Raiel stood at the edge of the restructured corridor, the null-tier key still warm in her hand.
The world had tilted.
She felt it not in her body, but in the feedback delay between thought and system response—an echo that had grown longer, deeper. The system was no longer parsing her as anomaly.
It was parsing her as **source**.
A door opened ahead, carved not by architecture but belief. She stepped through it—and entered silence.
But not alone.
Someone was already there.
She didn’t hear footsteps. No alerts. No glyphs.
But the air had shifted.
> “You named a space,” the voice said. Low. Female. Measured.
Raiel turned.
The woman was tall. Skin like ash. Eyes alight with recursive glyphs that shimmered even in rest-state. Her cloak bore the mark of the Old Anchors, the kind b
