The inner city that had once floated above Libertatis came down.
It fell in pieces at first—houses shearing free of their foundations, streets folding in on themselves, whole rows of stone tumbling into open air—before the root that had held the entire beautiful ruin of it aloft cracked clean through the middle and vanished in a wash of pale blue light. What was left of it drifted downward like ash settling after a fire, slow and almost gentle, entirely at odds with the violence that had brought it there.
The guards who had scattered mid-battle reappeared like falling stars against the darkening sky, diving beneath the collapsing mass and bracing their shoulders and hands against its weight, trying to hold up what could not be held. It was too heavy, and it was still falling. But slower now. Enough, perhaps, to matter.
.................................................................................
Cryo stood over Achlys's unconscious body, the mark on his skin glowing faintly blue.
A short distance away, Lisare knelt with her broken leg stretched out in front of her, healing slow and stubborn from everything the battle had taken out of it. "Dop dop," she murmured to no one.
Lecia was crawling.
She dragged herself across the broken ground toward her husband a few inches at a time, teeth gritted against the pain of it, breath coming ragged. "Please..." Her voice had almost nothing left in it. "Husband... be... alive."
She reached him. Her hand found his and closed around it, and the warmth still in his skin pulled something loose in her chest.
"I'm... glad..."
She fainted with her fingers still wrapped around his, unwilling to let go even unconscious.
Cryo watched it happen and said nothing out loud. I'm sorry, Lecia, he thought, the words private and heavy. You shouldn't have had to see him like this.
He turned to Lisare instead, needing something else to hold onto. "Lisare... can you walk? Or use your Life Binder as a walking stick, if you have to."
She looked at him, and after a moment she nodded, forcing herself upright with the weapon's haft under one arm. Then she waited, watching him, asking without words what he needed from her.
"Can you... bring Lopo here. He needs healing." A pause. "Even though I don't want to be the one to give it to him."
Her eyes went wide.
"Dop dop..."
"I don't want my master seeing what I did to him," Cryo said, and the admission seemed to cost him something. "Please."
She nodded and started walking, unsteady, favoring the leg that wasn't fully healed.
She found him where he'd fallen and lifted him with more care than the fight between them had shown. He stirred weakly in her arms.
"Hnng... why am I hurt. Why can't I see..."
Cryo's jaw clenched hard enough to ache.
"We don't know what happened, sir," he said, voice level with an effort that cost him. "We found you here, hurt. The city destroyed around you."
Lopo listened, and for half a second something like a smile touched his mouth before it vanished as quickly as it had come.
"Where's... Crevial. My little sister..."
Lisare set him down beside Achlys and sank to her knees next to Cryo without a word.
"The false king took her," Cryo said. "And ran."
The words landed and stopped Lopo's world cold. For one long instant, nothing in him moved at all.
"I'm going to freeze your body to heal it," Cryo told him. "It can hurt. No—it will hurt."
Lopo didn't answer. When Cryo reached out to lay a hand against his chest, he slapped it aside and forced himself upright instead.
"Crevial! I—I will save you—"
He managed three steps on legs that had no business holding him. It failed exactly the way it was always going to fail. His body gave out beneath him, and he went down face-first into the rubble, breathing hard against the ground.
"I... will... save..." The words reached no farther than the dirt in front of his mouth.
Achlys's eyes opened.
Cryo, bent over Lopo's fallen shape, didn't notice. Lisare did, and she tried to scramble toward him too fast, tripping and landing in a heap directly in front of him instead. "DOP DOP!!"
"I am freezing his body," Cryo said without looking up, still absorbed in the work. "Can you please be quiet? I'm trying to concentrate."
She tapped his shoulder to break his focus, and when he turned to snap at her, he found Achlys standing there instead.
"Hey there, bird." Achlys's voice was flat. "Shouldn't you be focused on healing him?"
Cryo went rigid, a bead of sweat sliding down his temple. "I—I should indeed. Hah. Ha." He turned back to Lopo and resumed the slow, careful work of the freeze, not quite meeting anyone's eyes.
Lisare looked between the two of them and sighed. "Dop dop... sisi." She rubbed her temple and shook her head, then looked down at her own leg where the healing had finally started to take. "Sisi longet!" she said, mostly to herself, mostly pleased.
