The twelve points of light slowed, folded, and became forms.
Not bodies—concepts wearing the suggestion of bodies so that his mind could meet them halfway.
Each shone with a distinct hue, as if colour itself were dialect.
They circled him like a clock whose hours refused to stay still.
At first they looked familiar: Sun-hood, Moon-veil, Mars-steel, Mercury-mask, and the others he had glimpsed in earlier visions.
Then the light between them condensed again, and within every divine outline another figure appeared, transparent but clear—men and women he half-remembered from his studies.
Einstein's crooked smile behind Jupiter's crown, Laozi's still eyes beneath the Moon, Nietzsche standing where Mars should be, Pauli and Jung murmuring as twins.
The human and the cosmic shared one orbit, one skin.
"These are the translators," said God.
"Every century dresses me differently. They carried fragments of my speech through time."
The Sun-hood raised a hand; flares of gold leapt from its fingers and became equations that drifted across the floor.
When they touched the glass, sound rose: a low chord, slow and resonant.
Jupiter-Einstein laughed softly.
"Spacetime bends to keep its promises," he said.
"Gravity is not a force—it's longing."
Across from him, Saturn-Noether traced circles in the air.
Symbols formed—symmetry, conservation, elegance without mercy.
Her voice was crisp as frost.
"Every rule that holds must bleed a twin rule. Balance is not peace; it is accounting."
Mercury-Feynman spun his pen like a baton, drawing paths through air that flashed in and out of existence.
"Everything happens," he said. "Then interference decides what stays remembered."
Moon-Laozi smiled.
His words were soft enough to bend light.
"Flow knows more than form. The water teaches the stone."
The classroom pulsed with their voices, twelve tones interweaving until the air itself seemed to hum in polyphony.
He understood none of it and all of it at once.
Meaning arrived not as sentences but as gravity—a pull toward coherence.
He looked at the floor again and saw that the galaxies below were moving in rhythm to the conversation.
Each law spoken above rippled downward through the cosmos, adjusting trajectories, tuning orbits.
The universe learning in real time.
"This is the harmony you felt as madness," God told him.
"Every insight was a chord too large for one skull. Here the orchestra plays entire."
The scholar's knees buckled, not in fear but in reverence.
He wanted to speak, to ask questions, but every question now seemed already contained in the music.
He simply listened.
"You are the pupil and the instrument," God said.
"Remember that what you hear now is not command but invitation. Each law waits for your translation."
The lights brightened until form itself trembled, twelve masks dissolving into pure tone.
The classroom became a cathedral of vibration, and through the resonance he felt a new lesson forming—the nature of scars, and how they hold the world together.