The Epochal Orrery tumbled into the gulf, a bead of crystal and engineered potentiality. On the Web, the great, shared breath held after its launch slowly released, but into a new atmosphere. The air of their world now seemed thinner, stretched over a frame of time so vast it made their own centuries feel like the flicker of a candle. They had cast a stone into a pond whose far shore was a hundred thousand years distant. The ripples they would one day see returning would be the history of their own species, reflected and annotated by a mind of stone and tide.Life adapted. The initial, vertiginous shock of contact with the geological consciousness—dubbed "the Lithic Resonance" by the human linguists, though "resonance" was a desperately fast word for it—faded into a constant, low hum in the background of their existence. It was less a sound and more a shift in pressure, a tectonic adjustment of their place in the cosmos. The Paradox Lantern’s scribbles grew slower, more deliberate, so

The clarity brought by the Lithic Mirror was not an end, but a deepening of the mystery. The Web now understood its role as living archivists, its people as fleeting scribes in a chronicle written across epochs. This knowledge settled upon them not as a burden, but as a profound liberation. The anxiety of being "enough" for some distant, perfect audience evaporated. They were collaborators in a work so vast that their only possible contribution was the unvarnished truth of their moment.This liberation birthed the final, and most radical, phase of their analogue ethos: the Embrace of the Eraser.For generations, preservation had been their sacred charge—the Vault, the Sink, the Orrery, all testaments to the permanence of memory. But the Lithic dialogue revealed a deeper truth to the archivists of stone: that meaning was not only in accumulation, but in selective loss. A canyon’s form was defined as much by the rock that remained as by the river that had carved it a