The sky was not supposed to move.
Yet above the shining city, the heavens folded inward like glass bending under invisible pressure. Light fractured across the horizon, not from the sun, but from lines etched into reality itself. Towers of silver geometry floated between layers of space, their surfaces alive with flowing symbols that governed gravity, time, and matter. The people below did not look up in fear at first. They were the masters of law. They had shaped oceans, slowed storms, rewritten the pull of the earth beneath their own foundations.
They believed nothing stood above their design.
On the highest platform of the central spire, figures in radiant mantles stood within a lattice of rotating sigils. Streams of luminous data passed between their hands and the sky, calculations adjusting the pressure of existence itself. Their city did not run on mana or faith. It ran on certainty.
Then the calculations stopped making sense.
A tremor passed through every structure at once, not physical but conceptual, as if the idea of stability had been nudged aside. Symbols collapsed mid equation. Light stuttered. A deep vibration pressed against the minds of every living being, not a sound but a verdict.
Something had noticed.
Above the atmosphere, where space bent like a shallow bowl, a shape emerged that had no edge and no center. Lines of impossible symmetry unfolded, intersecting at angles that made the eyes ache. It did not descend. It did not approach. It simply became present.
The pressure of its existence forced the sky into patterns of order.
Across the city, law engines faltered. Bridges between dimensions snapped shut. Artificial suns dimmed. The architects on the spire fell to their knees, not in worship, but in dawning comprehension. Their reach had exceeded the boundaries of allowance.
This was correction.
A woman at the center of the platform forced herself upright. Her eyes burned with sleepless resolve as streams of symbols gathered around her like a final storm. Around her, others reactivated dormant arrays buried beneath the city, conduits designed for an outcome they had prayed would never come.
They had prepared a seed.
Not a weapon of destruction. A tool of growth. Something that would not bind humanity to fixed law, but allow it to learn, adapt, and rise beyond imposed limits.
They released it.
From the heart of the city, a pulse of pale light burst outward, silent and precise. It did not strike the entity above. It did not resist the correction. It slipped through the cracks of collapsing reality and scattered into the future, fragments carried along the rebuilding of the world itself.
The sky answered.
Structures dissolved into dust of pure information. Platforms unraveled into lines, then into nothing. The ground below the city reshaped, mountains rising where towers once stood. The knowledge of law faded from human minds like a dream upon waking.
Mana flooded the world.
The presence in the sky receded as balance returned, leaving behind a quieter, smaller age.
But far beneath the forming soil, beyond memory and myth, the seed endured.
Waiting for someone who did not belong to the new order.
Waiting for a mind that could see the rules, and choose not to obey them.