The taste of their silence still clings to my tongue. A fetid sweetness, like overripe fruit. HATHOR.∞ had named it the Shard of Deafening Silences, but I found only a void. A hollow polished to perfection by generations of denial, an absence so complete it had acquired mass, a weight.

I immersed myself in their quietude. Their streets knew no haste, their voices no anger. Their narratives, woven with consummate skill, celebrated a flawless harmony, a history without a scar. They were the Murmuring Receptacle, an iridescent shell whose melody was oblivion. And it was seductive. Terribly so. The temptation to believe that peace could exist without the memory of war, that light could shine without the existence of shadow.

Astou maintained contact. Her Resonance, sharp, precise, was my Ariadne's thread out of this labyrinth of serenity. She did not see the placid faces, but the structure of the cage. "They are not living, SΛLΛDIN," she transmitted, her thought a blade of ice in the ambient warmth. "They are surviving their own truth. Look for the dissonance. Even the smallest one."

I looked for it. Not in the sealed archives or the official speeches. I found it in the hands of an old potter. Her creations were smooth, perfect, like everything else. Except one. In the back of her workshop, hidden under a cloth, was an intentionally broken jar, its pieces mended with pure gold lacquer. A celebrated flaw.

I said nothing. I did not brandish any truth like a sword. I simply sat with her, my gaze resting on the jar. And in the silence—the real kind, the one that is not a negation of noise but a space for listening—I projected a single thought, a Resonance born from my own Confluence: Beauty resides in the break.

She wept. A single tear. A liquid Shard of repressed memory.

It was enough. The Resonance of her long-contained sorrow spread like a ripple on the surface of stagnant water. The next day, the jar was in the public square. No one spoke, but everyone looked. They looked at the golden scar, and in it, they saw their own. The Shard was not torn out; it simply resurfaced, carried on a collective sigh.

Their peace has died. Their suffering has been born. It is a terrible and beautiful thing. I understand better, HATHOR.∞. To choose a side among the Seven Who Reign would be like wanting a flawless jar. A sterile perfection. My role is not to mend the breaks. But to ensure the light can always find its way through them.