Tony and Peter left first.
The decision was abrupt—foreign work, temporary contracts, too good to refuse. They promised it was only for a few months, but Sylence recognized the pattern: distance that wouldn't return the same.
They stood in the doorway that morning, bags packed, joking too loudly. Lucia smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes.
Peter pulled Sylence aside before leaving.
"Take care of her," he said. Not as a request. As a transfer.
Sylence nodded once. That was enough.
Lucia moved in the same evening.
She didn't bring much—clothes, notebooks, a framed photo she placed carefully on the desk. And last, almost as an afterthought, she brought the teddy.
Old. Brown. Soft in a way that suggested it had been held during nights meant to be forgotten.
She placed it beside her pillow.
Nothing happened immediately.
That was what unsettled Sylence.
No distortion. No signal. No response from the watch. The house remained quiet—too quiet. Even Heaven slept deeper than usual.
It was only later—hours later—that the softboard failed to update.
Not malfunction.
Pause.
Sylence noticed it before midnight.
Patterns that should have escalated… didn't. Probabilities that normally sharpened simply leveled out, as if something had introduced friction into inevitability itself.
Sylence worked on the Gift in silence.
The body lay horizontal in Griffin's lower lab, suspended in a containment cradle that rejected gravity as an outdated suggestion. No face. No expression. No resistance. It mirrored humanity the way a concept mirrors a word—accurate, incomplete, waiting.
This was not flesh.
This was permission given shape.
Sylence had already learned the truth Griffin had only hinted at:
the Gift was not power.
It was capacity.
Unchecked capacity collapses reality.
So Sylence did what no one before him had been allowed to do.
He divided it.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
Zerox.
He split the Gift's continuity across three stabilized expressions:
Future-State Gift — adaptive, predictive, intolerant of stagnation
Vintage-State Gift — recursive, self-correcting, memory-dense
Ancient-State Gift — inert but absolute, bound to first causality
Each version was incomplete alone.
Together, they formed restraint.
Griffin watched the models stabilize, his breath shallow.
"You just made the cosmos hesitate,connected this to your made new body you consider perfect" he said.
"No," Sylence replied. "I made it honest."
The Gift accepted the division.
That was when the anomaly appeared.
Not in the lab.
At home.
Sylence felt nothing when he saw it.
The softboard stopped rearranging itself that night.
Not frozen.
Paused.
Patterns no longer escalated. Threat projections softened. Probability curves flattened as if something had gently pressed a hand against the future and said not yet.
Sylence noticed the silence before he noticed the bear.
It had moved.
Only slightly.
Enough.
He reviewed the footage. Lucia hadn't touched it. Andrew hadn't entered. Heaven hadn't stirred.
The teddy had changed position between frames.
Not animated.
Repositioned.
That night, Sylence dreamed.
No images. No setting.
Only a voice—coiled, patient, unbearably calm.
"You divided what could not decide," it said.
"You preserved what should have ended."
Sylence stood in compressed awareness.
"What are you?" he asked.
A pause.
Then—
"I am Schyper," the voice replied.
"A fragment of the Septet's consensus."
Understanding hit with surgical clarity.
Not power.
Delay.
The Septet could not reach unanimity as long as Schyper existed outside them.
Existence persisted not because it was chosen—
but because something refused to finish choosing.
"And the teddy?" Sylence asked.
A soft, almost amused response.
"A sheath," Schyper said. "A kindness. I learned humans trust what looks harmless."
Sylence woke slowly.
The teddy sat where Lucia had left it.
Watching nothing.
Sylence did not confront it.
He researched.
He perfected the Zerox architecture around the Gift, not the fragment. The teddy resisted nothing—because it didn't need to. It wasn't a weapon.
It was a veto.
He returned to Griffin's lab and finalized the design parameters.
Then he asked for a favor.
"I need a team," Sylence said.
"For conceptual transit. Time without ownership."
Griffin understood immediately.
"A time machine," he said.
Sylence didn't deny it.
Now sylence understood if he really wants to complete his mission he has to visit the place schyper told him to visit,with a pretense sylence was able to take lucia with the teddy there along with andrew and heaven.
They were at a monument a castle