The silence did not scream.
It did not resist.
It did not shatter like it once might have—when stories pressed against it like waves trying to break a wall.
It did something far more unsettling.
It listened.
And when it listened, it changed.
Not all at once.
But like a mountain exhaling for the first time in centuries.
In the void beyond the Garden, where the last traces of the Erasure once lingered like dried ink, a shimmer stirred.
Not light.
Not shadow.
A resonance.
Faint. Incomplete.
As if the raw absence had finally heard something it could not ignore: a tone that made even emptiness wish it could reply.
Something had shifted in the way stories moved.
No longer linear. No longer monologic.
The Garden had become a call.
And now…
The other side of the silence was preparing an answer.
Jevan felt it before anyone spoke of it.
Not in his hands—those were still calloused from soil and ink and story-thread.
