It began, as many things now did, with a silence that was not absence—but preparation.
A gathering.
A breath held before the first note.
The Listener had passed, but its echo remained—not in the sky, nor the soil, but in the gaps between. Between phrases. Between eyes meeting. Between an offered hand and the decision to take it.
In the Garden's heart, where once the Song of Aiden rang and where Jevan's tale had branched into root and shelter, a hush unfurled.
It wasn't imposed.
It invited.
And the Garden answered in kind.
By waiting.
—
The child wandered.
Not as a prophet.
Not as a symbol.
As a question with feet.
They walked between groves that grew in oppositional rhyme—trees that could not exist in the same world under prior rules, and yet here, shared sun and soil.
They touched petals of impossible color, hummed to stones that held narratives long dormant, sat beside grieving Reclaimed and said nothing—only watched as the grief became a poem written without ink.
