The prison was dying.
Not in the way that ordinary things died — gradually, quietly, with the slow resignation of something that had simply run out of time. No. The First Horizon was dying the way a star died: violently, catastrophically, and with consequences that reached across the fabric of existence itself. Its collapse sent tremors through dimensions that had not felt movement in thousands of years, and the reverberations woke things that should have remained sleeping. Entire worlds watched in collective silence, their civilizations paused mid-breath, their eyes turned toward the same point in the cosmic weave — that singular location where possibility had once been born, and where something ancient was now breaking free of chains it had worn for longer than most realities could remember.
