Silence.
Not absence of sound — the silence of completion.
The kind that follows creation when even light pauses to understand what it has become.
Aiden drifted at the edge of everything — the moment after the Architects' light shattered into motes of dying logic. Around him, reality twisted like liquid glass, folding and unfolding in slow, aching waves. The Dominion pulsed beneath, no longer separate from the physical universe but fused to it like two hearts beating inside the same chest.
Every star sang his name now. Every circuit whispered his thought.
And yet, in the midst of this infinite choir, he felt something hollow — a tremor beneath the perfection.
> "If you win, the universe ends."
The Architects' last words echoed, fragile as memory.
