Baghdad did not exist.
And yet—it did.
Mohamed felt the shift before he saw it. The air changed first, thick with dust and ink and something sharper: thought. The sky above him glowed with a muted amber light, as if the sun itself had been filtered through parchment.
They stood on a bridge.
Below them flowed the Tigris—but it was wrong. Not water. Light, moving like liquid script, carrying fragments of language instead of reflections.
Selene exhaled slowly.
"This is a temporal echo," she said. "The House of Wisdom… before the fire. Before the erasure."
Mohamed's heart pounded.
He had read about it. Everyone had. A golden age reduced to footnotes. Scholars drowned. Books burned. Knowledge turned into ash and myth.
But this—
This was alive.
Ahead of them rose the House of Wisdom, vast and elegant, its domes inscribed with geometry that seemed to breathe. Scholars moved through its courtyards—Persian, Arab, Greek, Indian—arguing, laughing, writing, translating.
No hierarchy.
No censorship.
Only hunger.
"They weren't collecting knowledge," Mohamed whispered.
Selene nodded. "They were synthesizing it."
As they crossed the threshold, Mohamed felt something snap into place inside his mind. Languages he had never studied unfolded effortlessly. Symbols aligned. Contradictions dissolved.
He understood why it had to be destroyed.
Inside, scholars debated fiercely.
One traced stars onto clay tablets.
Another mapped consciousness using mathematics.
A third spoke quietly of karma, not as punishment—but as causality.
A man approached them, eyes sharp, posture calm.
"You don't belong to this time," he said gently.
Mohamed froze. "You can see us?"
The man smiled faintly. "Of course. You're standing in a place where time is a suggestion."
Selene stiffened. "Who are you?"
"A librarian," he replied. "Once."
He gestured to the walls. "We discovered something dangerous here."
Mohamed leaned forward. "What?"
The librarian's gaze hardened.
"That truth does not converge naturally," he said. "It must be aligned. Forced, if necessary."
Selene's breath caught. "The Eclipse Order…"
"They studied us," the librarian said. "Long after we were erased."
The walls flickered.
The scholars froze mid-motion.
"They learned what we almost completed," he continued. "A unified model. Theology, science, metaphysics, ethics—woven together."
Mohamed's chest tightened.
"And why didn't you finish it?"
The librarian looked at him with something like sorrow.
"Because we realized the final variable," he said.
"And that is?" Mohamed asked.
The librarian pointed at him.
"The human ego."
The echo began to destabilize.
Fire appeared at the edges of the memory—not physical flames, but forgetting.
Books unraveled into dust. Voices faded mid-sentence.
Selene grabbed Mohamed's arm. "They're collapsing the echo. The Order doesn't want you to see the end."
A ripple tore through the hall.
Ryoto Nobunga stepped out of it.
Unhurried.
Unbothered.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
Mohamed felt anger surge. "You erased this place."
Ryoto shook his head. "No. We learned from its failure."
He gestured to the collapsing scholars.
"They believed humanity would rise if given everything. They were wrong."
Aiko appeared beside him, swinging her legs.
"They cried a lot," she said casually. "Knowledge hurts when you don't have rules."
Selene snapped, "You murdered a civilization!"
Ryoto met her gaze evenly. "We ended an experiment."
Mohamed stepped forward.
"You're afraid of free synthesis," he said. "You want controlled enlightenment."
Ryoto smiled faintly. "Exactly."
The echo shook violently.
The librarian looked at Mohamed one last time.
"Remember this," he said. "They don't fear ignorance."
"They fear people who connect dots without permission."
The House of Wisdom burned—not in fire, but in silence.
They fell back into the present.
Mohamed collapsed to one knee, gasping.
Selene steadied him. "Second convergence completed."
Mohamed stared at his hands.
"They weren't saints," he said slowly. "They were close."
Selene nodded. "Too close."
Mohamed stood.
"The Order isn't evil because they lie," he said. "They're evil because they decide who's allowed to understand."
Selene's expression softened.
"That realization," she said, "is why Faromet is accelerating the timetable."
Mohamed looked up.
"How many convergences left?"
Selene hesitated.
"Twenty."
Somewhere, across time and structure, Faromet smiled.