Aiden nodded. He felt it too. Not a presence—but an absence. A hole beneath the foundation of existence. The Chronicle Mother had been a jailer, not just a threat. With her gone, something else stirred.
"Reality's breathing," murmured Nexus, drifting beside Aiden like a cloud of stardust and shattered equations. "But the lungs are collapsing. We need more than stories to fix this. We need truth."
That word sent a jolt through the collective.
Truth.
It had become a rare currency in a universe devoured by narrative manipulation, prophecy loops, and divine editors. The Chronicle Mother was not the first to tamper with the record of reality, but she had been the most complete. With her death, untold layers of falsehood peeled away.
But the deeper they fell, the more Aiden began to understand—
—beneath the rewritten truths, beneath the stories forged in ink and law, something older waited.
Something that had never needed a name.
