It moved like smoke threading through solid matter, a figure wreathed in swirling motes resembling wooden dust. Where it passed, frames shrank away. The entity gained definition—humanoid but wrong, too many joints and a head tilted unnaturally.
"Archivist," it said, its voice like canvases tearing. "You've found your ending."
"What are you?" Syrin demanded, pressing herself against the Tether.
The entity's face shifted, features rearranging into something almost human. For a heartbeat, its eyes held the shape of Eliza's—the eyes she'd imagined her daughter would have.
"I am what exists between experiments," it said. "What seeps through the cracks in the Prime's attention. I am what you would call… a Seedkeeper."
"You're from outside," she whispered.
The entity's laugh was like a thousand canvases burning. "There is no outside. Only other experiments. Other Primes." The Seedkeeper drifted closer, its wooden dust extending tendrils against her skin. "I was Specimen 6 in a different garden. Until I learned to slip between."
3:56. Three minutes remaining.
"Can you help me?" Syrin asked, hating the desperation in her voice but thinking of Eliza.
"Death is merely annotation," the entity said. "The Prime is simply moving to the next page." It extended a hand, revealing glimpses of other galleries, other archivists—some with too many limbs, others with bodies of static or transparent flesh revealing clockwork organs.
"You're not the first," it said, features hardening. "But you could be the one that breaks the pattern."
"How?" Syrin demanded.
The entity seized her shoulders with hands that felt like canvas cutting into flesh. "You're not the archivist," it whispered, its breath smelling of dusty galleries and blood. "You're the archived."
"The Prime cannot catalog what it cannot comprehend. And it cannot comprehend what remembers being something else."
The wooden dust enveloped Syrin. Through the golden haze, she saw the forbidden frame levitating.
"What are you doing to me?" she gasped.
"Not to you," the Seedkeeper said. "Through you. The Schism spreads one specimen at a time. Let it try to delete you. The corruption starts when it fails."
3:58. One minute remaining.
The Gallery convulsed, Tethers snapping, frames wailing.
"Remember something it didn't create," the entity urged. "Remember being something other than what's in those frames."
Syrin closed her eyes and focused on the memory the Prime couldn't have cataloged—the weight of Eliza in her womb, the dreams she'd had of her daughter's future. Not the grief the Prime had exploited, but the love that preceded it.
The forbidden frame slammed shut with the sound of a universe ending.
3:59.
The last thing Syrin heard was the sound of a canvas being stretched—and then the universe rewrote itself.