The DLA's Faith Monitoring Suite was quiet when the anomaly appeared. It began as a whisper in the Mandalanet—a spike with no coordinates, no permissions, no trigger miracle, just a zero-point flare in the index matrix. For two full seconds, the system tried to categorize it.
It failed.
At precisely 18:41 local time, all monitoring glyphs in the Wharf's DAZ-17 blinked out. Not red. Not off. Blank. As if the divine grid had forgotten what it was supposed to be.
"Run a cross-check," barked Herald Supervisor Ishaan Vale, watching strings of null values scroll across the sanctified interface. "Get me a domain footprint."
"There isn't one," replied the analyst, pale under the glyphlight. "It's… not mapped. No worship vector, no legacy signal. No pre-identification protocols. It's not even returning aura residue."
Ishaan cursed, the prayer-beads wrapped around his wrist crackling with defensive potential. "Then run a probability trace. I want to know where this thing would've come from—if it had the right to exist."
Vellum stood at the edge of the Wharf's old drydock, where ruined hulls of god-ships lay stacked like forgotten bones. The air shimmered faintly around them—not heat, not light, but possibility. Those who came near Vellum shifted in subtle ways.
A courier's gait altered slightly, as if remembering a life as a dancer.
A shrine-painter's hand trembled and then steadied, recalling a style they'd never studied.
And a child—small, hollow-eyed, trailing chalk across the wet stone—stopped and stared. Iri. She saw Vellum not as a stranger but as a blankness shaped like home. She approached with the casual audacity only children have for gods.
"You're not supposed to be here," she said simply.
Vellum turned. No face, but something like attention focused on her.
"I dreamed you yesterday," she said. "Only you weren't you yet. You were a question in my sleep."
No words passed between them. But something moved in the air—a ripple that didn't touch sound or mind, but memory.
Iri reached out and touched Vellum's arm. For a moment, her pupils flooded with starlight, and a tear slipped free.
"I could've been someone else," she whispered. "And it wasn't worse."
Above them, far across the gridlines of Umbral Wharf, the DLA's Seal Team descended.
Three Heralds in white-on-brass armor, each bearing relic rifles and mirrored helms. One Seal Judge, her eyes veiled by algorithmic scry-lenses. They landed on a floating glyph barge, scanning with sanctified sensors.
"It's near," said one. "But it's not acting like a deity."
"What's it doing?" asked the Judge.
"…Nothing. Just standing."
"Then that's the problem."
They advanced.
The first Herald reached the drydock wall and stepped through a halo gate. Vellum turned.
The world warped.
It wasn't an attack. It wasn't a defense. It was a quiet revision—a shift in the scaffold of potential.
The Herald saw himself die. Not dramatically. Just… collapse. A life he never lived—cut short by fear, never joined the DLA, died a lonely mechanic. His knees buckled.
Vellum did not touch him.
He fell anyway.
The others reacted instantly. One fired a miracle dart—encoded with a saint's breath, designed to pin metaphysical targets to the fabric of consensus. It passed through Vellum. And did not exist anymore.
The dart was unmade. Not destroyed. Forgotten. As if it had never been a miracle.
The Seal Judge activated her command relic.
"ENTITY UNKNOWN. YOU ARE OPERATING WITHOUT LICENSE OR DOMAIN. SUBMIT TO INDEXATION OR FACE TOTAL NULLIFICATION."
Vellum turned.
And the canal whispered.
Hundreds of voices echoed—voices of unborn children, discarded names, unwritten myths. The Wharf vibrated. The grid faltered.
And the Judge saw her father.
Not the man who raised her. The man he almost became. A pacifist. A poet. A man who taught love instead of law.
She staggered.
In that moment, Iri stepped between them.
"He didn't choose to be here," she said.
Far away, in a glass monastery in Halcyon Crown, a divine algorithm paused mid-prayer-cycle.
In the Palace of Echo Saints beneath the North Atlantic, Ravel laughed for the first time in years.
In a data vault in Luxnoir's coreframe, an unversioned god twitched.
And in the sealed archives of the Jade Kin, a name was scratched from the Book of Possible Ancestors.
The world shivered.
Vellum had not spoken.
But now, it was being listened to.