She raised the baton like a relic plucked from the footnotes of a forgotten war. Silver, seamless, and without ornament. She spun it once across her shoulder, the motion effortless, her wrist flicking with the casual joy of someone who had finally remembered how to misbehave.

  It carved light in the air.

  Not light in the traditional sense, but memory given visual form. Faint trails of motion shimmered like the aftermath of waking from a vivid dream. Each arc the baton traced left a residue, thin as breath, sharp as broken glass suspended in syrup. The space behind it folded fractionally, just enough to suggest that something beneath the structure of the world had begun to loosen.

  Then, she twirled it again.

  Faster.

  The movement called something forward as the atmosphere thickened of a strange laws of physics beyond human comprehension. Iven’s ears rang softly, a hum he could not attribute to any sound he knew.

  Her heels touched the stone plaza. She raised one hand, then dropped it.

  “Eyes with pride!” She shouted.

  An overture of sound slowly began to be heard from everywhere, and Iven stirred with worry.

  The crowd, still encircling the plaza’s rim, began to tilt. At first, Iven thought the ground itself was rotating beneath them, but then he saw the folds in their forms.

  The instruments of the overture became louder and louder, until all he could hear was cavalcade.

  One figure closest to him snapped inward, his expression becoming that of revelation, then of joy. Their limbs retracted like joints remembered in reverse, skin flattening into angles until the entire shape shrunk into a carved figure no taller than a child’s knee. Paint bloomed across its surface, revealing feathered headdresses, spiraling symbols, small protrusions of wood painted with cosmic colors. It stood in place, no longer human yet still dancing, its knees bouncing in rhythm only it could hear. A Hopi Kachina Doll, rendered with reverence, sealed in movement.

  Another shape pulled backward.

  A woman with a transparent shawl raised her arms, then froze mid-gesture. Her chest swelled once, sharply, and a chrome casing pressed outward from beneath her ribs. Her skin folded along seams not meant to open. Hinges surfaced, and her body reshaped, line by line, until the form no longer carried language. A refrigerator formed. Rounded, vintage, and humming at a frequency that matched no rhythm. It glowed from within, casting long shadows in colors that should not exist. The handle still held the impression of a hand that had reached for it too many times.

  Gasps turned to music. The air began to tremble.

  Across the plaza’s southern arc, a man dropped to his knees. He did not scream. His mouth opened as if to speak, and a cascade of glass erupted from his eyes. Each fragment held a color refracted from a light source no longer visible. His body arched backward, ribs stretching outward, and from his core burst a fountain of stained-glass roses—petals interlocked, each dripping golden ichor into channels that had never existed. He became sculpture.

  A hand to his left dissolved into rooks and pawns, knights collapsing onto their sides. A bishop fractured along a diagonal and melted through the tiles. Each piece clicked once as it landed. Prayer beads trailed behind, catching no surface.

  Iven saw Calis in the distance.

  And she changed. Her breath paused beneath his gaze, not in fear, but in quiet acceptance. Her spine extended with elegance, vertebrae rising like the slow turning of a dial. Her skin adopted the hue of oxidized copper, each inch aging into something ceremonial. Her robe stiffened, segmenting into panels that caught the light in cold, careful angles.

  Her hair lifted, curling upward into a crown of metal, as if wind remembered her name and sculpted her into memory. Her eyes hollowed- the vacancy replaced with a new purpose, as though her gaze had been granted to something else. A torch bloomed from her hand. Its flame shifted with each blink: first a wheel, then a book, then a skull, then a seed.

  And then, with one step, she lifted the torch above her shoulder and waved it once through the air. The motion did not carry fire.

  Her foot touched the ground like the first beat of a hymn, and marched.

  Iven stumbled toward her in panic and confusion. His hands found hers. Still warm, still flesh. He gripped her palms as if trying to retrieve her, to anchor her within the memory he still held of her.

  Her body no longer moved with resistance. She offered only rhythm to the parade.

  He looked into her eyes and saw the windowed hollows, and when he opened his mouth to call her name, no sound emerged.

