Chapter 61: Catalyst Bound, VIII
When the light faded, the silence lingered.
The kind that didn't feel like peace—just absence.
We stood in what was left of Furstenberg. The square was broken stone and glass, the bodies of those we couldn't save half-buried beneath time-warped wreckage.
The smoke had stopped rising.
There was no one left to scream.
Shattered signs hung sideways from broken posts. A half-destroyed market stall still swung gently in the breeze like it didn't know the world was in pieces. Time itself seemed uncertain—some corners of the town blinked in and out of sync, replaying broken seconds on a loop.
Konrad lay at the center of it.
His body had not moved since the moment of collapse. His thread, once radiant bronze and white, had dimmed to the barest shimmer—flickering at his fingertips like the tail end of a dream.
Clara hadn't looked away from him in hours. She stood just outside the blast radius, arms folded, posture stiff.
Her face said nothing. Her silence said everything.
Erich sat against the wall of a gutted inn, one leg stretched out, eyes fixed on the cracked stones. His hand hovered near his thread—not to use it, just to feel it.