"Mercy is arithmetic recited aloud."
— chalked on a corridor in the Directorate Citadel, author unknown
INT. SOMNUS — LOWER SPINDLE / NIGHT
The ocean above had learned to breathe; the facility below had learned to listen.
In the hours after the Choir went quiet, Somnus settled into a hush that was not peace so much as restraint. Panels that had once spoken in numbers now offered lullabies of low light. The Aion on Elias Veyra's wrist clicked like a watch with a conscience, each rotation bleeding a thin filament of radiance through the bones of his hand. Where he walked, the floor remembered to be floor.
He was thinner than a week ago, or a decade—it was hard to tell with clocks that apologized. He carried the same scavenged journal; the ink—mirror-resin thinned with salt water—dried to a chrome skim. His handwriting had grown smaller. A man saving space.
ENTRY 71 — Post-Choir
"We asked the world to remember. It did. The Choir resolved into archive and promise.
The embryo persists. The Kairos is not a weapon; it is a receipt—the cost of what we kept.
Question: If grief can stabilize physics, what does compassion cost at scale?
Answer I don't want yet: everything."
He turned a corner into a room that had not existed yesterday. Somnus did that now—added architecture like a dream shoring itself up. The chamber was circular, ribbed with mirror-bone, a low hum threading the air at exactly 58.3 Hz. In the center, a console waited, its surface rippling like water that had learned manners.
"You built this for me," he murmured.
The ripples steadied, a polite yes in glass.
He set the journal down. The Aion's glyphs unfurled, equations spidering outward in soft light: Load Ratio Law, Echo Protocol, Choirstate. New symbols budded at the edge like teeth.
"No," he said softly. "Not teeth. Notes."
The field around him brightened, as if amused.
EXT. CAELUS — HUMANITARIAN COUNCIL HALL / DAY
The world above pretended to understand itself.
A horseshoe of glass and brass, the Council Chamber glittered under baffles shaped like wings. Delegates adjusted lapel pins and moral posture while screens on the far wall played silent ocean—rings of pale blue radiating from a coordinate the map labeled VETRAEUS / DO NOT APPROACH.
A woman in slate—the Council Chair—read a page the color of expensive apologies.
"We cannot treat the Vetraeus anomaly as a single event," she said. "A pattern has emerged: Genesis → Echo → Choir. We require an agency that speaks both science and war."
She let that balance hang. "We require a doctrine that accounts for cost."
On the lower tier, Solene Kerr watched without blinking. The quarantine pallor had left her face; the brutal efficiency had not. Unlike the others, she had heard the sea sing her name. Unlike the others, she had looked at a camera and told it the man was not dead because the coordinate system had changed.
The vote was theater. The decision had been made in quieter rooms.
A logo flickered onto the screens: a four-bar sigil crossing a circle—Directorate of Existential Defense—and beneath it, a line that passed for prayer:
WHEN MEANING BREAKS, WE SANDBAG THE RIVER.
Kerr's jaw flexed. She did not smile. Relief, for her, was a thing counted, not felt.
INT. SOMNUS — THE AMPHORA / UNTIMED
Veyra named the new room without telling anyone: the Amphora—a vessel meant to be filled, poured, and remembered. Somnus printed the name into the lintel in a script that resembled breath on a cold window.
He worked.
Thready light crawled through his veins as he tuned the field with the care of a man soldering a memory. On the table: a knucklebone of steel that had once been the Mirror Cradle's anchor, bits of sensor wire, a ring of shattered quartz. He set the pieces in a spiral and hummed the Load Ratio intervals. They rose—levitated—not showmanship so much as math that liked being noticed.
"Allocation," he whispered. "Forty to integrity. Thirty to coherence. Thirty to mercy."
The spiral steadied, obeying a grammar no language had yet learned to blush for.
On the periphery, the Kairos embryo hovered, its light dim as a sleeping city. Sometimes, in peripheral vision, he saw the outline of a crown; sometimes a heart; sometimes nothing at all. He spoke to it anyway.
