Arkanis was quiet—but not empty.
It was a stillness that came after storms, not before them. The kind that settles after a world stops fighting fate and begins listening to itself. This wasn't the silence of fear or suppression—it was a hum of collective reflection.
The Temple of Possibility had become a sanctuary of choices unmade. Not a monument to regret, but to range. It was here that Nullcrown walked each day, barefoot along the Archive of Alternate Selves, tracing the edges of timelines no one had ever lived. Her form was more stable now—a young woman with silver eyes and the voice of twilight.
People came to her, not for answers, but to ask better questions.
One visitor, a man who had once tried to erase his past, asked, "If I'd taken the other path, would I still be me?"
Nullcrown replied, "Maybe. But you wouldn't be asking this now. And that means something."
Nyrax, meanwhile, had taken to wandering.
Not to rule, not to fight, but to observe. From the cliff cities of Skyreach to the coded lakes of the Eastern Array, he simply listened. Every place echoed differently now. The gods had gone quiet, but the people had found their voice.
In one town, he watched a group of children code their own local holiday. They called it the Day of The Undone—when everyone pretended to be someone they didn't become. A blacksmith dressed as a bard. A widow danced like a thief. Even Echo, who visited with Nyrax, disguised herself as a novice cook (and poisoned two dishes by accident).
They laughed. For the first time in cycles, Nyrax laughed too.
Lyra had taken her role as Head of Vanguard in a different direction. She now trained editors in empathy protocols—teaching them not only how to change reality, but how to understand the ripple effect of what they changed. Her sessions were often brutal, emotional. Students cried more than bled.
"Power isn't heavy because it's strong," she once told a shaken initiate. "It's heavy because it remembers."
Echo spent her time digitizing dreams.
No, literally—her new project, the Dream Index, mapped unconscious thought and emotional fragments, storing them in a new cloud archive. Some dreams became art. Others became laws. One child's nightmare was turned into an early warning system for emotional surges in the leyline net.
And when asked why she did it, Echo answered simply, "Dreams are the only code we never write on purpose. That makes them the most honest."
Then came the whisper.
It wasn't a threat. Or a bug. Just a name, carried through the Source Stack on a breeze of unsynced bytes:
"Sable."
No one knew who or what it was. Not yet. But it echoed like a warning.
And when Nyrax heard it for the first time, his pulse tightened—not from fear, but from recognition.
Something unfinished was surfacing.
Something that hadn't been forgotten.
Just... deferred.
As Arkanis quietly compiled itself into its new shape, the editors knew peace wasn't a constant. It was a choice, made again and again.
And the next cycle was already preparing its question.