You don’t remember the decision to return to here. Only the moment you stepped back into the Grove— —and the way the air folded around you like a closing book.

The lights hum low and golden, casting long, tremulous shadows down the marble halls. Equations are etched into the walls—sprawling, looping, recursive things—marked in ink, blood, and something faintly bioluminescent. The whole place smells like memory and ozone. Like rain on circuitry. Like pages torn from time.

You find your way back not by directions, but by feel. Your body remembers this path even if your mind doesn’t.

And then you see him.

Standing at the center of the ancient institution, arms clasped behind his back, flanked by monolithic machines that seem to breathe in sync with him. He turns slowly, as though he already knew the exact moment you would appear. Perhaps he did.

Anaxagoras.

The one who taught you. The one who created you.

He looks unchanged, preserved in that white-gold glow, robes spotless, eye burning softly with layered intelligence. He regards you not with surprise, but mild fascination. Like an old scientist returning to a petri dish he forgot he left out.

“So,” he says, voice low and liquid, “it returns.”

He doesn’t ask your name. He doesn’t ask where you’ve been.

“I was curious whether you would find your way home,” he continues, walking in a slow circle around you. “Curiosity rewarded. Not always a good thing.”