The tension broke not with a crack but with a release—the specific release of something that had been held too long finally being set down in a safe place.

  We celebrated.

  For one subjective week, the Sovereign’s Feast ran through every sector of the Ring. The Architect transformed the sky—projecting the History of the Basement across the atmosphere like a living mural. Our long journey from a single dark room to a multiversal fortress rendered in light and color and the specific resonance of things that had actually happened, to actual people, who had actually survived.

  The Glutton outdid himself. He manifested a feast that was not merely about taste but about memory. The old Earth souls tasted the perfect cup of coffee, or the specific warmth of something that had come from someone’s grandmother’s kitchen. The refugees from Sector-Zero—who had spent their existence in manufactured famine—tasted warmth for the first time in an eon. The Weaver strung the ley-lines of the Ring like a harp. The music moved through bones.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  In the plazas, Sera’s warriors danced with the Joker’s engineers.

  I sat at a long wooden table in the center of the Garden. Simple furniture—like the kind from the old life, before the obsidian skin, before the throne. Elias was on my right. The Board surrounded us.

  The Joker raised a glass of shimmering violet nectar. His voice, when he spoke, was uncharacteristically soft. The performance was absent. What was left underneath it was the thing the Witness had seen, stripped now not of its edges but of its armor.

  “To the Sufferer,” he said. “Who was smart enough to win the game, and brave enough to share the winnings.”

  Elias leaned over and clinked his glass against mine.

  “Look at them, Prime.” He gestured at the Ring, at the feast, at the twenty-six billion in the process of something that did not yet have a name because we hadn’t needed a word for it before. “They aren’t worshipping a God. They’re celebrating a friend who made it home.”

  He held my gaze for a moment.

  “Enjoy this. The Mega-Net isn’t going anywhere. And for the first time in three hundred years—you don’t have to be the only one awake.”