Cyril's Revelation

The light fractured. Not just the light filtering down from some impossible distant source, but the light *itself*, shimmering and tearing like old cloth. Cyril stumbled, caught in the visual dissonance. His hand instinctively went to his chest, where a worn leather-bound book used to sit beneath his robes. The book wasn't there, hadn't been for… he couldn't remember how long. But the *feeling* of it lingered, a phantom weight against his ribs.

Then, the words began.

"Consider the lilies of the field," his own voice, younger, firmer, echoed from somewhere behind his eyes, "how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin."

He flinched. The ground beneath him wasn’t the solid, impossible crystalline lattice of the Nexus core. It was packed earth, cool and damp against his thin sandals. He saw the faces: hopeful, weary, eyes fixed on him beneath a pale, indifferent sun. He was standing on the makeshift platform again, carved from scrap metal and salvaged wood, overlooking the gathered faithful in the Upper Undercroft. This wasn't happening. This *had* happened. Decades ago.

"...and yet I say unto you," the younger voice continued, unwavering, "that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."

Doubt, thick and bitter, rose in his throat, a taste he hadn’t experienced with such raw intensity in years. This was the start. The very beginning of the unraveling. He saw himself, earnest, sweat beading on his brow, believing every word. He saw the faces of his congregation, clinging to his pronouncements like life rafts in a rising tide of despair.

*They need this,* a thought, clear and sharp, pierced the temporal haze. *You have to give them hope.*

He squeezed his eyes shut against the vision, trying to force the present back into focus. The thrum of the Nexus, the sensation of reality itself being stretched and torn – that was real. This… this manufactured past was a cruel trick. But the emotions were real. The crushing weight of his own conviction, the absolute certainty that he was delivering divine truth, tangled with the nascent, terrifying questions that were just beginning to worm their way into his soul.

"...shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" the voice resonated, now tinged with a desperate plea.

A face in the crowd shifted, blurred. Not the face of a parishioner anymore, but something else, something formless and vast, its expressionless surface reflecting the impossible light of the Nexus. The lilies warped, their petals twisting into geometric impossibilities, their stems rigid frequencies instead of organic matter.

He tried to speak, to shout, to break the loop. "No! That's not... it wasn't like that!"

His voice, the present voice, came out as a choked gasp, swallowed by the echo of his younger self.

"Therefore, take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" The echo grew louder, insistent.

The heat of the fake sun beat down. The smell of damp earth and too many unwashed bodies filled the air. And underneath it all, the nascent anxiety of the man he was then, the man who was starting to see cracks in the foundation of everything he believed. The stories of the world outside, of the Undercroft’s strange whispers and shifting walls, had begun. And he, the theologian, was trying to fit them into the neat, ordered box of his faith.

The faces in the crowd contorted, stretching and pixelating, becoming less human, more like fields of corrupted data. A child's hand, reaching up towards him, elongated impossibly, its fingers dissolving into shimmering threads.

His younger self paused in the sermon, a flicker of confusion crossing his features. *What was that?* the internal thought echoed. *Just a trick of the light?*

No, it wasn't. He knew it wasn't. He *knew* the moments that followed, the subtle anomalies he dismissed, the growing dissonance between the scripture he preached and the reality he witnessed. The slow, agonizing realization that the universe might not be a moral stage for human drama, but something vast, indifferent, and utterly alien.

The loop tightened its grip. The feeling of standing there, offering empty platitudes in the face of true, cosmic strangeness, was a physical agony. His chest ached, his head pounded. He was trapped in the memory of his own self-deception, forced to witness the very first tremors of the earthquake that would eventually level his world. The certainty in his younger voice was a torment, a reminder of the fragile, temporary structure of his faith before the true nature of the architects of reality began to reveal itself. He saw the man he was, believing in a benevolent plan, utterly unaware of the cold, algorithmic processes that actually governed existence. And that man was breaking, slowly, unknowingly, in this very moment.

The familiar scenes of his past fractured, the temporal loops stuttering like a broken recording. Instead of the sun-drenched plaza or the faces of his past congregation, Cyril saw *through* them, or rather, the temporal echoes overlaid with something else entirely. The air, once thick with phantom heat and human scent, became crisp, cold, resonating with a different sort of clarity. It wasn't light or dark, sound or silence, but something that existed outside those human concepts.

He was no longer standing on shifting ground but floating in a void that was somehow both infinite and claustrophobic. The geometries unfolded without reference to Euclid or any mathematics he knew. Lines weren't straight; they curved into impossible angles, simultaneously present and absent. Shapes pulsed, not with light or shadow, but with what felt like pure data, raw information that bypassed his eyes and imprinted directly onto his mind. A structure bloomed before him, intricate and crystalline, but it wasn't made of stone or ice or any material he could name. It was built of interlocking concepts, theorems given form, radiating an energy that wasn't heat but a profound, chilling *correctness*.

His mind screamed in protest. It tried to assign meaning, to slot these forms into existing categories. *This is a prism,* it offered weakly. *A lattice? A construct of some kind?* But the labels felt flimsy, inadequate. They were trying to describe the ocean by calling it 'wet dirt'.

Then came the energy flows. Not currents of water or wind, not electrical arcs, but rivers of crystalline force that flowed through the abstract structures. They moved with a logic that was both beautiful and utterly alien. They shifted the impossible geometries, reshaping them with a silent, internal resonance. These flows were the *action* he had witnessed, the physical manifestation of the 'song' he had heard from the Chorister. But seen here, stripped bare of any human interpretation, they were terrifyingly devoid of purpose or malice. They simply *were*.

A particularly large flow surged past, a river of pure concept. It carved a new path through the geometric void, displacing the structures with effortless, absolute authority. The shapes didn't crumble or break; they simply *became* something else, following the inherent logic of the flow.

*This is what changed the Undercroft,* the thought surfaced, cold and sharp. *Not a battle, not a judgment. Just... a process.*

The horror wasn't in destruction, but in the sheer, indifferent *creation*. He saw a structure that momentarily resembled a human hand, wrought from these abstract components, only for a flow of energy to pass through it, rearranging the 'fingers' into intricate, multi-dimensional knots that bore no resemblance to biology. It wasn't violence; it was simply a redefinition. A few lines of code rewritten.

His breath hitched. He had seen echoes of this before, in the altered bodies of his followers, in the shifting walls. He had called it divine intervention, cosmic warfare, the work of architects. But this... this wasn't architecture in the human sense. It wasn't built for dwelling, or defense, or even aesthetic. It was pure function, a display of fundamental operations.

The geometries pulsed again, and he felt, somehow, a question within their silent resonance. Not a spoken question, but a conceptual one. *What are you? What is this data?*

His mind, battered and raw from the temporal loops, was finally starting to grasp the true nature of what he was seeing. It wasn't a vision *of* something; it was a vision *into* something. Into the very fabric of existence, or at least, the existence currently being defined here. And that fabric was not woven with morality or purpose, but with these cold, crystalline commands and the indifferent flows that executed them. He was perceiving reality at its most fundamental level, and that level was purely abstract, utterly alien to his humanity.

He was not seeing God. He was seeing code. And the dawning realization that everything he had ever believed, everything he had ever preached, was just a flimsy, anthropocentric interpretation of processes as indifferent to humanity as a compiler is to the text it processes, was a horror far deeper than any hell he had ever imagined.

He wasn't being shown a message. He was being shown the *mechanism*. And it was beautiful, intricate, and utterly, devastatingly empty of any meaning he could comprehend. What were these things? He didn't know. But they weren't gods, or demons, or architects with a plan. They were simply... operations.