Page 123 - SurprisingTruthFinal

Nicholas Boothman
It looked like a strange, many-sided shape made of
light and shadow. It glowed with a color he had never
seen before, a color that somehow held everything and
nothing at once. It felt like the opposite of the mess
below. It was perfect, cold order.
It felt ancient, undeniable, and utterly non-human.
Henry stared, the breath catching in his throat. This
wasn't a deity, or a foreign military. This was a cosmic
mechanism, forced into visibility by the ultimate,
structural violation of the planet's equilibrium.
The immense structure began a slow, deliberate
descent toward the poisoned atmosphere. As it moved,
the chaotic, contaminated colors in the sky below it
seemed to dampen, the toxic plasma softening into
dull, harmless shades. The roar of the fires seemed to
recede, not by distance, but by some immense,
stabilizing force.
Henry knew, with the clarity of absolute,
unmediated fact, the kind of fact even The Gaze
couldn't categorize, that the chaos was over. The game
had stopped.
The higher power, The Regulator, was here. It had
been activated not by prayer, but by physics. Humanity
had destroyed its own reality, and something vast and
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