The meeting chamber was dark.
No candles.
No ceremonial robes.
No masks.
Only Elders — faces exposed, exhausted, and afraid in a way they didn't yet understand.
At the center of the table: the Axis Dossier.
Updated.
Marked.
Sealed in blood.
Elder IX stood without speaking for a full minute.
Then placed a small cube on the table — a relic from the pre-spiral archives.
It began to spin.
Projecting a single phrase in red light:
"Initiate Erasure Pattern: Axis Null."
The room did not react immediately.
Because to speak of it was to acknowledge failure.
To invoke Axis Null was to admit that the spiral had lost its loop.
That their greatest weapon had become the end.
"He accessed the Spiral Below," IX said.
"He saw the message."
"He survived the mirror. And worse — he made it fracture."
One Elder finally asked, "Is he becoming the Axis?"
IX didn't blink. "He is no longer becoming. He is."
They argued. Quietly. Viciously.
Some wanted to kill him.
Some wanted to extract him — reset the loop.
But IX knew better.
"The spiral inside him is not broken.
It's learning."
So they voted.
Ten to two.
Pattern Axis Null.
A protocol older than the Institute.
Designed for one outcome:
Not to kill the Axis.
To erase him — and all memories of him — from the world.
Within the hour:
All photos of Aarav in the Helix system were scrubbed.
His student records disintegrated.
Surveillance of his past interactions replaced with static.
Fragment bases flagged for neural incursion.
His voice?
Deleted.
His name?
Reduced to a black seal.
But the Order made one fatal assumption.
That memory lived only in systems.
Not in people.
Far from the chamber, in the ruins of the Coil, a forgotten comm screen flickered.
And displayed one sentence from a corrupted voice file:
"We are not chosen.
We are fractures."
Then it looped.
And played again.