The water did not drown him. It unmade him.
Elias drifted in a light that had no source, a silence that had no depth. The Still Point was not a place; it was an absence, a hollow carved out of the world where nothing—not sound, not thought, not the deep's hunger—could exist. He floated in it, weightless and formless, and for a long while, there was no Elias. There was only the light and the quiet and the slow dissolution of everything he had been.
Then the memories came.
They rose like bubbles from the bottom of a black sea—fragments of the rig, the children's faces, the cold of the Silence, the taste of salt and blood. He saw Lyra's silver eyes, Isaac's steady hands, Jesus's axe flashing in the dark. He saw Ava's smile, rare and precious. He saw the original's face, twisted with rage a