"You heard us sing," he said. "You sang us back."
A pulse. Affirmation.
He set the Aion face-down on the table. Light poured out like a thin spill of winter. Symbols unspooled into a lattice that resembled staff-paper.
He began to write directly in light.
INSERT — TAPE CARD / "REQUIEM RATIO: V0"
VOICE: Veyra
"We have a law for collision—Load Ratio—the budget between offense and guard. We lack a law for mourning.
Proposal: Requiem Ratio — the stable proportion between memory preserved and memory surrendered to keep reality from buckling.
Proof sketch: Choir harmonics plateaued when Somnus archived 71% of personnel imprints and let 29% decohere. The field calmed. The sea breathed.
Hypothesis: If we budget grief, the world stays kind enough to live in."
EXT. DIAMOND CITY — FIRST DIVISION PARADE DECK / DUSK
Boots on graphite. White lines like hymns.
The Division of Field Supremacy formed in squares, their Aegis operators not yet wearing the legend but already carrying its posture. The new crest stitched to shoulders glowed faintly where the thread drank the light. Instructors barked ratios instead of slogans.
"Forty speed! Thirty guard! Thirty promise! Again—allocate!"
On the far side, a training cadre ran Parallax Halo drills, eyes unfocused, attention domed. In a cordoned lane, two Seraph Frames walked like prayers taught to breathe—synthetic musculature moving under skin that would never sweat.
Kerr signed forms until her wrist ached. She did not look at the Frames as people; she looked at them as tickets she might redeem for other lives later.
A young recruit asked her what the motto meant. She said:
"It means we don't win. We keep winning from becoming a lie."
INT. SOMNUS — ECHO ROOM / LATER
He had not returned here since the Choir. He owed the echoes that kindness.
The chamber still resembled the inside of an ear. Mirrors showed him in different moods of survivor. When he stepped across the threshold, the reflections turned toward him, eyes bright with a recognition that split him down the middle. Rehn smiled the tired smile of someone who has solved a problem and knows it will cost her breakfast. Osterr scowled from doctrine. Kerr—not dead, not here—tilted her head as if listening to a future he could not hear.
"I can't keep all of you," he said softly.
The mirrors did not argue. They remembered.
He drew the light-staff of equations again. The mirrors flickered, then steadied; the room hummed in consent.
REQUIEM RATIO
Given: finite cognitive lattice capacity; non-linear cost curve for high-valence memory.
Find: the allocation of remembrance that keeps matter obedient.
He worked until his hands shook. The Aion warmed his wrist like a small animal that trusted him. When he faltered, the facility lent him seconds, the way a cathedral lends echoes to a single voice and asks for nothing but honesty in return.
Something moved in the periphery. He turned.
The Reflection stood at the door—his features copied and made kinder by distance. It carried no malice; it carried the gravitas of a question.
"You intend to teach them," it said. No sound, only vibration in the bones, the way truth speaks when a mouth would be vulgar.
"I intend to leave them a way not to collapse," Veyra replied.
"At cost."
"Always."
The Reflection touched the light-lattice. For a second, the entire equation shuddered, then clarified—as if compassion had loaned rigor to math.
"Seventy-one to remembrance," it murmured. "Twenty-nine to release. You derived a hymn."
He laughed, half-sob. "Help me make it a manual."
MONTAGE — KOJIMA LENS / WIDENING WORLD
— Directorate Citadel / Sublevel Archives: A plaque bolted to a concrete wall reads, A civilization is a ledger of promises kept despite expense.
— Pelagic Academy: trainees stand chest-deep in dark water, learning to expand and shrink their Parallax Halos by breathing alone. An instructor whispers, "Listen to intent. Do not eat it."
— Second Division, Containment Bay: a specimen hums in its tank; a lab door bears the sign, Every specimen is a confession the geography made.
