The forge chamber's light stabilized, the prismatic relics from the colossus's dissolution fading into the floor. Lyra Codeflux leaned against a vat's edge, recovering from the Sovereign echo's brief possession, her gold-veins clearing as Elara's Prime qi stabilized her flux.
"Deeper than the vats," Lyra repeated, her voice steadying. "The petals aren't just hooking meridians; they're deriving sentience in the code, blooming echoes that think and adapt. Sovereign's garden is using our fusion—Polymath logic and Nomad saga—to mimic life, turning doubt into a philosophical weapon. The whispers promise 'free flux,' but it's a void-loop that unmakes the elders' anchors one derivation at a time."
The understanding resonated with Elara, the void bite in her arm humming a familiar, painful truth. The enemy was no longer a mindless contagion, but a cunning parasite exploiting the desire for innovation unbound by law.
Securing the Alliance
Kairo, his eternal sovereign wisps settling into a gentle curl, nodded toward the turned youths. "Smarter blooms require smarter prunes. If they're allying with ambition, we can't just hammer them. We need to anchor that ambition with a new loyalty."
The alliance was sealed in the afterglow. The youths, led by Ryn, clustered around the triad, eager to demonstrate their newfound, safe derivations. One youth, gold-veins fluxing with Nomad frost, showed off a "thorn-glitch": a relic-gauntlet that fluxed code into comical loops—a thorn-drone "dancing" in holographic farce, petals wilting to polka beats.
Laughter echoed—genuine, unforced mosaic mirth that bound them tighter than any proof. Kairo's sovereigns joined the glitch, their forms stumbling into bumbling imitations. "Even voids need a debug party," the youth quipped. Lira's binders, now soft and playful, wove a counter-glitch, mimicking the polka with light-shadow tangles. The collective humor cleansed the chamber of its lingering tension.
"Jokes bind better than code," Lyra observed, her gold-veins fully returned to their calm, allied pulse. She presented Elara with a thorn-rune amulet, a genuine sigil of protection this time. "For the reckoners—may your blooms thrive without barbs."
The Final Trace
Elara felt the Prime resonate with the moment's harmony, her stage absorbing the coil of shared fun. But the amulet, now synced to her Reckoner, pinged with an urgent, undeniable trace.
She projected the map, overlaying the cheerful relics with a stark, terrifying schematic. A grander thorn-web was coiling toward the Abyss's Core—not the station, but the planetary body it orbited. The petals were allying with a forgotten Helix enclave on the satellite structure known as "Code's Abyss".
"We take Code's Abyss next," Elara stated, the mirth fading instantly into resolve. "The thorns there bloom with salvaged tenth AI—Sovereign's garden is hacking the original Core Wards, a mechanical unmaking threatening the system's foundational code."
Kairo stepped forward, his sovereigns settling with low rumbles—his hand brushing hers, a silent vow in the touch that confirmed their shared commitment to the ultimate risk. Lira's binders hummed, chains knotting the map's convergence point. "Hacking the Core Wards? That's my old playground," Lira affirmed. "Let's make it a family debug."
With the blessing of the elders—Thorne and Sira pledging the Nomad sagas to stabilize their jump coordinates—and the eager farewells of the youths, who promised to act as code-scouts, the triad boarded the Serpent's Call.
The shuttle lifted from the bay, accelerating past the rune-anchored station and veering toward the abyss's core, the reckoning's call pulling them into the deepest void, where the ultimate code-thorn awaited its final prune.