The Listener studied them in silence.

  Ais didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Her tongue felt too old in her mouth. As if words would shatter in her throat.

  Darius stepped forward.

  “You know who I am.”

  The Listener smiled softly.

  “You are the fracture. The one who should not exist, and yet refuses to vanish.”

  “You are the ripple that made the script pause.”

  Darius’s hand tightened around the cube.

  “Tell me what this is.”

  The Listener looked to it—not with her eyes, but with something deeper.

  “That,” she said, “is a remnant of the original timeline. A shard of unreconstructed memory.”

  “A tool the Nine Writers feared so deeply, they locked it beneath twelve yers of forgotten time.”

  “And now… it is yours.”

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Ais finally found her voice. “Why? Why is it ours?”

  The Listener walked slowly around the monument at the center of the room—a pilr of frozen history pulsing like a slowed heartbeat.

  “Because no reality can stay rewritten forever.”

  “Because even the most absolute control leaves behind echoes.”

  She looked at them.

  “And you, Darius Vaelthorne, are no longer just an echo. You are a carrier.”

  Darius swallowed. “A carrier of what?”

  The Listener stepped closer.

  Her eyes were endless wells—like she could see every version of him that had ever existed.

  “Of the First Code. The pre-script. The world before logic. Before linear time. Before structure was imposed upon thought.”

  Darius nearly staggered. “That’s… what they’re afraid of?”

  “They’re not afraid of you remembering,” she said.

  “They’re afraid you’ll make others remember.”

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  A tremor shook the Hall.

  The vines recoiled.

  The monument dimmed.

  Ais turned. “What was that?”

  The Listener’s voice was calm, but urgent.

  “The rewrite has reached this point.”

  “They are coming to erase even the foundation.”

  Darius gritted his teeth. “Then we fight.”

  The Listener held out her hand.

  “You don’t need to fight.”

  “You need to write.”

  She opened her palm. A sphere of memory floated above it.

  A seed.

  Small. Dim. Fragile.

  But alive.

  “This is your choice,” she said.

  “You can leave now—carry what you’ve learned and hide in the cracks of memory forever.”

  “Or you can pnt the seed. Here. Now.”

  “But if you do… the war begins in truth.”

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Darius took the seed.

  It was warm in his hand.

  Like holding a forgotten childhood. Like touching the dream of a world that never got to be.

  He looked to Ais.

  She gave a single nod.

  Darius stepped forward.

  And pnted it in the monument.

  Light erupted.

  Not from fme. Not from magic.

  But from history reawakening.

  The Listener smiled, and for the first time—she looked relieved.

  “You have done what no fracture ever dared to do.”

  “You’ve written a new beginning.”

  And far above them, beyond sky and script—

  The Thanatarchy turned its attention.

  Not to erase.

  But to crush.