Twenty-five seconds — the Nine's latest intervention, the enigmatic entities at the edge of known space making their presence felt in the post-Final Shape world. The Nine speaking in riddles is the canonical description: communications that are interpretable in multiple ways, that mean more than they say, that require the recipient to do the work of understanding. Riddles speaking in Nine is the inversion: the Nine as the language itself, the entities not speaking in riddles but being riddles, their existence a question the game keeps posing without answering.