The sky never fully healed.
Though the pale fracture had faded, the air still carried the sense of something torn and poorly mended, and the afternoon light seemed thinner, as though the world had lost a layer that once made it whole. The land they crossed reflected that same quiet damage. Grass near him had withered into gray strands that crumbled at a touch, stones lay split along invisible lines, and the earth itself felt strained, like it had been forced to bear more than it was meant to hold.
Lyria walked beside him in silence, trying not to stare at the way the world reacted to his presence.
With each step he took, the ground shivered faintly, fine cracks tracing outward through soil and rock as if reality itself strained under his weight. The air around him rippled in subtle distortions, bending light in a way her eyes could barely follow. And yet, the closer she walked to him, the less severe the damage became.
At first she thought it was coincidence.
Then he stopped.
A jagged fracture had spread across the earth, racing straight toward her before veering sharply aside, bending around the space where she stood and leaving the soil beneath her boots untouched. The split curved past her like a stream diverted by an unseen barrier, continuing its path only once it had passed beyond her shadow.
His gaze lifted slowly to meet hers.
He studied her now not as a threat or an anomaly to be eliminated, but as something that altered the outcome of what should have been inevitable. The weight of that attention settled over her, not crushing, but inescapable.
He told her the collapse slowed in her proximity, that the unraveling of the world did not proceed normally when she was near him.
She shook her head, instinctively rejecting the idea. She was not doing anything. She was not even sure she was standing steadily on her own feet. But the evidence lay between them, undeniable.
He stepped back.
The air thickened at once, pressing inward with renewed force, and the ground shuddered as cracks widened through the earth, relieved of the restraint her presence had unknowingly imposed. Pebbles skittered across the soil. A distant ridge collapsed with a low, grinding sound.
When he stepped forward again, the trembling eased.
They stood there for a long moment, silent, watching the land react to distances measured in steps. The difference between destruction and stability was no longer abstract. It was the space between them.
A low vibration passed through the plains, deep enough that she felt it in her bones. Far away, some structure that had survived the initial destruction finally gave in, collapsing into a cloud of dust that rose and drifted like a final breath.
She asked if all of this was happening because of him.
He did not hesitate. His authority, he explained, was incomplete, and what remained of it leaked into the world without restraint. The law rejected his current state, and reality attempted to correct that rejection through instability.
The explanation only deepened her unease.
She looked down at her hands, at the dirt beneath her nails and the faint trace of dried blood she had not noticed before, and struggled to understand how she could possibly affect something that vast. She was nothing more than herself, a girl who had never stepped beyond the walls of her city until war forced her out. Her life had been small, contained, predictable.
Now the world shifted because she stood in one place instead of another.
The thought made her feel suddenly unsteady.
Another distortion rippled through the air around him, bending light and shadow. A sharp fracture split the ground once more, racing toward her before halting inches from her boots, as though an invisible boundary refused to be crossed.
Both of them watched it.
Understanding settled over him slowly. She did not know the language he used to describe it, but she understood the meaning. She anchored something that should not have needed anchoring. Her presence reduced the collapse.
She asked what would happen if she walked away.
He did not answer, and he did not need to.
The plains trembled again, and somewhere beyond the horizon, a deep sound rolled outward, like the world adjusting to an imbalance it could neither accept nor erase. The sky dimmed briefly, then steadied, as though the heavens themselves were watching for the next fracture.
A faint pressure built in the air, not crushing like before, but present, like the feeling before a storm breaks. She realized it was not only the land reacting to him now. Something beyond the world was paying attention.
When he told her to remain, the word carried more weight than a command. It sounded like necessity, like a law being spoken into place.
She looked out over the fractured land, at the places where the earth had split and never healed, and then back at him. He did not look monstrous, not in any way she understood. There was no blood on him, no rage in his eyes. Only something vast, incomplete, and quietly destructive.
She told him he seemed afraid of something he could not control.
He denied the emotion, but the distortion in the air around him lessened slightly, as though the thought had brushed against a truth he did not wish to examine. He spoke instead of inefficiency, of variables that could not be calculated.
She understood that well enough.
She was the unknown.
The tremors weakened for a time, and the air grew almost still. In that brief quiet, she became aware of her own breathing, of the distant echo of her heartbeat, of the enormity of the sky above them.
She told him she did not know how to help.
He answered that she already was.
The words lingered between them, heavier than the silence.
High above, the sky shifted once more, not breaking, not yet, but watching. The faint thinning of light along the heavens felt deliberate now, like a gaze focusing from far beyond sight.
And for the first time since the world had split open, Lyria understood something with quiet dread.
Staying near him might keep the world from tearing itself apart.
But it also meant she would never truly be free again.