[SYSTEM OBSERVATION LOG]
The fracture took him in the middle of a word.
Arveth finished it anyway. "Antecedent," he said into the strange quiet where the fracture had cast him. A word begun deserved its ending. He would not grant the fracture the satisfaction of interrupting it. Work unfinished had never suited him.
Four seconds passed.
The symbols on his robes had gone still. He looked at the space around him.
"The antecedent has been," he said, somewhat inaccurately, to the dimensional space around him.
The space did not answer.
But the world itself noted the pattern. The old confirmation sequence continued, though the other four who once received it were absent. Whatever purpose the pattern had once served remained unspoken. The system did not speculate. It simply allowed the pattern to continue, as it always had.
