The darkness didn't lift.
It knelt.
Black glass poured from every shard in Ka'thar like oil from a slit throat, pooling at Law's feet, climbing his legs, trying to drink the word he'd just spoken.
Tavren lay crumpled where the glass had caught him, mouth open in a silent scream. His eyes were still moving, tracking something only he could see.
Law didn't look down.
He was listening to the city cry.
Not a metaphor.
Every shard in every wall, every window, street, and sky was weeping blood that wasn't blood. It ran upward, against gravity, forming letters in the air that hurt to read.
The letters spelled his real name.
The one that had been erased from history the night the Mirror first cracked.
The name hit the alley like a second heartbeat.
Nysera dropped to all fours, claws carving stone, wolf surging so hard her spine cracked.
Zero's chains shattered mid-air, links turning to black rust that screamed when it hit the ground.
Liora and Laura clutched each other, resonance flaring white-hot, silver fractures racing across their skin like lightning frozen mid-strike.
Because the city wasn't just speaking Law's name.
It was remembering it.
And memory, in Ka'thar, is a blade.
Tavren found his voice. It came out wet.
"You… weren't supposed to remember that,"
he rasped. "No one was."
Law finally looked at him.
His eyes weren't gold anymore.
They were the exact colour of the moment before the world ends.
"I didn't remember," Law said quietly.
"I made you say it for me."
He took one step forward.
The black glass shattered under his boot like frozen screams.
Every shard in the city answered with a single, unified pulse.
A heartbeat.
His heartbeat.
The blood-letters in the air rearranged themselves into a new sentence, written in Tavren's own handwriting:
I WAS THE FIRST ANCHOR WHO REFUSED.
Tavren's face went the colour of old ash.
Law smiled.
It wasn't kind.
"Then you already know how this ends."
He pressed his bleeding palm flat against the nearest wall.
The city screamed.
Not the shards this time.
The city itself.
A sound like ten thousand mothers watching their children die at once.
The black glass exploded outward in perfect rings, carving Tavren's body into ribbons that hung in the air like red streamers.
Then the ribbons folded themselves into a crown.
A crown made of Tavren's bones and mirrors.
It floated toward Law.
He didn't move.
The crown stopped an inch from his forehead.
And waited.
Law looked at it.
Then past it.
Straight into the darkness that used to be the sky.
"I'm not your anchor anymore," he said.
The crown shattered.
Every shard in Ka'thar went dark at once.
Not night-dark.
Dead-dark.
The kind of dark that comes after the last star gives up.
And from that darkness came a voice the Five had never heard before.
Soft.
Female.
Ancient.
Tired.
It spoke one sentence.
One sentence that made Laura drop her knives.
Made Liora fall to her knees.
Made Nysera's wolf whine like a kicked puppy.
Made Zero's void close its eyes for the first time in his life.
The voice said:
"Thank you for teaching me how to look away."
Then the darkness folded in on itself.
And Ka'thar, for the first time in ten thousand years,
closed its eyes.
Law stood in the sudden, impossible silence.
Blood dripped from his palm.
Each drop hit the ground and became a tiny white flower.
He looked at the flowers.
Then at his family.
Then at the place where Tavren used to be.
And laughed.
It was the sound of someone who had just won a war he never agreed to fight.
Somewhere far below, the last shard in the city cracked in half.
And smiled.