The silence after Nihilus vanished wasn't empty.
It was waiting.
Luna stood alone in the resonance chamber, the air thick with ozone and the ghost of Eli's fading broadcast. Her hands still tingled from the severed link, fingers curled like she could claw the connection back from the void.
She couldn't.
But maybe she didn't have to.
Because in that final fractured second—before the Architects' pruning pulse hit—she'd felt it. Not joy, no. But a pathway. A neural echo where joy used to live. Like an old road buried under ash, but still there, if you knew how to dig.
And she did.
Her bloodline—the Luminari—hadn't just been healers. They'd been weavers of emotional architecture. Before the Great Scattering, before Earth forgot its cosmic roots, her ancestors could mend broken souls the way others stitched cloth.
But this wasn't a tear.
This was an erasure.
Still, she had to try.
