The Hidden Partition was no longer a prison, but it was a place of deep disorientation.
For the thousands of souls who had been "Deleted" and then "Restored," the world they knew was gone.
They were like deep-sea divers rising too fast
if they returned to the surface all at once, the pressure of reality would shatter them.
"They need a translator,"
Adriana said, looking at her hands.
They didn't glow anymore.
The violet fire was gone, replaced by the faint, steady pulse of a normal human heart.
"They remember the static.
They remember the silence.
They don't know how to be 'found' yet."
Adriana set up a new office in the center of the shimmering park.
It wasn't a basement
it was a pavilion made of the remaining light of the First Memory.
She didn't call it the Office of Lost Property.
She called it The Gateway.
Caius stayed with her.
Without the Architect's rigid code, he was learning the messy art of being human.
He used his remaining analytical skills to keep track of the souls, helping them find their "Spirit Notes" again.
"Adriana,"
Caius said one afternoon, holding a ledger made of light.
"There is a man here
a baker from the 1950s.
He's been in the Trash Folder for seventy years.
He doesn't understand what a 'cell phone' is, let alone how to live in a city that has moved on without him."
Adriana sat with the baker.
She didn't use magic to heal him.
She did something harder
she listened.
She let him talk about the smell of coal ovens and the price of a loaf of bread in a world that no longer existed.
By witnessing his story, she anchored him.
She became the Bridge not through power, but through Presence.
The woman ,the pixelated fragment of her mother,watched from the edges of the trees.
She never approached too closely, respecting the void in Adriana's memory.
She simply existed as a quiet guardian, a shadow of the love that had started this entire journey.
But the peace of the Partition was soon disturbed.
One evening, the silver pond in the center of the park began to boil.
It wasn't heat
it was Frequency.
A dark, oily substance began to leak from the staircase that led to the Museum.
"The Architect is gone,"
Caius whispered, his watercolor skin turning a fearful grey.
"But the Deep Silence we escaped... it followed us.
It's like a shadow that was cut off and is now trying to reattach itself."
The "Returned" souls began to panic. The light in the park dimmed as the oily substance spread, turning the glowing grass into black ash.
Adriana stood up.
She felt the hollow space in her ches
the place where the First Memory used to be.
She was powerless.
She couldn't sing the B-flat.
She couldn't weave the threads.
"Listen to the wind,"
a voice whispered.
It wasn't in her head
it was a literal breeze that ruffled her hair.
"I am still in the song, Adriana."
Vaelen.
He was everywhere now, just as he had promised.
He was the rustle of the leaves and the ripple in the pond.