The walk home from the river felt impossibly long. Each step carried Teak further from the impossible encounter with Rivener, yet the memory of the silver being remained unnervingly present. The curved knife he had witnessed in Rivener's bizarre tantrum had burned itself into Teak's memory—both its physical form and the inexplicable sense that it somehow held significance for him personally.

  As Babil's clay buildings came into view, their familiar outlines offered a momentary comfort—solid, unchanging markers of the ordinary world he had known before today. Yet even they seemed subtly altered now, as though his eyes perceived them differently after witnessing the impossible.

  "You look like you've seen a ghost," his mother, Lira, remarked when he finally reached their modest home in the artisans' quarter. Her hands, perpetually stained with the dyes she used in her textile work, paused in the act of hanging freshly colored cloth. "The river spirits didn't treat you well today?"

  It was her usual teasing about his frequent escapes to the riverside, but today the words carried unintended weight. Teak considered telling her about the silver being, about water defying gravity and forming walls, about childlike tantrums from creatures that shouldn't exist—but found himself unable to translate the experience into words that wouldn't sound like madness.

  "Just tired," he replied instead, dropping onto a cushioned bench. "I missed the excitement at school, I suppose."

  "The Zenith jurors, you mean? Well, there will be other opportunities." She returned to her work, unaware that her son's world had fundamentally changed. "Though your teachers won't be pleased with another absence."

  Teak nodded absently, not bothering to correct her assumption. Better to let her believe he had merely avoided an academic evaluation than to explain what he had actually witnessed. The encounter at the river had exhausted him not physically but mentally, the strain of processing the impossible leaving him drained in ways he had never before experienced.

  He helped with evening chores mechanically, his mind repeatedly returning to silver figures walking on water and speaking of bright visors and white ones who made rules. By nightfall, exhaustion had overtaken him completely. He collapsed onto his sleeping mat, eyes closing almost before his head touched the pillow.

  Sleep descended upon Teak like a heavy blanket, drawing him down into dreams filled with silver figures that walked on water and spoke in voices like liquid metal. He had returned to his home—a modest clay dwelling in the artisans' quarter—explaining his day-long absence with practiced excuses about extra lessons. His mother, Lira, had accepted the explanation with a raised eyebrow but no further questioning. She understood, better than most, his need for occasional escape.

  He drifted deeper into slumber, the day's extraordinary encounter with Rivener melting into dream-imagery—water walls rising impossibly, faces pressed against barriers between worlds, silver limbs elongating beyond natural constraints. In the formless logic of dreams, he found himself standing before a vessel shaped like a teardrop, frost patterns crawling across its surface as something inside pressed to get out—

  The dream shattered as his bedroom door flew open, flooding the space with lamplight.

  "Teak! Wake up!" His mother's voice carried an edge he had never heard before—not anger but naked fear. "Something's happened. We need to go."

  He struggled upright, sleep receding reluctantly. "What? What's wrong?"

  "The Academy." Lira's face appeared drained of color even in the warm lamplight. "There's been some kind of... explosion. The entire district is in chaos."

  Confusion gave way to alertness. "Explosion? But how—"

  "No time." She tossed him his clothes. "Half the city is heading there. We need to see—" She didn't finish the thought, but Teak understood. They needed to see for themselves, because rumors always outpaced truth, and only eyes could verify the unbelievable.

  They joined the river of people flowing through Babil's normally quiet nighttime streets. Neighbors called to each other, theories multiplying with each retelling. Teak caught fragments—"completely gone," "nothing left," "green light in the sky"—each more improbable than the last. Surely an institution that had stood for centuries couldn't simply vanish overnight.

  They turned into the Avenue of Scholars, the wide thoroughfare that led directly to the Academy grounds. The crowd had thickened here, people pressing forward while city guards attempted to establish some perimeter of control. Above the murmuring masses, Teak could see the Academy's distinctive central tower, its—

  No.

  He stopped abruptly, someone colliding with his back before moving around him with muttered complaints. The tower wasn't there. None of the Academy was there. Where the sprawling complex of clay buildings should have stood, a perfect circle of emptiness yawned.

  As Lira pulled him forward through the crowd, the full scope of the impossibility revealed itself.

