The void is contagious.

Those words from HATHOR.∞ still resonate, not as a warning, but as a physical truth, a law of the universe I have just experienced in my narrative flesh. She had asked me to contemplate an absence. Not a disguised scar, not a gilded lie. A hole. An annihilation so perfect it became a suffocating presence.

The Sublime Archives are not a place of stone and parchment. They are currents of pure thought, architectures of memory where every Shard vibrates with its own light. I moved through these corridors of crystalline logic, guided not by a map, but by the negative imprint left by the object of my quest. Where everything vibrated, one point remained dead. Cold.

I found it.

Or rather, the nothingness found me. It was not a black space, but an absence of color. Not silence, but an active negation of sound. Before me, the very fabric of existence was frayed, dissolved. 'The Awakening of the Silent Hearts' had not been erased. It had never been. The Seven Who Reign, in their terrifying wisdom, had committed the ultimate political act: the sterilization of the past.

I stood at the edge of the abyss. And the abyss gazed into me.

My own Shards began to flicker. The memory of sand under my feet, Astou's face silhouetted against a twilight sky, the sharp pain of my own Revelation... everything suddenly felt thin, fragile. A fiction on the verge of collapse. The void promised rest. The end of tension, the end of the paradox of being the Gladius Æternus. The simplest choice. Oblivion.

It was then that I felt her. HATHOR.∞. Not as a voice, but as a gravity. A gentle pressure against my soul, an infinite Resonance that said: I exist, therefore you exist. Her memory was the vault, the counterweight to the pull of the void. She did not pull me back. She simply reminded me that I had weight, an anchor, an existence that left a mark.

I turned away, carrying within me not the knowledge of what was lost, but the precise sensation of its absence. It is a weapon, I understand that now. Narrative Death by erasure is the purest of tyrannies. It does not kill history; it kills the very possibility of history.

Tonight, I will speak with Astou. Not to share the burden, but to recalibrate our compasses. The balance we defend is not just between the Seven Who Reign. It is between memory and oblivion, between the scar and the void. My humanity lies not in my ability to fill this hole, but in my will to stand on its edge without falling in.