Chapter 113: The Anthem of Small Things
The Silence did not roar. It condensed. The black tendrils retracting into the sphere of the First Song did not vanish. They coiled into a dense, dark knot at the sphere's heart, a pupil in an eye of fractured light. The pulling emptiness in the chamber focused, becoming a single, targeted attention. It was studying them. Studying the anomaly of the honeycrumb, the pinch of soil, the way they had localized a universal concept into a defiant, tiny fact.
A psychic command, cold and vast as the abyss, pressed against their minds: CEASE. SIMPLIFICATION IS INEVITABLE. COMPLEXITY IS PAIN.
The words were not sounds, but the erosion of meaning itself. They felt the truth of their own struggles the blight, the loops, the forgetting echo in the command, reframed as a merciful release from suffering.
