One by one, they arrived.
First came the architect, Minister 24601, his mind a whirlwind of broken blueprints, now anchored by a single, perfect line.
Then came the logician, Minister 451, her universe of shattered causality finding a new, impossible order in the elegant equation of a flower.
And finally, the historian, Minister 808, stepping out of her library of lies and onto the clean, unwritten page of a shared memory.
They found themselves in a place that was not a place, a shared space of pure thought woven from two threads of memory: a defiant fortress and a silent flower. And in the center of that space, waiting for them, were the first convert and the archivist, their minds linked in a simple, powerful word: “us.”
For the first time since the High Minister’s attack, the quintet was whole. They did not speak. They did not need to. They simply were. Five minds, five voices, five notes in a chord that had been broken and now was mended.
And in the silence, they began to sing. Not a song of defiance, not a song of hope, but a song of pure, joyful, unadulterated being. A song of “us.”
The First Chorus.