The door to the Source Core was not made of the polished chrome or the sterile glass that defined the upper reaches of Ouroboros.
It was a massive, weeping slab of raw iron, ancient and rusted, smelling of the very beginning of the world. It did not stand at the end of the hall; it loomed like a silent juror, weighing the "Pulse" of those who dared to approach it.
Kian Ewan stood before it, his breath hitching in the thick, yellow mist. Behind him, the Waste groaned as the massive gears of the city's subconscious continued their parasitic grind.
Jude, the Architect of Walls, stood ten paces away, his hands folded into the sleeves of his midnight-blue robes, a thin, observational smile etched onto his face.
"You've spent your life looking for the 'Why,' Kian," Jude said, his voice a low, cultured velvet that seemed to vibrate within the iron door itself.
"But the 'Why' is a luxury of the free. Here, there is only the 'How.' And the 'How' is very simple: The world requires an Anchor. It requires a heart that is willing to break so that ten million others don't have to."
Kian didn't look at Jude. He looked at Sion Valeska, who was being held upright by Dante. Sion's skin was no longer translucent; it was becoming a pale, luminous grey, like the pages of an unwritten book.
"The Anchor isn't a title, is it?" Kian whispered, his voice a cold, sharp resonance.
"It's a sacrifice. You didn't build this city for the people, Jude. You built it for the Record. And the Record needs fresh blood to keep the ink flowing."
"Blood is such a primitive term," Jude countered, stepping closer. "We prefer 'Emotional Kinetic Energy.' Sion is the most efficient battery we've ever grown. He feels more in a single second than a thousand poets feel in a lifetime."
"If you open that door, Kian, you aren't freeing him. You're plugging him into the socket."
Dante's eyes flared with a desperate, agonizing Truth.
"He's not lying, Kian. The door... it's a vacuum. If we open it, the Record will reach out and claim the nearest variable. It'll consume Sion to stabilize the Riot we started in the Plaza."
Kian gripped his jagged iron stone. His genius was screaming at him, calculating a thousand escape routes, and finding only one that didn't end in Sion's erasure.
But that route required a Betrayal of Logic.
"I'm not opening the door to stabilize the Record," Kian said, turning to face the iron slab.
"I'm opening it to Poison it. If Sion is the ink, then I am the acid."
"We're going in together."