Minister 24601, the architect, was adrift in a sea of broken blueprints. The High Minister’s attack had not just shattered their fortress of mirrors; it had shattered his own mind, unraveling the elegant structures of his thoughts into a chaotic mess of half-formed ideas and impossible geometries.
He had tried to rebuild, to find a single, solid concept to cling to, but it was like trying to build a house in a hurricane. Every time he laid a foundation of logic, a wave of silent, screaming chaos would wash it away. He was an architect without a blueprint, a builder without a foundation.
He was lost.
And then, he felt it. A flicker of something familiar in the chaos. It was not a sound, not a light, but a shape. A ghost of a blueprint, a faint echo of a structure he had once helped to build. It was the memory of the “First Fortress,” the defiant hall of mirrors they had created together. It was a single, perfect line in the midst of the unraveling, a thread to follow.
He reached for it.