The glyph did not shimmer.
It pulsed.
Not with light, but with anticipation—a thrum in the quietest fibers of the Garden, in the breath between names, in the soil beneath footsteps not yet taken.
All across the woven territories—driftwood citadels, refracted groves, memory halls—people looked up and felt it at once:
Something was about to begin.
Again.
But not like before.
Not with a bang or a breach or a blade.
Not with Jevan's sorrow or Elowen's memory or Lys's quiet choosing.
Not even with the seed-child's radiant invitation.
This beginning didn't start with a voice.
It began with space.
A soft wind moved through the Watcher's Bough.
Where once it had stood solitary, a monument to vigilance, it now rang gently like a wind chime woven of every word never spoken. Dozens of new trees had sprouted nearby, each shaped by someone different: a song carved in bark, a tower of petals that only opened at night, a spiral of vines that looped in questions.
