Night in the Waiting Grounds felt longer than usual. After the Singularity Map revealed its secrets, the entire group of Wanderers fell silent. Only the wind spoke now, whistling through the colossal stone arches, carrying strange echoes as if torn from another time.
The woman who carried the map finally broke the stillness. Her voice moved slowly, each word sounding as though it had passed through a thousand memories before reaching us.
“The Threshold of Memory,” she said, “is the final limit. When a world’s memory-energy exceeds this point, it will no longer bow to any force—not even those who watch over you.”
Her eyes moved from face to face across the circle of firelight. The smoke drifted upward like a thin veil, obscuring expressions that did not dare reveal fear.
“At that moment,” she continued, “the Gates will open on their own. No rituals, no machines. They will tear through the walls between realities, fusing every memory into one endless stream. And whatever is caught inside… will never return the same.”
A cold shiver ran down my spine. Earth—a small, seemingly ordinary planet—was drifting toward a moment that could rewrite the architecture of existence itself.
One of the Wanderers, his face hollow as though carved by countless dying worlds, spoke softly.
“We saw a land once… cross the Threshold of Memory. It vanished in a single night, as though it had never been.”
His words fell like stones shattering the surface of a still lake. My thoughts spiraled toward the looming Gates. I imagined the instant they would flare to life, opening infinite layers of space atop one another like pages of a collapsing book.
And somewhere, buried deep within my own memories, came the faint, terrifying feeling that my son… might already be trapped beyond that final boundary.
