The clearing was not the same.
The collapse had remade the world—or at least this fragment of it—into something colder, older, and far less forgiving. Beneath their feet stretched a floor of stone, smooth and cracked with age, veins of black fissures spidering out like dead rivers. The stones shimmered faintly under a lightless sky, casting shadows without sources.
Around them, red grass whispered in the breeze, if it could be called a breeze. It smelled of iron and earth and something sweeter—something wrong. Twisting up between the cracks were strange flowers, petals bleeding shades of crimson too deep to be natural. The trees, gnarled and ancient, rose up like skeletal fingers dipped in blood, their leaves an impossible, dark velvet red.
And scattered among the red tapestry lay skulls.
Not animal. Not human. Something in-between—elongated, deformed, the remains of creatures never meant to survive in any reality that obeyed the laws of nature.
The group stood in a loose, uneasy formation.
Mira leaned heavily against a tree, her breathing shallow. Brin sat cross-legged on the ground, staring at nothing with wide, unblinking eyes. Sir Calden remained upright through force of will alone, the edge of his blade scraping idly against the stone as if the act of holding it grounded him. Rei sat slumped, muttering to himself in broken half-thoughts.
Only Riven had enough clarity to step forward, his voice rough but steady.
"What happened?" he asked, directing the question not into the air, but squarely at Erasmus.
Erasmus stood a few paces ahead of them, gazing out over the unnatural landscape. When he turned, there was no visible strain on his face, no crack in the armor of his composure. Only calculation. Only purpose.
"It's an error," Erasmus said simply. His voice carried the calm certainty of a man explaining a minor defect in a piece of machinery. "Residual instability from the severed anchor. This... scenery is just what's left when a system forgets its own rules."
Riven glanced around at the blood-red grass, the twisting trees, the monstrous skulls. "Some error," he muttered under his breath.
"It will stabilize," Erasmus continued. "Or it won't. Either way, standing here worrying about it changes nothing."
He turned to the others, his voice lifting just slightly, not with warmth, but authority.
"Rest. You're no use half-broken."
Mira flinched at the sharpness of his tone but nodded numbly. Brin lay down without a word, curling into himself. Calden sheathed his sword with a mechanical slowness, sinking onto a boulder.
"And you?" Riven asked, not quite trusting, not quite ready to be shepherded like cattle.
"I'll keep watch," Erasmus said, almost too quickly, with that same tranquil certainty. "Someone must ensure nothing else... slips through."
The others, exhausted beyond the strength to argue, accepted his words at face value. Slowly, one by one, they surrendered to exhaustion, slipping into uneasy sleep beneath the hollow-eyed stare of the crimson trees.
Only Erasmus remained upright.
But he was not watching the forest.
He was watching them.
—
Standing alone amid the bleeding grass and crumbling bones, Erasmus folded his arms behind his back and let the silence stretch. His mind whirred—not with vigilance for external threats, but with calculations. Measurements. Assessments. Opportunities.
They thought he stood guard for their sake.
In truth, they were the ones being measured.
Their exhaustion, their vulnerability, their fractures—all valuable data. All elements to be weighed when the next judgment came. He would see who broke first. Who adapted. Who begged. Who betrayed.
Rest up, he thought, a faint smile ghosting across his lips.
Tomorrow, the real trial begins.
Above it all, unseen to the others, the black-winged shadows of the Ebonmoths clung to the broken air—silent. Watching. Waiting.
Erasmus turned away from the sleeping remnants of his group, his gaze sweeping over the red landscape. He moved without hurry, stepping lightly between tufts of crimson grass and the scattered, cracked skulls. It was then—at the edge of the clearing, half-buried among the red flowers—that he saw it.
It was a stuffed figure—like a child's abandoned toy.
Small. Motionless.
It resembled an effigy stitched from black fabric, clothed in a tattered black priest's outfit that trailed into the grass like spilled ink. Long strands of white hair, impossibly fine, pooled around its form, and a black veil covered its eyes. Its face, pale and delicate beneath the veil, wore the softest expression: one of sleep. Almost... contentment.
Erasmus crouched down beside it, studying it with cool detachment.
It was perfectly still. Not damaged. Not weathered. As though it had only just been placed there—or birthed by the cracks in the world itself.
Another error, Erasmus thought. Or something deeper.
A product of the system's collapse? A buried memory unearthed from the strata of broken timelines? Or a fragment of something that had never been whole to begin with?
He reached out without hesitation and gathered the stuffed figure into his cloak, hiding it from sight. It was light, almost weightless, and unnervingly warm against his fingers.
He would study it later. Dissect its nature. Understand what flaw—or what intent—had given it form.
For now, it was simply another variable to be catalogued. Another artifact of collapse.
Erasmus rose, the figure tucked away, and returned to his place at the edge of the group.
And in the quiet that followed, he extended his will—not outward, but inward, into the very marrow of this wounded reality. He did not summon. He did not demand. He tilted.
The Weight of Judgment shifted.
And reality, already wounded and reeling, yielded.
The change began at his chest—a pulse, subtle and then sudden, like a vein rupturing beneath skin. In the next heartbeat, the surface of Erasmus' body fractured—not bleeding, not tearing—but weeping ink.
From every pore, every unseen seam of his being, Ebonmoths burst forth.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
They did not flap their wings. They bled into existence, coiling out of him like black smoke given hunger, like ink drowning the very concept of space. They did not obey the winds. They rewrote them.
The crimson grass bent away from him in waves, recoiling. The sky above dimmed further, a slow collapse of color, as the swarm poured from Erasmus' frame, blotting the clearing in unnatural darkness.
And still, he did not move.
The others—Mira, Brin, Calden, Riven, Rei—lay unconscious or too broken to see it. They would not understand what was happening. They were not meant to.
The moths did not scatter. They clustered around Erasmus, orbiting him like particles around a collapsed star. Feeding. Waiting. Carrying the stolen memories that he had stolen from the Trial's collapse, now made real.
And as the first sleeper's breath stirred the petals of a bleeding flower, Erasmus remained where he was, unblinking, unmoving.
Not a guardian.
Not a shepherd.
A judge.
And judgment was only beginning.