The echo spread like a tremor between the bones of broken time.
She had not spoken loudly.
She had not needed to.
The word she had whispered—No—was not a refusal.
It was a beginning.
A declaration of selfhood.
And in the wake of that one syllable, the Vale's silence shifted. It became resonance. A hum beneath the surface of what had not yet occurred.
Jevan felt it even as he lay in quiet beside the still pool, the girl curled in sleep beneath a half-woven bough. Around them, the Pact kept watch—but not out of fear. There was reverence now. Curiosity.
The girl had no name. But she had shape. A story waiting not to be told—but to be chosen.
And far away, in places long severed from narrative…
…others heard her.
In a ruined orbit around the remains of a shattered possibility, a boy with silver veins blinked awake.
He had not known sleep.
Only suspension.
