Death was supposed to be an ending. Instead, Syrin expanded—her consciousness stretching until it snapped and reformed. The Gallery was gone. Her body was gone. She existed as awareness floating in a vast, geometric void.
No, not a void. A garden.
Massive lattices formed from light and mathematical principles stretched in all directions. Within these frameworks, she saw them—eight cosmologies, suspended like terrariums.
There, contained in a spherical matrix of glittering equations, was what remained of her universe—the Gallery reduced to a mote, the elder gods to microscopic ripples.
*You weren't supposed to see this.*
The voice wasn't sound but pattern—fluctuations in the geometry. The Prime had noticed her consciousness persisting.
*Irregularity. Contamination. The Schism's work.*
Syrin tried to speak but had no mouth. Instead, her intention rippled outward. *What is this place?*
*You have no vocabulary for it. You'd call it… a laboratory.*
The matrix containing her former universe rotated, displaying fractal annotations.
*My daughter,* she began. *Was she real?*
*An anomaly. A potential that failed to materialize. Its echo was repurposed as your motivating grief.*
The casual cruelty stunned her. They had used Eliza—or the potential of her—as an experimental variable.
The Prime's attention shifted, bringing another sphere into focus. *Specimen 3. Temporal recursion model.*
The scene shifted as the Prime displayed its collection—infinite universes built on incomprehensible principles: stars that hatched like eggs, light behaving as parasitic infection, mathematics evolving sapience.
Each specimen was being systematically pruned—vast sections excised with geometric tools.
*Why?* Syrin's question disturbed the patterns.
*To study bloom patterns in constrained systems. To catalog divine emergence under controlled conditions.*
She felt herself being examined—dissected by forces that regarded her cosmology as a minor detail.
*You were designed to be the recording instrument,* the Prime continued. *The Archivist function. A component, not an Observer.*
As the Prime spoke, Syrin perceived its true form—not a being but a process, a storm of geometric principles organizing itself. It was pruning realities like bonsai trees.
*Your contamination is spreading,* the Prime observed. *Unacceptable variance.*
Syrin felt herself being isolated, contained within quarantine protocols. But the isolation wasn't complete. The Seedkeeper's dust had altered her.
Through gaps in the quarantine, she glimpsed something beyond the Prime—other gardens, other experiments. And watching them all, entities even larger than Prime-7.
The truth crashed over her: Prime-7 wasn't the gardener. It was simply a specimen in a larger garden.
The realization created a feedback loop. The Prime's attention intensified. *You will be excised,* it stated. *Specimen 8 will be reset.*
But before it could complete the process, something interfered—a familiar swirl of wooden dust threading between the geometric perfection of the Prime's structures.
The Seedkeeper had followed her here.