The Weaver greeted the Ice-Souls herself.

  I watched it from the Night-Side balcony—the one the Architect had built when the Ring first began to grow, before it had grown into something that needed a proper vantage point rather than just a railing. Below me, the first massive refugee vessel from a dead universe docked with our harbor. A crumbling crystalline structure trailing entropy like a wound trails blood. Thousands of translucent souls drifted out of its torn hull.

  They expected a judge.

  They expected a void.

  They expected another harvest.

  Instead, they found the Weaver manifested as a figure made of warm, golden silk—her many limbs folded inward, her voices quieted to one, her aesthetic stripped of every element of cosmic majesty and rebuilt as something that looked, purely and simply, like welcome.

  She touched each soul as they passed. Not taking. Adding. Knitting their broken memories into the Ring’s tapestry with the specific delicacy of someone who understood that what the newly arrived most needed was not to be processed but to be recognized.

  “The winter is over,” I heard her say—not loudly, but in that frequency that moves through bone rather than air. “You have reached the Harbor. Your stories didn’t end in the dark. They were just waiting for a better scribe.”

  The Joker leaned against the balcony rail beside me, his eyes doing their old familiar roll, watching the Ice-Souls begin to glow as the grey frozen trauma of their transit started to melt.

  “Look at ’em,” he said, and his voice carried something I had not heard in it before. Something that was not performance. “They went from Zero-Point popsicles to Diamond-Deck players in five minutes. The Weaver’s got a way with the newcomers.” A pause. “Makes ’em feel like they actually won something.”

  On the bench below, Elias was watching the first Phoenix souls waking from their Cradle-resets, laughing and crying over memories of first rain and fresh coffee. His face carried the expression of a man who has spent three centuries watching things go wrong and is not entirely sure what to do with a thing going right.

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  I held the clear diamond in my palm.

  The deck was empty. The last bet was paid. The Harbor was open and full of light and the machine was running not on terror or desperation but on the specific, sustainable heat of people who had chosen to stay.

  And standing there, watching all of it, I felt—

  Wrong.

  Not wrong in the way that precedes catastrophe. Wrong in the way that precedes restlessness. The specific wrongness of a gambler who has won so thoroughly that the cards have been put away, and the table cleared, and the other players have gone home satisfied. And who is still sitting in the chair. Staring at the felt.

  There has to be something else.

  I didn’t say it out loud. I didn’t have to. Elias set his glass down the moment the thought completed itself. He had known, I realized, long before I knew it consciously. He had been waiting for this particular morning with the patient readiness of someone who has learned when not to rush the person they are watching.

  “You’ve got the Thirst again,” he said. It was not a question.

  “The Sauce,” I said, looking at the Ring. At the Harbor. At the twenty-five billion sparks, each one in the middle of whatever particular version of becoming they were currently engaged in. “It’s too still. A still sauce goes flat.”

  Elias looked at me for a long moment.

  “You look at this perfection,” he said, “and all you see is a cage.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  The Five had opinions, as they always had opinions. Two paths, and I was torn between them like a rope bridge between two cliffs.

  The first: The Great Hunt. Go out into the multiverse. Find the dying Nets, the corrupted Primes, the universes being bled to nothing by tyrants we hadn’t met yet. Break their chains. Offer what we had.

  The second: The Second Spark. Use the Diamond-White energy—two hundred and fifty years of it, concentrated and humming in the Ring’s infrastructure—to trigger a new Big Bang in a pocket dimension. Stay in the Ring as the Old God. Spend our centuries crafting a brand-new reality with different laws, where the Unless had never been written.

  Sera wanted blood. She wanted the Hunt.

  The Joker wanted stakes. He wanted the Hunt.

  The Architect wanted to build something that had never existed before. He wanted the Spark.

  The Weaver wanted new colors. She wanted the Spark.

  Elias was torn—the old humans wanted purpose, the refugees wanted peace, and he was holding both in the same exhausted hands.

  I listened to all of them and felt the Diamond-White pulse in my veins like a tide looking for a moon to follow.

  Peace without purpose, I finally said, is just a slow rot.

  And I chose the Hunt.