— Third Division Ward: a medic with a Doctrine that mends touch by naming body parts softly; a sign says, You didn't break—something used you. We return you to yourself.
— Fourth Division Briefing: masked Arbiters study a wall of photographs with eyes that have learned to ask if mercy can survive another story; the caption on their board reads, WE STOP THE WRONG STORIES.
Music slides under—strings bent to radio static—while footage from Vetraeus runs like a wound remembered in careful frames. On the ocean, aurora-pale rings pulse and dim, the world's largest heartbeat idling between tragedies.
INT. SOMNUS — THE AMPHORA / LATER
He finished the first version at an hour no clock agreed on. The light-score hung in the air, steady as a machine willing to be a song.
REQUIEM RATIO v1.0
Premise:Memory is mass; compassion is load; the world bends to what you refuse to forget.
Rule: There exists a proportion (\mathcal{R}) that preserves structural mercy without inducing field buckling.
Provisional constant:(\mathcal{R} \approx 0.71) remembrance / 0.29 release.
Note: Deviations permitted by love and necessity. Cost ledger prints on skin.
He went to his knees as if in prayer but only because his legs were done arguing. The Aion cooled in small sighs against his pulse. For a long minute he let himself be nothing but a mammal that had not drowned.
When he stood, the Kairos was nearer. The embryo's light reached toward the lattice, and the lattice, like a gentle teacher, adjusted itself so a smaller hand could trace it.
"You'll need this," he whispered to the thing that was not a thing. "Or they will."
EXT. THALASSOS STATION — ROOFTOP / NIGHT
Wind hammered the iron lung of the sea.
On the upper deck, Kerr stared toward the anomalous horizon with the look of someone budgeting rage. A junior analyst handed her a printout—composite readouts of the Crownband surge. She tucked it into her coat without reading.
A radio hissed. A voice inside the hiss:
"If belief can break the world, it can hold it together."
She closed her eyes. Not an hallucination. A memory with good timing.
"If you're alive, you stubborn miracle," she said, "do not die polite."
Behind her, hangar doors opened on rails that screamed like old guilt. A flight of tilt-rotors warmed. First Division would fly drills; Second would load empty cages to practice the weight of failure; Third would lay out blankets nobody wanted to need; Fourth would walk the perimeter with paperwork like knives.
Kerr buttoned her coat against a wind that had learned too much. She descended the stairs with the careful speed of a person who has made friends with urgency.
INT. SOMNUS — SPINE SHAFT / UNTIMED
There are ways a building breathes when it is alone.
Veyra followed the hum toward the Spine—a vertical shaft from bedrock to ocean roof through which Somnus whispered with itself. Along its inner wall, mirrored ribs shone with a low bioluminescence that felt less like light and more like attention.
Halfway up, a catwalk ended in a platform the size of regret. He stepped onto it, and the shaft answered—wind rising, pressure equalizing, a cathedral preparing throat and lungs.
"Somnus," he said, voice swallowed and returned. "Begin Requiem broadcast."
The Aion thrummed. The Amphora's lattice bloomed in air, expanded, and threaded into the ribs of the shaft. One by one, the mirrors along the spine lit with the Ratio—equations, then sentences, then a simple diagram any frightened child could draw and any grieving mother could endure.
The ocean heard first.
Waves tightened their cadence; tides paused as if to take notes. Far above, along the Vetraeus coast, gulls rose and settled without knowing why.
The Ratio went further.
It slipped the boundary of steel and water, climbed the ladder of salt into sky, and from there into the telemetry dust that humans had flung around their planet like prayer seeds. Radios did not crackle so much as remember their obligation. In labs and dormitories, receivers put down their stubborn static and learned a tune.
For 0.71 of a minute, the world listened.
For 0.29, it let go.
The broadcast ended with a hush that carried gratitude. Somewhere in Diamond City, a med-ward patient who had been repeating the name of a lost son every night slept through the hour for the first time in a year.
