Chapter Six: Fractures
I didn't sleep again. Couldn't. Every time I blinked, I saw the obsidian door in the void. Felt the pulsing heartbeat of something that had never been alive in the way we understood it.
I sent a dead packet to Hara.
Just three words: They're lying. Help.
I didn't know if she'd respond. Or if she'd report me.
I prepared for both.
Meanwhile, I tunneled deeper into the Nyxari data. I decrypted more glyphs, uncovered references to entities that predated the Convergence—pre-technological, pre-physical. Beings of thought and hunger and design.
They weren't gods.
They were engineers.
And we were living in a prison they built for something worse.
The Convergence wasn't a tool.
It was a lock.
And I had just rattled the keyhole.