The first shafts of morning strained over the crest, washing the vale below in muted gold and casting long murk that twisted across the jagged terrain like faint echoes of the night. Maya pressed the tablet to her casket, feeling its gentle, metrical palpitation beneath her fritters, a quiet twinkle that sounded to attend with her own. Each subtle chirr carried consolation, a memorial that they had survived the structure’s cores, the nexus, and the intelligence that had lurked within but it also carried a warning mindfulness, tolerance, and computation still dallied in every shadow below. Arman, still pulsing from the residual pressure