The silence that hung over the twenty-pace enclosure of cured sheepskin was thicker than the ice on the Blackwater River.
High above the Crucible, the seven conflicting skies had begun to slow their wild rotation, freezing into a jagged, sharp-angled ceiling of fractured glass. The orange flames of Berserker Ren’s paradox fire hung suspended in the clouds. The purple stars of Apostate Ren’s void pulsed with sluggish, irregular beats, like a dying heart struggling to pump lead through cold veins.
Ren Prime took a slow, deliberate breath, steadying his hands against the hard speckled rock stone base.
He reached into his leather apron. Then he drew out the ancient notice scroll he had drafted in the underground archive beneath the altar. He unrolled it across the central drafting stone base, smoothing the chalked surface with the flat of his mammoth ivory awl.
The contract ledger ratified: The Seventh Void Recursion Proof. Theorem: Unilateral Termination Multiplies Divergence. Axiom 1: Every Authentic Choice Collapses An Unchosen Path. Axiom 2: Every Collapsed Path Crystallizes In The Speculum. Axiom 3: Execution Is An Exercise Of Voluntary Moral Agency.
The Man Who Returned stared at the text. His mirrored eyes, which had looked upon the collapse of empires without flinching, were wide with an ancient, horrified realization.