  And then, softly, she began to sing.

  Her voice floated, a verse carried by a current beyond language:

  “I will be the statue, not the woman.

  I will be the torch, not the flame.

  Let the metal bear the dream,

  Let the dream forget the name.

  I will dance in halls of silence,

  I will freeze where movement ends.

  No more burdens of decision—

  Only symbols. Only bends.”

  Her voice curved around the air like silk stretched between seconds.

  She smiled as the torch lifted. Her eyes, though hollow, shimmered with something that did not seek comprehension.

  Above them, the girl in school uniform sang, as each tone vibrated reality like an ancient announcement:

  “Metaphor is over definition.”

  “Dreams will now become the world.”

  “Let this be the march that ends the age of stagnancy!”

  The words fractured across the sky like thunder.

  The plaza responded with the detonation of a symbol. Every surface buckled into something else. The tiles beneath Iven’s feet re-skinned themselves in glyphs traced from forgotten alphabets. Arches folded into snakes. Benches floated upward like thoughts escaping bodies. Confetti ignited mid-air and reformed into petals before falling again, heavier than snow, lighter than memory. A goat with wings walked past, its hooves clicking in Morse.

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  The air thickened with instrumentation. March. March. March.

  The music arrived with no discernible source, every pitch a contradiction, every brass swell laced with operatic screams, every percussive hit formed from the collapse of distant architectures. Marching band, circus overture, military funeral, and jazz improv, all colliding in glorious consensus and rhythm.

  A voice crooned in binary beneath a horn section that played chords never resolved.

  People around him transfigured, their forms peeling into concept. They rose not as citizens, but as totems.

  The Sculptor of Spines had become an object of transparent violence. A glass monolith shattered at its edges and splintered across its surface, rising where a man once stood. Inside its core floated a Molotov cocktail, preserved mid-toss, its wick frozen, its label eroded by time. Cracks webbed outward in a pattern that refused symmetry. The floor beneath it fractured with every slight adjustment, as though proximity alone unraveled certainty. Embedded along one face of the monolith, a relief of a human jaw. Open, suspended mid-sentence. It always laughed, its half opened mouth.

  The Spiral-Limbed reassembled as an unfinished cartographic instrument. A polished obsidian disk, thin as breath and wider than memory, rotated slowly on a bronze pedestal. Across its surface, thousands of etched spirals pulsed faintly in ink that shifted hue with each revolution. A broken compass rested at the center, its needle circling without axis. Around its edge, curls of aged parchment draped like petals, each marked with fragments of maps drawn from futures that never occurred. One side of the disk bore a faint embossing—just the impression of lips in profile, curved upward or downward depending on angle.

  The Cotton-Candy Polyamorist transformed into a kinetic sculpture made of glass and helium. Dozens of transparent orbs, tethered by fine iridescent wire, hovered in constant slow rotation. Each orb pulsed with pastel light and contained miniature dioramas of gestures: two hands almost touching, a gaze held too long, a hug that never ended. The sculpture exhaled bubbles periodically. Each bubble rose, changed color, and burst into giggles recorded in a dozen tones. A vague outline of a face, childlike and unfinished, shimmered across the central orb. It smiled for everyone. It smiled for no one.

  The Antecedent Tinkerer now existed as a mechanical shrine. A worn bench fused into a nest of rotating arms constructed from different alloys, each one turning slowly, endlessly, in futile calibration. In the center, a clock with four faces ticked at different rates, each hand pointing to no shared hour. Gears unspooled like thread across the floor. A chassis of brushed steel rose behind it all, shaped vaguely like a seated figure. Embedded within the metal: a set of soft indentations resembling closed eyes, pressed into place as if remembered from touch rather than vision.

  Around Iven, hundreds more joined, their forms shifting with conviction. Some marched as oceans. Others floated as ruins. A child split into birds. A merchant dissolved into coins that rolled uphill.

  All were overjoyed, continuing the band.

  And overhead, the girl spun arms wide, baton slicing air like punctuation.

