The first thing to go was the sound.
Not the sound of the Eternal Forge — the geothermal rumble of the magma vents, the subsonic hum of the resonance cavity beneath the Spire's base, the ambient prayer-noise of the twenty-seven million believers. All of that had been present at 0600hrs, a familiar atmospheric constant, the background texture of nine hundred and fifty years of accumulated divine presence.
At 0601hrs, it began to recede.
This was not unexpected. Zephyr had modeled the Vigil's sensory withdrawal with precise mathematical parameters. He knew that the Ascension Trance required a progressive collapse of distributed awareness — that the twenty-seven million prayer-threads he carried in his perception would need to be surrendered, one by one, as the Vigil drew his cognitive focus inward toward the single, concentrated point of the Rank 10 algorithm.
He had modeled it. Modeling a thing and experiencing a thing were structurally different operations.
