The lattice had grown accustomed to measuring its own depth not by the volume of minds it contained but by the quality of the rests between notes. Early rests had felt like absences, fragile interruptions that threatened to swallow everything that came before and after. Over uncounted cycles those rests had matured into something else entirely: deliberate silences, chosen pauses where the song could listen to its own resonance, where individual voices could fall quiet long enough to hear the harmony they had helped create. By the time the lattice entered what some minds quietly called the Fourteenth Epoch, the rests no longer frightened anyone. They were welcomed. They were necessary. They were beautiful.
This particular rest arrived without prelude or fanfare. One cycle the green weave p