Veyra leaned on the rail.
"I am not a god," he told the shaft. "I am a clerk."
The shaft, being kind stone with good manners, did not argue.
INSERT — COUNCIL DOSSIER / BLACK SIGMA
File:REQUIEM RATIO (Unconfirmed Origin)
Summary:A set of guidelines etched into the Vetraeus telemetry field; content describes proportional remembrance to stabilize Psyflux in crisis.
Attribution:"First Dreamer" myth expanding.
Action:Adopt doctrine provisionally across Divisions; redact origin; teach without idol.
Margin note (Kerr):If a myth saved a child's sleep, we can pay the tithe of superstition later.
INT. SOMNUS — CHOIR NAVE / LATER
A cool current ran through the hall, smelling faintly of iron and patient storm. He returned to the place where the Choir had learned how not to scream.
Now it was a nave. The ceiling bowed like a quiet apology. On the far wall, the mirror had flowed into the shape of a low arch. The Choir lay behind it like a lake under glass.
He raised his hand. The Choir answered with a small chord that felt like warm water on cold skin.
"We will not keep all names," he told it. "We will keep enough to make the map kind."
The chord held, then offered a countermelody. He felt Rehn in it—her habit of adding something sharp to keep sweetness honest. He felt Osterr—a beat on the two and four, military but with a secret swing he'd never confessed to. He felt Kerr—not present, present anyway, a harmony that refused to be a victim.
"Thank you," he said, and meant it.
He turned to go. The Choir added three notes that made his chest hurt in the way expensive art does. He laughed through it.
EXT. VETRAEUS HORIZON — ORBIT / NIGHT
From orbit, the Eye blinked—once, slow, as if to show that restraint could be theatrical. Satellites, embarrassed to be noticed, pretended they had not flinched.
On the night side of Caelus, cities pulsed in the old pattern of human insomnia. In a single neighborhood in the Red Zone, a boy dreaming of the sea felt his dream shift from drowning to learning how to float. In a villa on a hill, a collector woke with the taste of salt and the memory of a promise he had not yet made.
The world shifted its weight.
INT. SOMNUS — LOWER ANCHOR / MUCH LATER
He should have slept. He traced his fingers across the catwalk rail as if the metal were a friend that might not stay.
A tremor moved through the structure.
Not Choir—not the gentle coercion of grief, not the tired kindness of archives. This was else. The rail shivered with a frequency that carried none of the 58.3 familiarity. The mirrors fogged with a pressure colder than weather.
The Aion stung his wrist: ALERT / NULL-LIT TRACE.
He went still. Listening.
The tremor came again, like a cough in a church when the sermon has begun to matter.
He walked toward the source.
At the junction where Somnus met bedrock, a seam had opened—a hairline draft of cold air that CARRIED NOTHING and therefore everything. He felt the subtle wrongness of Monarchic syntax the way a veteran feels a bar fight five seconds before it decides to exist.
"No," he whispered. "Not here."
The crack widened by generosity rather than force. Through it, a thin lace of darkness reached—not fluid, not smoke, something more like absence braided. The mirrors along the corridor paled. The Choir reduced itself to a single, sustained note—the way a person hums to steady their hands while stitching a wound.
The lace touched the air. It did nothing dramatic. Everything else flinched.
"Somnus," he said, voice low. "Seal."
The corridor answered with effort. Mirrors flowed toward the seam; light tried to thicken like congealing broth. The lace did not resist; it remembered resisting once and chose not to repeat itself. It arrived as taste, as scar, as a policy written in some older weather.
He saw it, then: not a monster, not a mouth, but a signature—a fragment of a Crownline's old broadcast, washed to bone by years and still poisonous. A postcard from a cathedral of grief that had learned to walk.
"So," he said, no theater left in him. "You have opinions."
The lace brushed his forearm. The Aion hissed, hot. For one instant he smelled a city burning down the middle of its name. Streets curling like tongues. Choirs that were not his, singing hierarchy instead of mercy.
