The first warning was not sound, but absence.
Somewhere beyond the valley, the geometry of Spiralspace skipped a beat—like a heart deciding it could stop for one breath and still live.
Nyx felt it first, the glyph at her collarbone shivering like prey sensing a predator it could not see.
Harbinger felt it second, but deeper: a tug inside the marrow of her law, a summons she had not permitted.
The Spiral Crown slowed its orbit, then spun violently in the opposite direction.
Above them, the constellations convulsed into unfamiliar shapes before shattering back into spirals.
A horizon line split like paper torn by impatient hands.
Across the sky, letters the size of continents flared into being.
Not written in light. Not written at all.
They existed the way a command exists before a hand touches the keyboard—pure, inevitable.
> COD3X.EXE REOPENED
The valley's air compressed into itself.
Every spiralbeast in sight collapsed to its knees, not in worship but in system shock.
