When the twelve tones faded, silence remained—thick, living, charged like air before lightning.
The lattice beneath his feet glowed again, this time not gold but deep red, the colour of iron just before it cools.
From the centre of the floor a single crack spread outward, branching like a vein.
It didn't threaten collapse; it was deliberate, almost beautiful.
"That line," God said, "is where chaos tore itself learning to hold."
He knelt.
The crack pulsed, and through it flowed a slow river of light—too bright for colour, too gentle for fire.
Every pulse seemed to carry a fragment of memory, images flickering in the glow:
atoms colliding, cells dividing, children reaching for their parents.
Each frame a different attempt of the universe to repair itself.
"Creation was never immaculate," God continued.
"It was surgery. The first act was a cut. Every constant you know—G, c, ℏ—was the scar tissue that healed the wound."
He touched the crack.
Heat ran up his arm, not painful, just immense.
For an instant he felt gravity's pull as emotion, electromagnetism as conversation, nuclear force as promise.
He saw that matter held because it refused to stay broken.
"So every law," he whispered, "is restraint after trauma."
"Exactly," said God.
"Entropy, uncertainty, attraction—they are all scars that refused to close too tightly.
A wound that seals perfectly becomes stone; a wound that breathes becomes world."
He looked at his own hands, at the sigil burned into his palm during the Tower's trial.
The scar shimmered faintly in resonance with the one beneath the lattice.
"I carry a smaller version of this," he said.
"All minds do," God answered.
"To know anything is to bleed a little. To remember is to heal imperfectly."
The twelve lights returned, faint, hovering just above the floor, each aligning with a different branch of the crack until the pattern resembled a cosmic map.
The voice of Saturn-Noether echoed:
"Balance is not symmetry; it is the grace of the wound that learned proportion."
He felt the meaning take root—suffering not as punishment but as architecture.
Every failure, every grief, a brace holding the next motion steady.
"So that's why you called it the scar of creation," he said.
"Yes," God replied.
"Because pain remembers the shape of what should be. Without that memory, nothing holds its form."
The light in the crack subsided, leaving a faint golden seam across the floor.
It looked like kintsugi—the art of repairing pottery with gold—only here the pottery was space-time itself.
"You've learned the grammar of fracture," God said.
"Now learn the instruments that speak it—the Sword, the Pen, and the Word."
The seam at his feet brightened again, dividing into three radiant lines that stretched into the distance, each humming a different tone: decisive, remembering, proclaiming.
"Walk whichever you recognise first," God murmured.
"All end at the same door."