The world behind them was too quiet.
No wind crossed the ruined plains, and no birds circled the sky above the empty scar where the battlefield had been. The silence felt unnatural, as if the land itself were holding its breath after something it did not know how to survive.
Lyria walked because he walked.
She did not remember deciding to follow. Her legs simply moved, stiff and unsteady, carrying her away from the place where thousands had vanished as though they had never drawn breath. The ground beneath her boots felt wrong here, too smooth, too untouched by time, like stone newly formed instead of earth worn by years.
He moved ahead without sound.
No footprints marked his path. The air around him felt dense, pressing inward, yet the space closest to him carried a strange stillness that was almost calmer than the emptiness beyond. High above, the sky still bore the faint fracture he had torn through it, pale light lingering along its edges before fading into gray.
She kept her distance.
Not far enough to escape his presence, but not close enough to reach him if she tried. Crossing that invisible line felt like stepping into deep water without knowing how far the bottom lay.
Her thoughts circled the same impossible truth.
He had erased armies.He had tried to erase her.She was still here.
She asked him again what he had meant when he called her existence irregular. His answer came without hesitation. She persisted where she should not. That alone, to him, was explanation enough.
Frustration slipped past the numbness tightening her chest. She insisted she was only human, nothing more, nothing strange.
He stopped walking.
Up close, his face seemed untouched by time or hardship, too perfect to belong to the same world she did. Yet his eyes held something older than the sky itself. He told her she had remained when her existence had been rejected, and that was not ordinary.
The words made her arms fold tightly around herself, not for warmth, but to keep herself steady. She told him he had almost killed her.
He corrected her calmly. He had attempted to end her. She had remained.
The distinction did nothing to quiet the memory of the battlefield. Men shouting. Horses collapsing. Life disappearing without even the dignity of a body left behind. Anger rose unexpectedly, sharp enough to cut through the fear. She told him those people had been alive, that they had homes and families, that he had not even hesitated.
To him, they had simply reached their end.
The certainty in his voice was absolute, like gravity stating itself. She felt painfully small standing in front of him, fragile in a way she had never been forced to acknowledge, and yet she did not look away.
She told him he spoke as though he did not belong to this world.
He agreed.
That answer left her without words.
They stood facing one another, human and something far beyond human, separated by a distance that felt wider than the ruined plains. She asked the only question that mattered.
Then why was she still here?
For the first time, his attention focused fully on her. That, he admitted, was the question.
A tremor passed through the air.
Lyria felt it in her bones before she understood it. Beyond the scarred land, the world shivered faintly, like fabric pulled too tight. Far at the horizon, a pale glow stirred, too distant to see clearly but bright enough to thin the sky.
He noticed it as well.
Her presence, he explained, stabilized the law. Reality bent less near her.
The words made no sense, and yet she could see the proof of them. The ground closest to him fractured again, thin lines spreading through soil and stone as though the earth could not bear his weight. But the space between them remained intact, untouched by the same strain.
He stepped closer.
The tremor eased. The sky seemed less fragile.
Understanding settled slowly in his expression. She anchored something that should not need anchoring.
She had not meant to. She did not even know how.
Another pulse rolled across the plains, deeper this time. The faint light at the horizon flared brighter before dimming, as if something vast had opened its eyes.
This time the tremor did not fade quickly.
The air grew thinner. A faint ringing filled the silence, too high to be sound, too sharp to ignore. Lyria felt it in her teeth, behind her eyes, as though something unseen were pressing against the world from the outside.
He lifted his gaze toward the sky.
For the first time since she had seen him, something in his expression resembled tension.
The faint fracture high above flickered, pale light gathering along its edges once more.
"They are searching," he said.
A chill crawled down her spine.
"For you?" she asked.
"For the imbalance," he replied.
She did not need to ask what that meant.
The sky dimmed for a heartbeat, then brightened with a distant pulse. Not lightning. Not sunlight. Something deliberate.
Lyria wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly aware of how small she was beneath that endless sky.
She was not special. She was not chosen.
And yet the being who could erase the world stood before her, studying her as though she were the only thing that did not make sense.
The girl who should not exist.
High above, beyond sight, something had begun to look for her.
And this time, it would not hesitate.