The denial was the breaking point. The Grand Conjunction, a synchrony of yielded intentions had been intended for an ideal consenting Anchor. A faulty dissenting one was an inconsistency. The circuit didn't power off. It writhed.
The buzz, in the salon persisted—it broke apart. The once harmonious tone fractured into a disordered deep-frequency quiver that resonated through the teeth and bones. The luminous filaments linking the preserved individuals flickered, then flickered resembling broken neon. The calm expressions stayed calm. The energy issuing from them was no longer a steady stream; it was a fractured irregular leak.
It started to seep out.
Devon initially noticed it as the hotel's time-thickening syrup intensifying. The atmosphere thickened more weighing down like a tangible force. The dust particles came to a halt. The gentle sluggish breeze, from the balcony door stopped entirely. The hotel was closing itself off like a tomb.
However the impact did not stay confined. The unbalanced force radiated outward generating a ripple of calm.
In the lobby the majestic clock's halted hand remained still. Yet the minute hand started to creep backward accompanied by a grinding, scream of time, in reverse.
Along the Quai du Mont-Blanc the flow of traffic never stopped. It slowed down. A tram, which moments earlier moved quietly started to fade its hum its movement gradually fading not into a full stop but into a languid slow-motion glide that appeared to extend its length along the rails. The passengers' faces seen through the windows transformed into stretched blurs of bewilderment.
On a café patio a waiter filling a glass with mineral water observed the flow turn into a sluggish thread then transform into a collection of hanging, quivering droplets that hesitated to drop into the glass. He gazed intently his order pad dropping, from fingers that no longer remembered how to hold it.
Throughout the city within the sector algorithms created for rapid trading started to cycle endlessly. Not failing. Idling. Computational sequences extended, mulling over computations, with boundless sluggish thoroughness. Market charts didn't plummet out of fear. From deep electronic ennui.
The playground grew quiet not due, to the children leaving. Because their playfulness dwindled. A swing paused at its point and simply… remained still the child seated on it gazing vacantly at the sky a laugh left unfinished in her throat. A soccer ball, caught mid-kick lost its drive and settled onto the grass with a last thump as though the idea of a 'goal' had vanished.
It wasn't aggression. It was a breakdown. The mental brake Flavio had engineered was now a disruption. Than delivering a gentle consistent soothing the corrupted signal was creating a deep focused inertia within the chain of cause and consequence. Drive faded away. Outcomes were ignored. Fires, in hearths no longer blazed; their flames stood quiet and high gradually shrank into embers too indifferent to shine.
In the lounge Flavio observed his tablet. The trio of synchronized waveforms from the points had transformed into sharp conflicting lines. The peaceful data had vanished, substituted by the pattern of an unsuccessful test. He didn't appear furious. He resembled an engineer witnessing his elegant bridge shudder and fracture not due to external pressure but because of one wrongly positioned speck of sand, in the concrete.
"It isn't peace " he murmured, aghast. "It's… ineptitude."
The emptiness of Belphegor itself started to flicker. The serene quiet possibility began to warp its borders unraveling. It ceased to be a substitute, for reality; it was turning into an imperfect reality. A reality where things never concluded they simply… lacked the motivation to keep going.
Devon remaining on his knees sensed the fading force of the world slipping from him. He had picked the agonizing world.. Now due, to that decision the world was losing its ability to be loud or agonizing or anything whatsoever. It was turning into a incomplete entity. A literal embodiment of a shrug.
The ritual had begun, but it was birthing not a new world of quiet, but a ghost of the old one—a world losing, thread by thread, the will to be itself. The Grand Conjunction was not a climax. It was a slow, gentle dissolution into apathy's grey, undistinguished haze.