She sat down where she was and stared out at what remained—the city still falling in the distance, the two guards still holding what they could of it, small as stars against the wreck of it all.
"They need help, don't they, Lisare."
She looked up. Achlys stood behind her, watching the same wreckage she was, his silhouette dark against the fading light of the falling city.
She nodded. "I think we should let it fall," he said quietly, his voice tired, threaded with something sadder than exhaustion. "It only holds bad memories for this city anyway."
"What happened up there wasn't meant to be fun for anyone. People lost families. Friends. Some lost their lives entirely." His fist closed, knuckles paling, reddening.
Lisare touched his hand. He looked at her, and she shook her head slowly.
"...Yeah. You're right." He exhaled, frustration bleeding out of him in the breath. "I shouldn't look at this like it's only loss. We won the fight. People still died. I just—I still feel like it wasn't enough."
"Young man. You did enough for us."
Achlys turned. An elderly woman stood a short distance away, a black, faintly shining sphere resting in one hand. "We knew you were coming," she said. "The governor did not know what was coming for him."
"And who might you be?" His tone was easy, unbothered.
Lisare hit him on the back of the head. He didn't flinch—he'd been expecting exactly that.
"Dop dop!"
"I expected to be hit," he said mildly.
The old woman set her sphere down on the ground and bowed low. "My name is Mirai Desluc. I am a fortune-teller. A teller of futures." She straightened. "My other name is Thy Prophet."
Achlys stared at her, plainly unsure whether to believe any of it.
"A future-teller. That's... remarkable." He tilted his head. "But why lie to the governor? Not that I'm objecting."
"If I had told him you were coming," she said, "he would have prepared far more than soldiers. He would have prepared a Breaker."
"A Breaker?"
"Just that. A weapon meant to break Order users from the inside—to turn their own power against them with a perfect counter." She lifted the sphere and walked toward him, and pointed, without ceremony, at the unconscious man lying beside Achlys.
"He was meant to be that Breaker. If I had warned the governor of your arrival."
Something started to come together behind Achlys's eyes.
"...What we just did. The fighting. I was meant to lose." He looked at her slowly. "There's an alternate timeline. That you—no. That we created."
Mirai nodded, satisfied he'd reached it on his own. "Indeed. It was the only way, Mister Sword. If we hadn't, many more would have died—and a second conquest of this world would already be underway."
He kept turning it over. "What happens to our timeline. Now."
She pressed the black sphere into his hand. "You'll see. In the near future."
He stared at her, still not understanding, and she raised a finger to her lips.
"...Alright," he murmured. "I understand." He didn't, not fully, but there was nothing else to say to it.
.................................................................................
Where the Time Tree stood, in a place with no wind and no sound of its own, a figure in a deep hood bent over a slender cylinder, watching the countless threads spooled through it. Each line carried perhaps eighty small, glowing orbs strung along its length like fruit on a vine, all of it shifting in some slow, private rhythm only the figure could read.
Then something changed.
Her mouth parted. She bit down on her lip, frustration flickering across features hidden by the hood, and a heartbeat later she was gone—teleported away, the cylinder left spinning behind her.
It cracked. Every line inside it shuddered violently, and one snapped clean in two, both halves already beginning to lengthen and grow on their own.
An alternate timeline has been formed.
.................................................................................
Back where she'd left him, Mirai's expression had gone distant, listening to something none of them could hear.
"The Time Master will notice," she said. "The Time Master will interfere. The Time Master will destroy."
She walked past Achlys and lifted a crying young pegaluve into her arms without breaking stride.
"We're here to watch this world burn," she said, and her voice had changed—older, stranger, carrying an edge that hadn't been there a moment before. "But we're afraid to die all the same. We creatures love to hunt. To adapt. No matter what we've done, or what we do next—we're all just another shape of selfish."
She held the boy close and traced slow circles against his head with one finger, and before Achlys's eyes the child began, impossibly, to age—years passing across his small face in the span of a breath.
"I am a prophet, Achlys," she said. "But I am also the Time Master of Hope and Fate."
