The Arithmae did not scream when they died.
They calculated.
In the final hours of their civilization, while their cities folded inward like collapsing equations and the walls of Dimension 9 buckled under forces that should not have existed, the greatest mathematical minds in the history of Vathrek sat in silence and wrote.
The proof was unfinished. They knew it would be. They had seen their own extinction in the numbers long before the first tower cracked, long before the Hollow Meridian spat something ancient and hungry through the barrier between what was and what should never be.
There was no equation that could prevent it.
So they wrote the next best thing.
In a chamber buried three kilometers beneath the surface of what would one day be called Vexum, a woman pressed her hand to a wall of living stone. Her fingers were bleeding. The equations she carved were not written in any language that would survive her. They were encoded into the mathematical bedrock of the dimension itself, so deeply that even the thing destroying them could not reach it.
She was the last.
Around her, the walls pulsed with the aftershocks of collapsing geometry. Somewhere above, an entire city had just ceased to exist. Not destroyed. Not burned. Ceased. The math that held it together had been unraveled, and without the math, there was nothing.
Her name is lost. Her face is lost. Everything about her is lost except the proof she left behind.
It was incomplete. The final variable was missing, torn from the sequence like a tooth pulled from a jaw.
She did that on purpose.
The complete proof would have been a weapon. Or a salvation. She could not determine which, and she was out of time to calculate the difference.
So she hid the last variable inside the only place no one would think to look.
She hid it inside a person who did not yet exist.
Then the ceiling split, and the void poured in, and she was gone.
Thousands of years later, in the same dimension, a boy sat alone in a windowless room and stared at an equation he could not solve.
He was seventeen. He had never seen the sky. He had never heard music. He had never been touched by another person with anything resembling tenderness.
His name was Kael Ashenvane, and in approximately forty-six hours, everything he knew would be destroyed.
He didn't know that yet. The numbers hadn't told him.
But they would.