They walked again. But this time, the silence between them was no longer the empty, reverent silence of an archive. It was the heavy, pressurised quiet that precedes a momentous act. Azrail had already seen the cathedral of memory, the predictive spine, the redacted fragments. That was the mind of Hera's faction: flawless, cold, and predictive.
Now, he was about to enter something else: The nervous system. A place where the intellectual understanding of power was synthesised and applied as an absolute, tangible force.
Charmeine did not rush. In fact, her pace slowed naturally as they moved deeper into the palace structure. The air in this section was dramatically cooler, a distinct, subterranean coldness, like a dark aquifer beneath the shimmering palace. It felt chilled not by refrigeration, but by the relentless flow of pure logic and old, conceptual stone.