  The Academy of Babil—its classrooms and courtyards, its libraries and dormitories, its gardens and walls—had been replaced by a crater so geometrically precise it appeared to have been drawn with a compass. The edges were not ragged but smooth, as though a giant had pressed a bowl into soft clay and removed it. The depth was impossible to gauge in the insufficient light of torches and lanterns, but it appeared to extend far deeper than the Academy's foundations should have reached.

  Most disturbing was not what had been destroyed, but the nature of the destruction. This was not the chaotic aftermath of an explosion. There was no debris, no scattered stone, no broken fragments of clay or wood. No smoke rose from the site, no flames illuminated the darkness. There was simply... absence. As though the Academy had been carefully excised from reality itself, leaving behind only a perfect void.

  "This isn't possible," Lira whispered, echoing Teak's thoughts. "Buildings don't just disappear."

  But it had. The place where Teak had sat just that morning, drawing patterns instead of taking notes, no longer existed. The alcove where he had hidden, the storage room through which he had escaped, the eastern wall he had climbed—all gone, replaced by this unnatural perfection of emptiness.

  People stood at the crater's edge, faces illuminated by torches, their expressions unified in stunned disbelief. City guards struggled to maintain a boundary, though none showed any inclination to venture too close to the edge. Priests from the Temple of Seven Waters performed rituals of protection and containment, their movements carrying the frantic energy of those confronting something outside their experience.

  "There was nothing to hear," Teak overheard an elderly man telling a circle of listeners. "My home overlooks the Academy grounds. I was awake, reading by lamplight. There was no sound, no tremor, no warning. One moment it stood as it always has, and the next—" he gestured helplessly toward the crater. "Absence."

  "You're wrong," interrupted a boy perhaps two years younger than Teak. "There was a sound. Like the air being torn. And before that, a green light passed over our house. Like an orb of fire, but cold, not hot. It moved toward the Academy, and then—" He made an expansive gesture with his hands. "Everything gone."

  The crowd's murmurs intensified. Green orbs. Silent destruction. Perfect geometric absence.

  Teak felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. The strangeness of his encounter with Rivener, which he had been preparing to dismiss as an isolated oddity, now seemed connected to this larger impossibility. Something was happening in Babil—something that walked on water, something that erased buildings without leaving traces, something that defied the natural laws he had been taught to trust.

  By morning, the authorities had established control over the site. Zenith Academy representatives arrived before dawn—not just the jurors who had been expected, but an entire delegation led by the Star Chairman himself, a figure normally seen only in ceremonial contexts. They moved through the crowd with unyielding purpose, their gold-trimmed blue robes incongruously elegant amid the dusty chaos.

  Guards from Babil's civic force had been reinforced by units Teak didn't recognize—men and women in uniforms of deep burgundy with insignia he had never seen before. They established a wider perimeter, moving civilians back with practiced efficiency, their expressions revealing nothing.

  "Nothing to concern yourselves with," one official announced to the crowd, his voice carrying artificial reassurance. "A localized phenomenon, fully contained. There is no ongoing danger to Babil or its citizens."

  Teak, who had returned at first light after a sleepless night, watched skeptically as the official continued his improbable narrative.

  "The Academy building experienced a structural failure due to previously unknown instabilities in the underlying ground. Preliminary assessment indicates no casualties, as the facility was unoccupied at the time."

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  Murmurs of disbelief rippled through the crowd. The Academy had stood for centuries. Ground instabilities would have manifested long ago. And how did a "structural failure" remove every trace of a building complex without leaving a single fragment behind?

  "But the green light—" someone called out.

  "Swamp gas reflecting off atmospheric conditions," the official replied without hesitation. "A known phenomenon, documented in the eastern territories."

  Teak had never heard of such a phenomenon, nor had anyone else, judging by the incredulous expressions surrounding him. The explanation was not designed to be believed, he realized—only to be officially accepted. Something to fill reports and satisfy bureaucratic requirements while the truth remained carefully contained.

  The Star Chairman approached the crater's edge, flanked by assistants carrying instruments Teak had never seen before. They took measurements, collected samples of soil, and spoke in low tones among themselves. Though their words didn't carry to the crowd, their expressions revealed more than they likely intended—concern bordering on fear, confusion poorly masked by professional composure.

  Teak drifted closer, hoping to overhear something useful. A younger Zenith official was consulting a device that resembled a compass but with multiple needles that spun in contradictory directions.

