The remains of the Paradox Wyrm didn’t decompose like flesh.
Where its forty paces of segmented slate and bone had landed, a low mound of dry grey powder four feet high stretched across the collapsed courtyard of the watchtower. It smelled neither of rot nor of soot. It smelled of old library paper that had spent eighty years in a stuffy cellar. It was dry, acidic, and chilled to the touch.
Ren Vale knelt in the grey drift, his newly aged joints protesting with a dull ache as his knees settled into the ash.
He reached into his keeper’s kit, his callused, ink-stained fingers selecting two four-inch bone studying probes and a pair of brass measuring tongs. Beside him, Chrono-Scribe Ren knelt with the practiced, rigid stance of a High court coroner, his slate-grey scroll-keeper’s coat tucked neatly between his knees to keep the hem from dragging in the detritus.
“Begin with the main anchor,” the Scribe instructed, his voice clipped and cold and exact. He drew a twelve-inch steel cutting-open needle from the calfskin wrist guard on his right forearm. “Entities of this class can’t maintain physical holding power in the third stratum without a focal seed. A causal paradox has no weight of its own. It needs an artificial mass around which contradictory histories can accrete.”
