The scream of the tower transitioned into a harmonic resonance that vibrated through every atom of Malphas and Lyra’s being. As their fingers closed around the white spark, the sensation was not one of heat, but of total, crushing expansion. They were no longer standing on a floor of chrome.
They were becoming the very geometry of the space. Every memory they had ever carried. The ache of the throne, the sting of the spy’s betrayal, the smell of the pines in the Peaks, the cold of the gorge, was stripped from their minds and rewritten into the Core’s fundamental code.
Malphas felt his consciousness stretching across the sector, touching the thousand towers that formed the web of the harvest. He saw the Masters, entities of pure, cold mathematics, not as gods, but as observers watching a