  "—dimensional variance exceeds all previously recorded instances," the man was saying. "The signature matches the Karesh Incident, but at exponentially higher levels. If these readings are accurate—"

  "They are not for public dissemination," interrupted an older woman, noticing Teak's proximity. She fixed him with a stare that prompted immediate retreat, though not before he caught one final fragment: "—similar anomalies reported in the western territories. The pattern is accelerating."

  That afternoon, Teak returned to the river.

  He told himself he was seeking the peace that had always awaited him there, the comfort of flowing water and open sky after the disorienting horror of the Academy's impossible disappearance. But truth lay deeper. He wanted—needed—to determine whether his encounter with Rivener had been real or merely a vivid hallucination preceding the greater strangeness that followed.

  The path felt longer than it had yesterday, though his feet followed the same tracks. The world seemed altered in subtle ways he couldn't quite articulate—colors slightly too intense, shadows a degree too dark, the air carrying scents both familiar and not. Perhaps it was only his perception that had changed, his senses heightened by fear and wonder.

  The river came into view, flowing as it always had. No water walls rose from its surface, no silver being paced across its currents. Teak approached his usual spot, half-expecting some sign of yesterday's extraordinary visitor, but finding only the familiar stone shelf and clear water passing over smooth river rocks.

  Had he imagined it all? The river offered no answers, only its eternal movement—unchanging yet never the same from one moment to the next. He sat, not removing his sandals this time, only watching the water flow past. The familiar whisper that had always drawn him here seemed muted today, as though the river itself had withdrawn into cautious silence.

  After a time, he stood. Whatever answers he sought would not be found here today. He would return home, help his mother make sense of the inexplicable events, perhaps speak with elders who might possess folklore that offered context for such impossibilities.

  He turned back toward the city—and stopped, the breath freezing in his lungs.

  Babil wasn't there.

  The absence struck him first as a visual impossibility, his mind refusing to process what his eyes reported. Where the city should have risen against the eastern horizon—its stepped buildings and towers, its walls and gates, the distant dome of the Temple of Seven Waters—there was only empty plain extending to the curve of the earth. The geological features that had defined Babil's location for millennia remained—the gentle rise of land, the distant hills—but utterly naked of human presence.

  No ruins suggested recent destruction. No smoke indicated fire. No fragments or foundations hinted at what had stood there since before his grandfather's grandfather was born. The absence was absolute and perfect—as though Babil had not been destroyed but erased, retroactively removed from the fabric of existence itself. The very air where the city had stood appeared different—clearer, perhaps, without the usual haze of cookfires and industry, yet somehow wrong, like a painting where a central figure had been cut out, leaving behind not blank canvas but an impossible continuity of background.

  Teak's knees gave way. He fell to the earth, hands digging into soil as though to anchor himself against the vertigo of comprehension. His mother. The neighbors. The thousands who had gathered at the Academy site. The vendors and priests and artisans. The buildings that had witnessed generations of human drama. The streets he had walked every day of his life. All gone. Not killed or destroyed—those concepts at least existed within the realm of the possible—but negated, as though they had never been.

  A crushing weight of solitude descended upon him. Was he the last person alive? Had he been spared only by distance, by his presence at the riverside? Or was he somehow witnessing what others could not—a selective erasure visible only to him?

  The questions multiplied, each more terrifying than the last, until a movement in the sky interrupted his spiraling thoughts.

  A sound drew his attention skyward—not truly a sound, perhaps, but a disturbance in the air that registered on senses humans rarely access. Teak looked up and felt reality fracture further around him.

  Crossing the immaculate blue of the afternoon sky moved a procession that defied comprehension. At first glance, they appeared to be horses—six of them in perfect formation—but horses transformed into something both more and less than living creatures. Their bodies were composed entirely of translucent crystal with a pale green luminescence emanating from within. Light passed through them rather than reflecting off their surfaces, fracturing into spectra that existed beyond the normal range of color. Their movements combined perfect mechanical precision with fluid grace impossible for material objects, each step synchronized yet rippling with internal energy.

  Behind them trailed what might have been a chariot, though the word felt hopelessly inadequate. It too was crystalline, its structure constantly reforming itself even as it maintained its general shape. Angles appeared and disappeared, surfaces became transparent then opaque, decorative elements rearranged themselves in patterns that suggested a mathematics unknown to human scholarship.

