Chapter 162: The Map to a Scream
Planning a rescue into a conceptual void required a new kind of cartography. Lyra's loft became a war-room of resonant paradoxes. Maps of the Kethran foothills were overlaid with Aurora's recalled impressions not of terrain, but of silence-shapes. Zones were marked not by elevation, but by the intensity of the Nullifier's lingering hunger. Their path was a winding, nonsensical line that avoided not patrols, but "resonance sinks" areas where the world's song had been permanently thinned and where their own living signatures would stand out like a shout.
"We don't move through space," Lyra explained to Kaelen and Vale, her hands flying. We move through states of meaning. Here, the land is 'forgotten' safe to cross quickly. Here, it is 'angry scar tissue' we must match its dissonance. Here, near the forge, it is 'actively digesting' we must be pure contradiction, as Aurora was.