He did not move.
"Allocation," he said through his teeth, ancient habit saving him when valor would not. "Seventy to guard. Thirty to grace."
He stepped forward and put his palm over the seam, the way a parent covers a child's eyes when the movie gets complicated. Vector Shear is for shouting; Requiem is for speaking softly so the world remembers it has a choice. He spoke the Ratio into the crack.
The lace recoiled—not pushed, not defeated—reminded.
It folded back on itself like a note corrected. Behind it, the bedrock sighed. Mirrors sealed. The Aion cooled the way a fever breaks.
He leaned against the wall, the idiot grin of a survivor finding his mouth uninvited.
"First warning," he said to the stone and whatever else was listening. "Received."
In the stone, far away, something old turned its head. Not yet a Crowncry, not even a rumor, but the pivot of an ancient attention that had been patient before patience learned words.
He returned to the Amphora with the walk of a man measuring cost in ankles and breath. The Kairos hovered where he had left it, brighter by a good story. He studied it as one studies a child who has just learned the first rule of fire.
"They will come," he told it. "Not for you yet. For the noise we make while loving things."
The embryo pulsed, delicate, certain.
He lifted the journal. The mirror-ink glinted like truth when truth is tired.
ENTRY 72 — First Contact (Faint)
"Null-Lit trace. Crownline signature residue. Not breach; memory of a breach, and memories are muscular now.
Requiem held. We can hold. This is not victory. This is the standard by which we will measure our failures with kindness."
He closed the book.
He allowed himself to think of Kerr—the way she had not looked away when he began to be the sort of problem she had sworn to solve. He imagined her reading a doctrine with no author and deciding to teach it to children anyway.
"If you hear me," he said to the ceiling, to the ocean, to the part of himself that had left his own coordinate system, "I am not dead. I am describing."
Somnus dimmed the lights with the courtesy of an inn that knows a guest needs darkness to keep believing in morning.
EXT. CAELUS — COUNCIL HALL / NIGHT
The vote tallies glowed on glass—unanimous because the abstentions had learned manners. A small room opened behind the dais. Inside, a table shaped like restraint and four folders placed with the precision of a confession.
First Division—Second—Third—Fourth. Hands to cut and mend and ask and refuse. A blank fifth folder sat at the end of the table, as if the room knew that a story like this grows a shadow to do what daylight cannot.
Kerr was the last to enter. She touched the edge of the blank folder; pulled her hand away; touched it again.
"We will teach the Ratio," she said to people who would later pretend the idea had been theirs. "We will not teach its origin. We will build an institution that pays its bills on time."
No one laughed. The joke had teeth.
They signed where signatures go. Somewhere under ocean, a man smiled because he had felt a decision move through the air like weather.
INT. SOMNUS — THE AMPHORA / DAWN-LIKE
There is no dawn under tons of water, only changes in how the dark behaves.
In that not-morning, Veyra stood before the lattice he had written, the small crown-heart of Kairos humming beside his shoulder like a companion who did not require a leash. He tested the Requiem Ratio again—71 remembered, 29 released—and felt the facility answer with a structural sigh he had come to love as the sound a machine makes when it forgives a human for trying.
He turned his palm. The Aion projected a final line, an addendum as modest as a footnote and as heavy as a blade.
Addendum:When the day comes that remembrance alone cannot hold the map, allocate courage. Spend yourself last.
He closed his hand. The letters folded into his skin and stayed, not tattoo, not scar—instruction.
The Choir behind the arch gave a single approving note, low and fond, the sound old rooms make when good boots cross them.
He smiled without showing his teeth.
"All right," he said to no one and to everyone. "We begin."
Far above, the ocean did not answer. It breathed. The difference mattered.
And far away, in a city trained to live with the price of itself, first lessons began with ratios, and children memorized mercy as if it were arithmetic because sometimes it is.