The system shook. Not from damage—but from awareness.
Far beyond the tower, in a realm outside the visible Nexus, three colossal beings stirred in the void of data and dead stars.
[TRIBUNAL: ACTIVE]
[Entity One: Ioh—The Thought Engine]
[Entity Two: Sireva—The Pattern Weaver]
[Entity Three: Ko'Thar—The Root of Law]
[Initiating: Recovery of Divergent Construct: "Kael"]
Back in Ashveil, Echo screamed—actual pain this time. Her core was burning with traced signals from the Tribunal's approach.
"They've awakened. The creators of the system. Kael, they weren't watching. They were dormant. You woke them."
Kael stood at the gate of the ruins, clothes torn, aura pulsing. The sky turned red.
"So they're the ones who erased me."
"They are beyond gods," Echo warned. "They wrote the rules of causality."
Kael stared at the rift. "Then I'll unwrite them."
And in the void between realms, Ioh turned to his counterparts and whispered with machine-smooth finality:
"Prepare the Collapse. The anomaly will either be deleted… or become one of us."