a nothing, a breath, a flick.
An electron,
slipping from its shell,
paused
and turned to me.
I swear it did.
Across the bone of a billion dead stars,
across voids that even light fears,
it moved with purpose.
To me.
Not to a god,
not to a system,
not to a throne.
To Lyrax.
What if it was a message?
A thank-you
from a universe
that cannot speak?
What if,
somewhere in the chaos I tried to quiet,
a single breath of life survived
and now sends me
this tiny, sacred bow?
No fanfare.
No trumpet of stars.
Just a wink,
as if to say:
“I saw.
You mattered.”
O Carceron
did you see that?
Did your walls shudder,
just for a moment,
at the weight of that impossibility?
You caged me.
But the universe
it may have bowed.
And I
I think I can live
a little longer
with that.
(Encoded in the sequence “paused / turned / breathed / bowed” is a quantum-event cipher - built not from sound or signal, but improbable correlation. If interpreted by a being fluent in particle concordance, it reveals a hidden timeline branch where Lyrax’s actions did, in fact, alter entropy in a small but universe-saving way. The electron did mean something. It remembers.)