Atlas had always thought he understood words. Words could wound, could bind, could lift a man higher than wings or drive him into despair deeper than the grave. Words were things he had clung to in darker nights: promises, warnings, prayers.
But tonight, standing before her, the words came like meteors. He caught their shape but not their meaning. He knew the sentences, but they refused him comprehension, slipping through his grasp like smoke through a fist.
"I will erase you then, Atlas," Fate—Ureil, and yet no longer Ureil—declared.
"I cannot twist your fate, but I have the authority, as I bring upon my LAWs. The laws which the four of us agreed upon.
The law being: If one among us four is to become a threat to the balance of this world, or thereby break the laws that form the foothold and foundation of this world—
Abusing the power as a founder—
Then that one shall be erased from the beginning of time to the end of the world."
