The transition was not movement.
It was unmaking.
The lattice dissolved around him—its walls folding into threads of unspoken mathematics, its geometry inhaled by something far older. For a moment he felt the boundaries of his being stretch thin, like a shadow pulled across the surface of a star. Even for him—architect of domination, breaker of systems—this place was too vast to comprehend in a single thought.
The Architects led him through the breach.
No… into something.
A realm without shape, without time, without even the courtesy of dimension. The Architects' luminous forms flickered, reduced from towering cosmic entities to fragile silhouettes in the face of what awaited.
And then—
He saw it.
The Source.
