Chapter 98

• What happened next happened everywhere at once.
• The system, which had been tracking seventeen dimensions, five anchor points, and one Nexus Lock, suddenly found its reporting structure inadequate for what was occurring. Dimensional boundaries, already loosened by weeks of First-assisted fragmentation, had become permeable in a new way — not the hostile permeability of reality being softened for erasure, but a resonant permeability, the five anchor points radiating the Primordial energy outward through every Nexus thread connected to them, which was every Nexus thread in the multiverse.
• Zareth, in the war room, watched the Nexus map with the expression of someone who had spent fifteen thousand years preserved in ice precisely in order to see this moment and was now uncertain whether to feel vindicated or afraid. The map was doing something it had never done in any of his memories. Every thread was lighting up simultaneously — not with the distress-red of the First's fragmentation, but with the warm gold of the Primordial resonance.