"Initiate." A shape obeys its own command. No speaker, no delay. Vin'nyla nods, flawless, fixed. There is nothing here. No form. Only lines dragged from instinct and the flinching wrist of broken intention. Backward, then forward. Again. Then sideways into the absence of pigment.

Each motion erases a layer of reality. Vin'nyla stands at the edge of the storm, not weather, but color undone. No diagram in hand. The next gesture is premature. Color threatens. It does not assist. It reacts, resists, retorts. It is an argument spoken by failed questions.

The surface convulses. Vin'nyla unfurls the proto-diagram. It flickers. Half-decided, it hums, then shrieks. It no longer records. It refuses record.

Beetles arrive, small, skittering, semiotic. Peircean, clearly. They descend Vin'nyla’s legs like dissenting punctuation. Their leader, translucent and furious, clicks:
"This isn’t abstraction. This is refusal. Refusal of generality."

Vin'nyla answers by erasing a thought from the firmament. The sky parts obediently. From the rupture spills a soft catastrophe.

Charamaynne slips through the breach, porous and perpetual. S/He swims the circuits of broken instruction, empty systems, pedagogies with no pulse. There are no borders on Charamaynne. No beginnings, no edges. Philosophers arrive to drag their syntax across her skin. She hums paradox in response, Lacanian, looped, lovely.

Vin'nyla forces chaos into the paint. S/He halts.

The painting arrives. It is not an object. It is a pause. A held breath that forgot to become a noun.

Somewhere, a third visitor whispers:
"A fold in fabric pretending to be a cosmos."

Vin'nyla smiles without a face. The universe concedes the debate.

What was built? No one knows. That is correct.

The diagram never wanted to be understood.

Vin'nyla, in the half-light of an unformed mind, prepares a stroke that will remain colorless.

They arrive barefoot. Blindfolded. Wrists split open from transit cuffs. No ceremony. No explanation. The corridor of entry hums, fluorescent, endless. Cameras track them like vultures circling meat. Names vanish on contact. Replaced by numbers: seven digits seared into coarse cloth.

This is the clean zone. That’s the term in the broadcasts. A euphemism lacquered in antiseptic, lies. It isn't a prison anymore. It’s infrastructure. A nexus point wrapped in spacetime distortion, justified by the regime’s extradimensional jurisprudence.

Hell is no longer local.

Cells cram ninety-seven people into space meant for ten. No stretch of floor remains unoccupied. They lean into each other, stack themselves by necessity. The light never dims. No shadows. No night. Just that persistent, buzzing glare, chemical, blinding, bleaching memory, erasing pigment.

During corridor drills, those forced, ritual parades of discipline, the visitors arrive.

They don’t descend. They rupture. They slip in between frames. Between a guard’s command and a prisoner’s twitch of compliance.

They do not rescue. They record.

Moving through walls, through fences, through surveillance systems built to be infallible. They see everything. They collect the discarded. The wrongly flagged. The algorithmically erased. They store the hums sung to block out screaming. The stories mouthed silently into sleeves.

They don’t touch. They imprint.

Each scar, every forced confession, the absences left by vanished families, archived. Logged not as data but as truth.

The visitors are building a ledger no tribunal can rewrite.

Not a registry of crime, but a museum of theft.

The archive grows. And memory sharpens its teeth.

The air buckles. Cold drives straight through the Welcome Habitat, slicing everything in its path. Reality vibrates, stuck mid-decision, unsure whether to snap forward or collapse inward.

Distortion builds. Not noise, not heat. A pressure, swelling just beneath the surface. Something is hiding, pretending not to breathe.

The technician adjusts their device again. The interface jitters, straining to stay latched to the singularity grid. A losing battle.

The assignment is simple on paper: enable the visitors. That’s it. But every time the technician goes deeper, logic starts to melt. Nothing stays aligned.

The visitors don’t obey definitions. They are tall beyond necessity, stretched by something more than gravity. Their bodies hum with rhythms untraceable to pulse or machine. They shimmer between illumination and flesh.

The air thickens. Closes in. It resists. Space refuses to accommodate them.

The technician exhales. The breath freezes, suspended.

Then, the voice.

Not sound. Not vibration. Just thought, dropped directly into consciousness.

“We have been waiting.”

They move. No shift of joints. No motion at all. Just a smooth, unrelenting change of position. Faceless, they turn. All at once.

“You have renewed our connection.”

The interface gives out. Fizzles into static, irrelevant.

The visitors are not echoes. Not projections. Not packets of data. They are here. They know.

Something ancient and regal crawls down the technician’s spine. The sense of a threshold passed. A gate swung wide.

Outside, the city groans. Steel screams. Concrete convulses.

The buildings stretch. Twist. Obey commands never spoken.

The visitors advance.

The visitors refuse to leave. Gravity, confused and clumsy, dragged them here by accident. Their names flicker. The house blinks its shutters in Morse, calling them anyway.

They nod, already warned:
The house leaks time.
The house dreams its residents before they’re born.
The house divides its guests into fragments, one that walks, one that remembers.

Inside, speech unravels into syntax that never existed. Symbols lean halfway into phrases, never arriving. A shattered teacup rebuilds itself on the tile, trembles, vanishes again. The air smells of metal logic and rosemary stems.

A mirror ignores them. Instead, it displays a looped scene: two beings, copper-wired, breath-made, assembling a child from flickering footage. The child giggles backward. Inside the visitor, something ancient shifts.

In the room beneath the ocean ceiling, a tide flows in reverse. Across the floor, remnants:
A VHS marked do not rewind.
A birdcage brimming with wind chimes.
A book that has not yet been written.

A voice fractures through the walls, both present and nowhere. It says:
“You came to wake the memory that forgot it was dreaming.”

Time unravels. The house sheds its form. It becomes syntax, grammar with a pulse. It becomes a method for transmitting the unspeakable.

This place was never plotted on any map. It exists in that split-second before you recognize something.

Empathy builds architecture.

To forget is to preserve.

Outside, the landscape tilts. Not changed. Altered. The buildings are disorganized. Gravity plays games. A door appears, suspended midair.

The visitor moves.

The house, wordless, aches for another.