The world above was no longer the one they had known.
As Orion, Kael, Lyra, and the girl stepped out from the cavern beneath the worldtree's roots, they found a sky rewritten. The stars spun in unfamiliar constellations. Mountains floated in arcs above the horizon, chained to the earth by threads of translucent gravity. Oceans glittered with colors that had no names. The Veil was gone—but in its place, something new had taken root.
Orion held the unwritten book in his hands. Its pages shimmered, still blank, but warm.
"She's changed it all," Lyra murmured, glancing at the girl, who now hummed as she walked ahead barefoot on the living soil. "Not by force. By presence."
Kael scanned the terrain. "Then why do I feel like something's watching?"
They crested a ridge of floating black glass, sharp-edged and humming with forgotten power—and then saw it.
A humanoid figure, forged from mirrored shards of the old world, stood at the edge of a ruined cliff.
Its face was a single triangular prism, reflecting all three of them in distorted forms.
As they neared, the figure turned its head. The sound was not mechanical—it was glass breaking in reverse.
It spoke.
"You chose the unwritten."
Its voice wasn't a voice. It was memory, being torn open.
"I am what was," it continued. "A splinter of the prior multiverse, denied ending. The Shard That Walks."
Orion instinctively stepped forward, shielding the girl.
"What do you want?"
The shard-being lifted a finger made of fractured time.
"To return. To rewrite what you destroyed. She is unanchored. She can still be undone."
Kael summoned his blade. "You'll have to go through us."
The shard-being extended its arm—and the air around them fractured. Visions tore loose from the wind: past victories, failures, lovers lost, mistakes made.
Lyra's flame roared to life, struggling to stay coherent against the psychic storm.
The girl stood firm.
"No," she whispered, voice rippling with the resonance of origin. "This is my world now."
A pulse of white-gold light erupted from her body—gentle, not violent—but it shattered the illusions instantly.
The Shard That Walks staggered, cracks forming along its mirrored limbs.
"Unacceptable. This timeline is a deviation. It must be sealed."
Kael was already moving.
His blade struck the shard-being at the shoulder, shearing glass-memory into the air. Lyra followed, launching fire that curved mid-flight like intelligent serpents, seeking weakness.
Orion raised the book. It burned in his hands.
"Let's write how this ends," he said, and the first word inked itself across the page:
"Defiance."
The Shard That Walks screamed—not in pain, but in denial.
As its form collapsed into mirrored sand, the girl stepped forward, reaching out.
"I forgive you," she whispered. "But I will not bring you back."
Silence followed.
Then wind.
Then peace.
Orion turned to her. "What happens next?"
She smiled. "We write another chapter."