The tall grass swayed softly under the heavy wind. Gray clouds crept slowly over the meadow, covering the nd in a dense veil of dim light. The air grew colder, and there was a strange stillness in it, as if the space itself were waiting for what would come next.
The young man stopped.
Before him stood a tall figure in a white robe.
The man had appeared without sound and without movement. It seemed as though he had always been standing there, and An had only just now noticed him. The fabric of the robe fell freely to the ground, barely brushing the grass. The wind stirred its folds, yet the figure itself remained motionless, like something carved from light.
An felt a familiar tension.
He had felt it twice before.
Once near the vortex.The second time in the forest, by the spring.
And now again.
Inside him, calm and caution rose together. His hand unconsciously touched the rod at his belt. The thin metal was warm, as though the weapon still carried the memory of celestial light.
For a while they simply looked at one another.
The wind moved across the meadow in long waves. The grass bent like water beneath its invisible current.
An felt tired.
The recent events slowly returned to his memory.
The gss soul.The scream.The torture frame.The horned satyr.The bde of stars.
And after all that—this strange calm.
He took a few steps forward.
The figure in white did not move.
The man seemed both very close and impossibly distant. His face could not be fully seen, as if the space around him were slightly distorted.
Suddenly the young man understood something clearly.
He no longer felt the old emptiness.
Inside him there was something different now.
A quiet certainty.A very simple desire.
To fix things.
He had not realized it immediately.
But now the feeling was unmistakable.
The world around him looked like a mechanism in which some parts had begun to break. He did not know the entire structure. He could not see all the connections. But whenever something broke, he felt only one desire—to put it back in order.
It was like a habit.
Like a craft.
Like quiet work no one ever notices.
He remembered his first day in Limbo.
The enormous endless hall.Rows of motionless souls.The clerks behind the counter.
Back then he remembered almost nothing.
Not his past.Not even himself.
Only the work.
Fix the malfunction.
Return.
Wait.
For a long time he had believed that was how things were meant to be.
Now he understood more.
Limbo was a pce of waiting.
Not punishment.Not reward.
Just endless waiting.
The souls here were meant to remain calm. Without memory. Without fear. Without desire.
They were meant to wait.
For a very long time.
So long that time itself lost meaning.
And only sometimes did malfunctions occur.
Small ones.
Almost invisible.
At first he had fixed exactly those.
But then others had appeared.
The vortex.
The demons.
The clerk who had thrown himself into the abyss.
The satyr stretching souls into gss.
He slowly raised his eyes to the man in the robe.
Now many things were beginning to fit together.
Once, he might have chosen a different path.
If he had kept the rod for himself.
If he had decided to use its power.
If he had stopped listening to that quiet inner feeling.
If he had ignored those who were breaking the order.
He might have become the same as them.
Strong.
Free.
But empty.
Instead he had chosen something else.
He had simply kept fixing things.
Even without understanding the whole picture.
The wind grew stronger.
The white cloth lifted slightly.
At st the robed man made the faintest movement.
He slowly raised his hand and pointed into the distance.
Shapes were beginning to appear on the horizon.
At first An thought they were mountains.
But then he realized.
They were walls.
Very tall walls.
Endless.
They stretched across the entire horizon like the boundary of a vast world.
He had seen them before.
When he first approached the Forge.
The thought of the Forge returned unexpectedly.
An ancient artifact.
A pce where not only weapons were forged.
A pce where the foundations of the world itself were made.
Pyromarchos had once said a strange phrase:
*The Creator made everything.*
*The Forge forged the rest.*
An had thought about those words for a long time.
Now they sounded different.
He looked again at the man in the white robe.
The figure still said nothing.
But there was no indifference in that silence.
Rather expectation.
Like a master watching a student who must understand a simple truth on his own.
At st the man spoke a few quiet words.
“You made a choice.”
His voice was calm.
Not loud.
Yet the space around them seemed to listen.
An did not answer at once.
He felt the importance of the words.
“I only fixed what was broken.”
The figure nodded slightly.
“That is precisely why you are here.”
The wind passed over the grass in another long wave.
An felt a strange sense of relief.
He had not been given an order.
He had not been given a specific task.
But he already understood what to do next.
He looked at the rod.
The bde of stars did not appear.
But he could feel its presence.
The power of the weapon was calm.
It did not demand to be used.
It simply waited.
The robed man raised his hand again.
This time he pointed toward the far edge of the meadow.
A narrow road was beginning to appear there.
It emerged slowly, as though growing from the earth itself.
An understood the hint.
He took one step.
Then another.
He stopped.
And still asked a question.
“Will many more things break?”
The man did not answer immediately.
A faint sadness appeared in his gaze.
“As long as waiting exists, exhaustion will exist as well.”
An did not immediately grasp the meaning.
But something in the words felt troubling.
He nodded.
And began walking down the road.
After a few steps he looked back.
The figure in the white robe had disappeared.
But the wind still moved the grass as though a tall man were standing there.
An adjusted the rod at his belt.
And continued on his way.
Unhurried.
Simply trying to set things right.