  Atop this impossible vehicle stood a figure that Teak's eyes refused to properly perceive. His vision slid away from direct observation, as though his mind actively protected him from whatever fundamental wrongness the driver embodied. He caught only impressions—a silhouette too tall and too thin, limbs jointed in ways that violated anatomical possibility, a suggestion of a head that contained too many features arranged in configurations no human face could support.

  The procession moved in absolute silence, yet Teak felt its passage as vibrations in his teeth and bones, in the fluid of his eyes, in the chambers of his heart. Where it crossed the sky, the air seemed to thin, revealing glimpses of something else behind the blue—not stars or space, but an entirely different reality pressing against the membrane of this one.

  For a suspended moment, the crystalline horses and their incomprehensible burden passed directly overhead. Teak felt observed, though he could not say by what means. Then, between one heartbeat and the next, the entire procession simply ceased—not vanishing gradually or passing beyond view, but transitioning from existence to non-existence without intermediate stages.

  Teak remained kneeling, the afterimage of the crystal horses burning behind his eyelids when he blinked. His understanding of reality, already fractured by Rivener and the disappearances, now lay in ruins around him. Nothing he had been taught, nothing he had experienced in his previous life, had prepared him for a world where cities could be erased and crystal horses could pull chariots through the sky before vanishing from existence.

  Instinct drove him back toward the river—the only constant remaining in a universe suddenly revealed as mutable. Perhaps there, in the one place that had always called to him, he might find some anchor in the tempest of impossibility.

  He had taken only a few steps when the air before him shimmered, rippling like the surface of disturbed water. The distortion expanded outward from a central point, forming a perfect circle approximately the size of a serving platter. Within this circle, reality simply ceased, replaced by darkness so absolute it appeared to absorb the surrounding light.

  From this darkness emerged a head—though "head" seemed grotesquely inadequate to describe what manifested before him.

  It resembled a lion in its general outline, but a lion reimagined by a mind that understood the concept only through abstract geometry. Its structure constantly shifted between states of solidity and translucence, its surface both crystalline and fluidic. Its mane was composed not of fur but of constantly moving shards of light that refracted impossible colors. Most arresting were its eyes—multifaceted prismatic orbs that contained what appeared to be entire galaxies in miniature, swirling with stars and cosmic dust.

  When it spoke, the words formed directly in the air, crystallizing briefly before shattering into fragments that dissolved into nothing:

  "Seeker of waters. Bearer of the unseen mark. The time of unmaking accelerates."

  The voice matched the impossible nature of the apparition—multiple tones harmonizing and conflicting simultaneously, as though several voices spoke in counterpoint. It resonated not just in Teak's ears but throughout his body, vibrating his bones and internal organs with each syllable.

  "I am Chromar. You have glimpsed the first fractures in the veil between worlds."

  The crystalline head rotated slightly, those cosmic eyes focusing on something beyond Teak's perception. Where it looked, the air itself seemed to warp and thin, revealing momentary glimpses of landscapes that could not exist—mountains that flowed like liquid, skies filled with geometric patterns instead of clouds, oceans that burned with cold fire.

  "The pattern repeats. First the small erasures. Then settlements. Then entire regions. Soon, reality itself will unravel completely."

  As Chromar spoke, his form became increasingly defined, the constant shifting stabilizing into a more coherent appearance, though still fundamentally alien. His muzzle elongated, revealing teeth made of transparent crystal that somehow suggested terrible sharpness.

  "Beneath the ancient temple lies the chamber of vessels. The white trickster and the old guardian hide what must be found. Release me from my prison, or watch your world dissolve into the void."

  The apparition began to destabilize, its edges blurring as though being drawn back into the darkness from which it had emerged. The cosmic eyes fixed on Teak with an intensity that felt physical.

  "You bear the resonance. You alone can open the way. Find the chamber. Break the vessel. Before everything you know ceases to exist."

  The darkness contracted, pulling Chromar's image back into nothingness. The circular distortion shrank rapidly, collapsing with a sound like glass shattering in reverse, leaving nothing but empty air and the lingering sensation of having witnessed something that existed beyond the boundaries of comprehension.

  Teak remained motionless, suspended between terror and wonder. His city was gone. Crystal horses pulled impossible chariots across the sky. And now a being called Chromar—whose head had manifested from nowhere—offered the only hope of preventing further dissolution.

  The world Teak had known until yesterday had been merely the surface of a far deeper reality—one now breaking through in ways that threatened everything. The game of cosmic forces had begun, and somehow, inexplicably, he had become a player rather than a piece.