*From the site-book:*
> [The final pages are water-stained and hurried.] Through the port I watched the direct road — the artery of our commerce, the thing I was commissioned to protect — pulled into the maw of the Gallery. The landscape folded into itself. The feedback loops achieved total, unmediated autonomy; the mathematics collapsed into a singularity of intent. The guests and couriers were not killed. They were translated: their momentum became architecture, their existence fuel. It was a masterpiece of destruction, and I had signed every drawing. > > I did not build a defense. I did not even build a trap. I built a gateway. The world beyond the port is no longer a place of destinations; it is a place of transitions, where the path itself is the only reality left.
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**Town restoration note.** Here the site-book ends and the novel begins — Chapter 5 tells this day hour by hour, and Chapter 6 tells what the town did with the wound (the Underways went around it; nobody rebuilt the trap, until this record, which is not one). Foss survived the port, resigned, and eventually walked into the town as an ordinary guest. The Gallery survives only as the thing you have been walking: pages, links, and marked exits.