The space beyond the academy's threshold wasn't a floor.
It wasn't the subspace either, not yet. It was something in between, the fable's architecture doing what myth-grade fables did at the edge of their completion — holding the arc open for one final beat, the sealed timeline unwilling to close until the full causal chain had been witnessed.
He stood in a grey that had no source direction, the light flat and total, and watched the fable's remaining moments play out in the peripheral way that completion sequences sometimes ran, not as vision exactly but as a known thing settling into certainty.
