Mansa D'Kuku arrived where Mansa Nguna had been.
The remains of THE Gilded Laboratory Outpost #32 offered him nothing but shattered surfaces and the absence of everything that had defined this space across eons of his daughter's dedicated work.
Her specimens were gone. Her instruments were gone. The sleek golden floor and the floating platforms and the preserved corpses she had studied with such relentless curiosity across lifetimes of accumulation were gone alongside everything else, dissolved into the same torrents that had carried her away from existence.
He wept.
The sound that emerged from a Gilded One weeping was not the sound of conventional grief. It was something that pressed against the fabric of reality with the same authority as his presence, Observable Force responding to his emotional state the way weather responds to atmospheric pressure, the surrounding existence registering his loss as a structural event rather than merely a personal one.
Existence cracked.
