The words buzzed in the air like the moment between lightning and thunder...that breathless pause where reality holds still, knowing that everything is about to change!
She would establish Order, but not with the Living Origins!
The declaration rippled outward through the assembled Origins like a stone thrown into perfectly still water, each wave carrying deeper implications than the last.
Behind Origin Ama Gias, the collected Dukes recoiled as if physically struck.
Their eyes...stellar, crystalline, void-touched, burning, expressed a symphony of emotions!
Betrayal mixed with disbelief.
Shock tangled with rage.
And underneath it all, a current of something that might have been fear...not of Sigrid herself, but of what her rejection represented.
The weapon they had forged turning away from their hand. The Order they had cultivated choosing its own path!
The Origin Ama was silent.
The entire area was silent.
The only sound that dared to break that terrible quiet was, shockingly, the soft scratching of pen against paper.
The Queen of Matter sat with perfect composure, a golden page floating before her as she wrote with careful precision in a white-gold book whose cover bore the title "The Chronicles of Order" in script that seemed to rearrange itself depending on the angle of observation.
She wrote with the focus of someone documenting history as it happened, understanding that this moment would echo through epochs yet unborn!
Her pen moved with steady certainty, recording not just words but the weight of them, the shape of the silence that followed them, the precise quality of shock that painted itself across faces.
Apart from this literary intrusion, there was immense silence!
Duke Gwendolyn seemed to have been frozen mid-thought, her entire being locked in a moment of cognitive dissolution.
If these words had come from Osmont...that mysterious anomaly who defied categorization.. she would have argued, fought, perhaps even laughed at the audacity.
But they had emerged from the Young Miss herself, from THE Living Order, from the being they had sacrificed generations to create.
This...
The thought couldn’t complete itself. There was no framework for this betrayal that wasn’t betrayal, this rejection that was somehow more insulting than opposition.
At least enemies acknowledged your importance by opposing you.
Sigrid... was simply walking away.
Sigrid remained calm after her words.
The white-gold radiance that surrounded her didn’t flicker or waver, Order itself seemed to have accepted her decision, perhaps had even been waiting for it.
Origin Ama Gias continued staring with those pure white eyes that contained depths suggesting she had seen the birth and death of concepts themselves.
Then, with movement that managed to be both graceful and threatening, she began to float toward Noah and Sigrid.
Her hand rose with gentle authority, a simple gesture that stopped all others from following.
She descended until she stood directly in front of them, close enough that the terrible power she contained...hundreds of trillions in complexity and purity compressed into form, created its own atmosphere.
The air grew thick with potential violence carefully leashed, destruction politely declining to manifest.
Her entirely white eyes were eerie and majestic simultaneously.
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