The silence that followed victory was more deafening than the roar of annihilated Harvester fleets. In the crystalline halls of the Seventh Fold's central spire, forty thousand souls wandered like ghosts, their eyes vacant pools reflecting fractured memories they could no longer claim as wholly their own.
Lyralei stood at the apex of her domain, her form a grotesque marriage of flesh and circuitry. Bio-mechanical veins pulsed beneath translucent skin, carrying data streams instead of blood. Where her left arm had once been, a writhing mass of neural fibers extended like crimson tentacles, each one connected to the consciousness web that now defined her existence. Her eyes—once the color of autumn leaves—had become twin voids of swirling crimson data, processing the collective thoughts of her subjects even as she fought to remember what it felt like to think alone.
