The Bastion didn’t merely break—it was unraveled, its very foundation coming apart thread by thread, as if the reality holding it together was being erased from existence. Carter’s gambit—brutally jamming his own raw, unrefined human static into the so-called “Final Version” ledger—had been the catalyst. The North’s proud, unyielding laws, chronicled and enforced for centuries, began to dissolve like a story being unwritten. Those infamous black iron walls, once the symbol of invincibility, lost their substance. They bled into shadows, dissolving into viscous streaks that crawled downward, pooling on the floor as though the darkness itself was melting. The massive bronze gears, guardians of the world’s time, which had always ground out the rhythm of days and years, simply let go—breaking f