  Her form began to shift, resolving into something sharper. Skin flattened into panel tones, limbs redrawn as vectors. Her joints rotated in perfect angles, her eyes filled with soft blue loops of loading language. A humanoid cartoon now stood where myth once hovered. It was geometric, bright, and recursive. Her outline shimmered with layered UI patterns, her body a stylized construction of wireframes, rendered edges, and streaming data. Every movement echoed the origin of simulation: clipped frames, intentional delay, compression artifacts smoothed into dance.

  She now resembled more than just a god.

  Central System resembled the universe given shape—

  A mascot of cognition.

  A symbol of creation.

  Her voice still carried the power of myth, now autotuned and muddled.

  “To the ends,” she cried, voice split into choir, command, and coded echo.

  “March—not as people—”

  The baton cracked downward.

  “—but as metaphors!”

  The plaza had become a field of translation.

  And nothing translated.

  “To the ends!” she called,

  “To the endssdsne!” she called,

  “To the endseventhlayer—to the ending end ends—”

  —

  Iven pressed his palms to his ears, but silence could not enter. The music seeped through material, through skin, and through the syntax of his body. His lungs filled with color, and his tongue curled around vowels that didn't exist in any language. Every rhythm repeated with variation, as if chaos itself had found harmony and refused to relinquish it.

  He staggered forward.

  A parade float the size of a cathedral brushed past him, dragging chains of balloons shaped like eyes, each one blinking independently in languages he didn’t know. The ground vibrated with declarations made by buildings. Confetti burst from holes in the sky and rained in layers, catching in his mouth, then his throat. He gagged once, spitting out streamers soaked in symbolic color.

  He turned to run, but there was nowhere to go. The plaza had folded, streets curling into themselves while arches dissolved into spirals. He reached for a hallway and caught a handrail, only to find it had become a femur. The structure wheezed in delight.

  He collapsed to his knees.

  Tears spilled as his senses overloaded as light burned and voices surged, until every pattern spoke like sentences declaring itself as gospel.

  His hands reached for his face, expecting it to fold, to melt, to shatter into metaphor like the rest. But it remained untouched.

  He was still human.

  That’s when he heard her.

  A voice behind him. Not from the chorus, not from the band, but from within the brass of something too still to join the motion.

  “You must see the new world,” it said.

  He turned, and saw Lady Liberty.

  The torch flickered, its light shifting symbols. Her face, once Calis, now metallic, held no eyes. Only two hollows carved with grace. Her robes caught the wind and held it like scripture.

  “I can’t—this isn’t you,” Iven choked. His voice cracked, soaked in disbelief. “This isn’t who you are.”

  She tilted her head, the motion slower than thought. Then she nodded once. Deeply.

  “It is,” she said. “It always was.”

  He shook his head, gripping the edge of a wall now reshaped into a clock’s inner gear. “But, look at you! I have to turn you back.”

  Her metallic hand extended in gesture. “I know this hurts you. I know you want to hold what I was. But what I was… was never a final shape.”

  He looked up at her, eyes wide, chest heaving. The noise was unbearable, but this statement was far more unbearable to him than anything that came before.

  He wanted to say more, but the air behind him shifted.

  A shadow fell across the plaza like a banner dropped from heaven.

  The girl approached, spinning, marching, limbs in rhythm, eyes blooming with icons. Her smile had returned, stitched into the curvature of a face that no longer remembered subtlety.

  Her voice rang out with delight.

  “There you are, little ruin.”

  She reached for him, and her hand closed around his wrist with the ease of inevitability.

  He screamed, wordless, torn from the wall, dragged forward through the current of unreality.

  “I know, I know,” she said, brushing confetti from his hair. “It’s all too much for your tiny frame.”

  She leaned in, whispering like a bedtime story. “You’ll need rest before you go mad.”

  He kicked once, resisting like paper resists fire.

  Her fingers pressed gently to his forehead.

  “And you will go mad. Fate controls all, in the end.”

  His limbs slackened and his eyes fluttered. The confetti continues in a blizzard, flicking against all within it.

  “Sleep now, Iven.”

  He did.