The sky did not darken. It simplified.Colors drained first, not vanishing, but compressing, as if the spectrum were being folded into fewer, harsher choices. Blue became sky. Brown became ground. Everything else blurred into undecided gray.Sael felt it like pressure behind his eyes. “The Atlas is resetting,” Irix said quietly.Lysara looked up. “Resetting what?”“Criteria,” Irix replied. “When prediction fails, it narrows the future until something becomes inevitable.”The thing, the remainder, Sael thought, stood at the edge of the absence, watching the sky with interest that bordered on familiarity.“It is afraid,” it said.Clean Sael was on his knees now, breathing hard, hands shaking as if trying to hold onto a version of himself that was slipping.“You don’t understand,” he rasped. “If the Atlas collapses prediction space… entire regions will be flattened into certainty. No paradox. No margin.”“Meaning?” Lysara asked.“Meaning,” Clean Sael said bitterly, “perfect order.” Sael’

The rumor reached the capital before Sael did. It arrived twisted, breathless, wearing different faces depending on who told it.In the river markets of Virellon, dockhands whispered about a man who stepped between streets and came out somewhere else entirely. In the border forts, soldiers swore an unfinished shadow had stood between them and erasure, and the map had blinked first. In the halls of scholars, ink-stained hands shook as they argued whether the Atlas had glitched, or been wounded.By the time Sael felt the first pull of it, the rumor had already learned how to survive.“People are looking at you like you’re a prophecy,” Lysara muttered, keeping her hood low as they passed through the outer road of Brackenreach.Sael adjusted the strap of his pack. It slipped, then corrected itself, then slipped again. He sighed. “I don’t feel very prophetic.”“You never do,” Irix said. “That’s what makes them dangerous.”Brackenreach was a border city pretending to be neutral. Its walls w