LYRA'S POV – NINE YEARS LATER
"This is the last one."
My voice echoed across the restoration chamber—the same space where we'd performed one thousand integrations, then five thousand, then twenty thousand. The walls hummed with residual energy from thirty-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine successful restorations spanning nearly a decade of relentless work.
Maya stood beside me, her extended lifespan barely showing the passage of nine years while my forty-one dimensional states had only grown more refined, more capable. More prepared for this singular moment that would complete the systematic repair of twelve centuries of genocide.
The final fragment pulsed before us—ancient consciousness, older than any we'd encountered. Fourteen centuries in crystalline stasis. Shattered before intervention protocols were even formalized. Before the Council had refined genocide into bureaucratic procedure with compassionate language disguising systematic murder.
