The glow of the seal dimmed, its once-blinding radiance reduced to embers crawling along Elysia’s roots. The great tree trembled, not from damage, but from memory. The kind only immortals feared.

  Iode stood before the scorched mark, the shape of the sealing rune pulsing faintly like a heartbeat. His cloak fluttered in the dying wind as he whispered,

  “Those words it said… they weren’t random.”

  Elysia’s voice echoed faintly through the trunk, heavy with exhaustion.

  “You heard it too.”

  He didn’t answer immediately. His eyes stayed fixed on the fading sigil, reading what no mortal sight could—the lingering trace of something ancient.

  “It wasn’t calling me a traitor,” he said at last, low and deliberate. “It mistook me for someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “The true one. The first betrayer.”

  The World Tree’s bark groaned. Her roots curled deeper into the soil, as if recoiling from the name left unspoken.

  “You don’t mean…”

  “Yes.” Iode’s tone hardened. “The one who turned against gods and creation alike. The one erased from every world and timeline. If that serpent remembered him… then the fracture has already begun.”

  “The fracture?”

  “The First Tether,” Iode said. “Someone is tampering with the laws that separate our ages.”

  Silence swept the field. Then a gust of wind carried faint echoes, voices whispering from past and future at the same time.

  Elysia spoke again, slower now. “That’s impossible. The Tether was bound by the Creator Himself.”

  “Unless,” Iode said quietly, “one of us broke it.”

  He looked skyward, not at the heavens, but beyond them, to the fractured threads of time unraveling like veins in the air.

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  “The serpent called me traitor because it remembered the one who carried my soul before me,” he said. “The one who cracked the first seal between mortal and divine, long before Zenobios, long before Igor’s covenant.”

  Elysia’s voice wavered. “You’re saying one of the Original Five… broke the contract?”

  “No.” His eyes darkened. “I’m saying one of them survived by breaking it.”

  The ground trembled. The seal flickered once more. In its glow, a mark formed in the air: a perfect circle split in half, one radiant, one void.

  The symbol of the celestial of Perpetration and Sabotage.

  Iode’s pulse quickened.

  “…Valier,” he breathed. “You weren’t just the Celestial of Sabotage. You were the hand that broke the Tether.”

  A soft laugh followed, not from Elysia nor from the forest, but from within him.

  A familiar, mocking tone.

  “You finally remember me.”

  Iode stiffened. “Valier.”

  “You still cling to mortal definitions. Betrayal, loyalty… You forget, those concepts were born after me.”

  The laughter faded, replaced by an echo of something else. A pulse in the fabric of the world. A distortion rippling backward through time.

  Iode’s pupils constricted.

  “…No,” he whispered. “That resonance—”

  Then he felt it.

  The same anomaly he’d sensed before.

  The temporal distortion that had frozen even his mana perception.

  The moment the stickman appeared.

  That impossible presence that stunned him.

  “That fracture wasn’t random,” he breathed. “It’s connected. The boy who went back in time, the stickman. His existence isn’t temporal noise… it’s residue. A byproduct of the Tether breaking.”

  Elysia’s whisper trembled. “You mean… that child carries a fragment of Them—the Unknown?”

  “Not of Them,” Iode corrected sharply. “Of him. The traitor. The source. The one Valier helped escape deletion.”

  A chill ran down his spine as he remembered the stickman’s eyes: endless, empty, aware of every layer of space and time Iode had tried to hide from.

  “That’s why he stunned me,” Iode muttered. “He isn’t bound by time. He exists outside it, a living paradox.”

  His hand tightened into a fist as the seal faded completely.

  “If the Unknown are stirring again, then that stickman’s existence isn’t coincidence… it’s consequence.”

  Elysia’s voice broke the silence, low and fearful.

  “Then what happens when that consequence realizes what it is?”

  Iode looked toward the horizon, where clouds twisted into spirals that bent the light.

  “Then history will repeat the sin we buried,” he said. “And the true traitor… will wake.”

  Elysia hesitated. “It took a coalition of gods just to stop Zenobios from finishing that same goal. Does this mean—”

  “Zenobios wasn’t erased,” Iode cut in coldly. “That cockroach is still alive, pulling strings from the behind covers.”

  A pause.

  “You’re going to search for that stickman.”

  “Of course.”

  Another stretch of silence. Then Elysia asked quietly,

  “When you find him… what will you do?”

  “It depends on the state I meet him in,” Iode answered. “But most likely… I’ll nip the bud.”

  His tone hardened like iron.

  “We cannot let Zenobios finish what Valier started.”