The first symptom was forgetting.
Not full amnesia. Not panic.
Just a strange, creeping absence, like a debt you didn't know you owed, quietly coming due.
Merchants paused mid-transaction. Names of spouses fell out of reach. Entire love letters evaporated from inboxes. Hopeful graffiti scrawled across abandoned trust towers faded without being washed.
Veltrin Sprawl exhaled—and no breath returned.
There were no sirens.
No warping light.
No dimensional rift.
Ledger Null did not arrive. It did not descend.
It simply became present—a being of such systemic alignment that its existence rewrote local memory to accommodate its presence.
The air around it didn't move.
Law itself crystallized.
At the edge of Veltrin's failing belief grid, just above the silent layers of the Genesis Basin, Ledger Null walked between platforms, untouched by gravity or narrative.
Its form was vague and perfect—a silhouette drawn from raw compliance:
Head: Featureless, smooth, a reflection of the world's current debt status.
Hands: Callused, geometric—made not to wield power, but to quantify it.
Robes: No cloth, only long pages of blank protocol. When it moved, those pages rustled without sound.
And behind it:
A trail of nullified data, where flowers lost their bloom, lights forgot to shine, and memories gently unraveled.
---
> [System Activation: Correction Mode // Ledger Null Online]
Assigned Target: Sykaion Kairo
Classification: Unauthorized Law Originator
Status: Anomalous
Correction Priority: FIRST STRIKE / FINAL RULING
No thoughts.
No doubts.
No emotion.
Only law.
For every article of belief Sykaion tried to write…
Null had come to erase it.
It moved through the city like a cold opinion—unarguable, undeniable.
A young child screamed at the sight of it—then forgot why she was screaming.
A scholar trying to pray to her index gods stared at Null—then forgot what faith was.
Even the city's feathered infrastructure—those ghostlines of morality and myth—began dimming, flickering like candles in a courtroom.
---
Somewhere below, Zeraphine felt the System tighten. A pressure at the base of her skull. A Concordium protocol she'd studied once but never hoped to feel:
> "When Ledger Null awakens, no mercy can be bartered.
No plea can be entered.
The only language it accepts… is flawless law."
---
Meanwhile, on a skywalk high above the Scripterium Vaults, Arlyss stumbled—her feather burning cold against her chest. She clutched the railing, breath stolen by nothing she could name.
"Something's here," she whispered. "And it doesn't believe in anything."
---
Ledger Null reached the city's First Market Spire.
It looked toward the horizon.
There, in the distance: the last flare of Sykaion's stabilizing myth-light.
The rogue Rebalancer.
The one who'd written a loophole…
And was still writing.
Ledger Null lifted its Balance Staff—not a weapon, but a tool of systemic reassertion. It burned with threads of unreleased precedent and impossible counter-laws, glowing with the fire of everything the System feared might become contagious.
And it stepped forward.
Reality adjusted to make way.