I’m here, El, Asher projects, his mental voice a steady, deep drumbeat that cuts through the shrieking chaos of the collapsing cavern. Feel the stone. Feel the weight. I’m holding the physical. You find the thread.
Elara closes her eyes. She takes a deep, shuddering breath. And then, she reaches up.
She doesn't reach for the Seed. She reaches for the beam.
Through the merge, I feel what she is doing. She is reading the Architect’s sterilization algorithm. It is a cold, mathematical sequence of pure entropy, designed to unravel atomic bonds. But Elara is the Blueprint. She understands the geometry of the universe better than the entities that wrote the code.
It’s a closed loop, Elara whispers in my mind, her voice echoing with the vastness of the cosmos. The beam is just energy. Energy
