Live chapter: https://echoes-of-the-real-20f058.gitlab.io/chapter-4381.html (commit ca1b74d). Title-locked from main HTML (“The Child in the Crossfire”). Streak 266.
Opening (live prose):
It was the pragmatists who moved first.
They began to weave a new law into the fabric of their creation’s reality, a law that would gently, inexorably, sever the link to their own pain.
The mourners felt it as a tremor, a violence done to the delicate, wounded heart of their creation.
Arc beat: scar-child inheritance arc continues through fix-vs-accept, child-in-crossfire, shared culpability, and into atonement-as-creation. Non-WOW; echoes count bumps.