Understanding did not come all at once.
It did not arrive as a revelation that resolved the contradictions they were facing or as a single explanation that restored clarity to the system they had relied on for so long. Instead, it emerged slowly, in fragments that refused to align with what they already knew.
Seraphina worked through those fragments in silence.
The study had become something different from what it had been before the fractures began. It was no longer a place where the convergence could be documented and understood through structured observation. The records in front of her remained useful, but only in the way that a map remains useful after the terrain has changed—helpful to show where things had once been, not where they were now.
She did not look at the convergence m
