Rowan blinked. The secrets of the Primordial Beasts were not what he had expected, but he did not want to be distracted by the new information he was gathering, and he asked Eosah,
"Why would the Cradle need a guard in the first place?"
Eosah gestured, and a new vision bloomed in the space between them, not of ladders or maps, but of a vast, silent, and utterly dark ocean.
"Think of the Cradle of Enoch not as a place, but as a state of perfect, unassailable logic. The Cosmic Record is its output, its manifest reality. But the Cradle itself is the processing core. To approach it with a false name, an impure intent, is like introducing a virus to a perfect machine. The Beasts are the antivirus protocols."
She focused, and in the dark ocean, shapes began to move. Vast, non-Euclidean, their forms suggesting functions rather than biology.
