played a game involving chalk-drawn lines that shifted when no one was looking.
This place already suffered from proximity.
The predator's influence had arrived before him.
Tareth found an inn that leaned inward, as if confiding secrets to itself. The innkeeper—a woman with sharp eyes and scars that spoke of negotiation rather than battle—looked up as he entered.
Her gaze slid past his face.
Then snapped back.
She stiffened.
"What are you?" she asked quietly.
Tareth did not lie.
"I don't know anymore."
That, unexpectedly, earned a nod.
"Room's cheap," she said. "Trouble costs extra."
He paid with a coin that felt heavier than it should have. The innkeeper examined it longer than necessary, then accepted it with visible relief, as if reassured the metal still remembered its purpose.
Upstairs, the room was small and uneven. The bed creaked when he sat. The window showed a slice of sky that refused to stay the same color for more than a few breaths.
Tareth lay back and stared upward.
For the first time since Ironreach, no system pressed on his thoughts. No doctrine whispered correction. No qi flowed to smooth his edges.
The emptiness was… terrifying.
His body ached constantly, a low-level agony born of imbalance. Every movement felt slightly wrong. His breathing never quite settled. He understood now why systems were seductive.
They relieved you of choice.
A sound outside drew his attention.
Voices—arguing.
Not loudly.
Intensely.
He rose and looked through the window.
In the street below, two men faced each other, hands clenched, faces flushed. Between them lay a rolled parchment, edges glowing faintly.
A contract.
But the words upon it shifted, letters rearranging themselves subtly every few seconds.
"I didn't agree to that," one man snarled.
"You did," the other shot back. "It says so."
"It didn't yesterday!"
Tareth felt it then—the predator's handiwork. Not present. Not watching.
Echoing.
The argument escalated, reality leaning closer to hear. The parchment flared brightly, then tore itself in half.
The men staggered back as if struck.
Around them, the street adjusted—one man now standing slightly farther from the inn than he had been moments before, the other closer to a doorway that had not existed until it was needed.
No demon emerged.
No blade flashed.
The world simply… rewrote its own margins.
Tareth stepped back from the window.
This was what he had unleashed.
Not apocalypse.
Proliferation.
Later, as he lay half-awake, he felt it.
A pressure—not external, not hostile.
Attention.
The sword ticked.
Once.
Tareth sat up slowly.
In the corner of the room, a shadow had grown too deep, edges sharpening where shadows should blur. It did not form a body. It did not cross the floor.
It simply waited.
"You're not the predator," Tareth said quietly.
The shadow rippled.
"No," came the reply—not spoken, but implied. "I am what notices when systems fail to agree."
Tareth swallowed. "Another demon?"
A pause.
"Another auditor."
The pressure increased slightly—not threat, but interest.
"You broke something fundamental," the presence continued. "Now many of us are checking the math."
Tareth exhaled slowly. "And if you don't like what you find?"
The shadow leaned closer, darkening the room.
"Then the world will renegotiate your existence," it said.
The sword remained silent.
That was worse than a hum.
Outside, the border city slept fitfully, contracts uneasy, walls subtly misaligned, dreams bleeding into one another.
Far away, the predator continued to write badly.
And Tareth Veyl—unintegrated, uncorrected, unfinished—lay awake in a world that had begun, cautiously, to test whether he was a solution…
or the most interesting problem it had ever produced.