She set the now-grown pegaluve gently on the ground and bowed, and a robe of pale gold light folded down over her, covering her face entirely.
"You will not forget our conversation, Achlys. But you will forget my face, and the time I wore it in." Her voice had softened again, almost gentle now. "Be strong. Keep moving forward. I will hold this timeline together for as long as I'm able."
She rose into the air, and the cylinder of threaded light reappeared, folding itself into her waiting hands.
"Heed my words, and be the salvation we've been waiting for, Achlys. Be our god's righteous knight."
Light spread from her out across the whole of the city, gentle and gold, rolling over rooftops the way dawn rolls over a valley.
"Clock of Redemptive Offering."
Millions of small, glowing clock faces bloomed into being over every rooftop, every street, drifting even out to the far mountaintops on the horizon, each one turning backward in perfect, silent unison. In a single flash, everything returned to how it had been before the fighting ever began—every house standing, every street whole—everything except the inner upper city itself, gone entirely, leaving only the bare root that had once held it aloft, jutting up into empty sky like a monument to something no one else would remember.
Pegaluves walked the streets as though nothing at all had happened.
"Sir? You good? You alright?" One of them paused beside Achlys, who only stared back at him, silent, unable to find an answer that would make any sense outside his own head.
A sound drew his attention. Cryo, Lisare, and Lecia stood watching him, confusion plain on all three faces. "Achlys... what just happened? There was a light, and now—this."
He said nothing. He raised a hand and shook his head, a quiet request to let it go, and after a moment they did.
A grunt of pain cut through the quiet.
"My head... what happened here..."
They turned together to find Lopo stumbling out of a nearby alley, one hand pressed to his skull. He looked at the four of them and stopped, brow furrowing.
"Do I know you people?"
"No... sorry—" Lecia started, before a cluster of young pegaluve girls shoved past her and swarmed him entirely.
"OH MY LORD, IT'S LOPO! OUR PRINCE OF HOPE!" They pressed in around him giggling, cheeks flushed, already trying to pull him off toward whatever plans they'd just invented.
He held up a hand and stopped them gently. "Ladies. One moment." Then he turned to Lisare. "I need to find my sister. She was being held prisoner—if I remember right."
Cryo stepped into his path before he could go any farther. "I'm sorry to say... Crevial's been taken. By someone."
Lopo's eyes went wide, and he crossed the distance between them in a single stride, seizing Cryo by the shoulders hard enough that neither Lecia nor Lisare nor Achlys moved to stop it.
"Where is she? What do you know?!" He shook him, desperate for an answer he clearly hoped wouldn't come the way it did.
Cryo looked away. "We don't know that yet. I'm sorry."
Lopo shoved him aside and turned on Achlys instead. "How do you even know my sister?!"
Achlys sighed and turned to walk away rather than answer directly. "No idea. She told us one day, and we believed her."
Lopo stared after him, furious and helpless in equal measure, and said nothing more. "...Fuck. Why does she always do this to me."
He drove his fist toward the nearest house, and Lisare caught his wrist before it landed. "Dop dop..."
He turned on her, anger flaring—and it broke apart almost as fast as it had risen, tears rising in its place instead.
"Please..." His voice cracked entirely. "Bring her back. One day."
The words reached everyone standing close enough to hear them, and settled there.
"We'll do our best to bring her back," Cryo said, and managed something like a smile.
"Don't worry! She'll be back before you know it!" Lecia added, and smacked Cryo on the head for good measure, apparently on principle.
"Dop sisi, dop dop!" Lisare said warmly, resting a hand on Lopo's shoulder.
"We'll find her," Achlys said, meeting Lopo's eyes and holding them. "And we'll bring the one responsible to his knees. Your family will be whole again."
Lopo heard all of it, and the tears finally broke loose entirely. He wept openly, loudly, unashamed of it, while pegaluves gathered curiously around the small group to see what the commotion was.
"You can do it, Lopo! Be strong!"
"We believe in you!"
"Your sister's coming home!"
"...Anyone know where I can get food around here?"
The voices tangled together into something that was, against every odd, almost like comfort. Lopo pulled two startled pegaluves into a hug without asking either of them first, and the four who had promised him everything looked at one another and, quietly, nodded.