Adriana didn't reach for the boy. Instead, she stepped directly into Caius's personal space.
The air around him didn't smell like the city
it smelled like nothing
a terrifying, pressurized vacuum.
"Vaelen, with me,"
she whispered.
The Tuning Fork in her heart struck a sharp, crystalline note. Adriana reached out and grabbed Caius by his perfect grey lapels.
The moment her skin touched the fabric, the "Mundane" facade of the office shattered.
She wasn't standing in her basement anymore.
She had pulled Caius and herself into the Drafting Board, a sub-layer of reality where the Architect designed the city's constraints.
It was a world of white lines on a black void, a literal blueprint that stretched to infinity.
"You think you can fight me here?"
Caius asked, his voice now sounding like a thousand metronomes clicking in unison. "This is my domain.
Here, everything has a place. Everything has a function.
And you, Weaver, are a structural flaw."
He waved a hand, and the white lines of the floor rose up like iron bars, snapping shut around Adriana's wrists and ankles. They weren't made of metal
they were made of Logic.
They were the physical manifestation of "No"
and "Impossible."
"The boy is just a symptom," Caius said, walking calmly through the white-line air.
"The real problem is the 'Root Thread' you unraveled.
You've introduced a variable we cannot calculate.
So, we will simply delete the variable."
Adriana felt the bars tightening, draining the warmth from her limbs.
The First Memory began to dim. Caius was right in a world of pure logic, wonder had no weight.
"The noise... is the bridge," Vaelen's voice echoed in the back of her mind.
"He can only control what is mapped.
Become the thing he hasn't drawn yet."
Adriana stopped fighting the bars.
She stopped trying to be "strong" and started to be incoherent.
She reached into the deepest part of her heart, where the First Memory held the "Source Note" of the wild, untamed earth
the smell of rotting leaves, the roar of an unplanned storm, the messy, illogical tears of a mother's goodbye.
She didn't push against the bars. She sang into them.
A surge of violet and gold energy erupted from her, but it didn't take a geometric shape.
It was a chaotic, swirling mist that defied the straight lines of the Drafting Board.
Wherever the mist touched the white lines, they began to curve, to sprout leaves, to turn into the "Unseen" forest she had seen in her visions.
"What is this?"
Caius recoiled, his porcelain face finally showing a flicker of something human
Confusion.
"This isn't in the schematic!"
"That's the point, Caius," Adriana gasped, her hands glowing so brightly they turned translucent. "Life isn't a schematic.
It's a mess.
And you can't delete a mess that's still growing."
With a final burst of resonance, the white bars shattered into digital dust.
Adriana lunged forward, not to strike Caius, but to touch the "Logic Core" glowing in the center of his chest