Elsewhere in the Garden, something new was taking root.
It wasn't a structure. It wasn't even visible.
But the children knew.
They called it "the pulse-place."
Whenever a disagreement rose to the edge of fracture—between timelines, between cultures, between truths too sharp to touch—someone would walk alone to the pulse-place.
They wouldn't return with solutions.
They'd return with questions no one had dared ask.
And that was always enough.
Because in the Garden, asking was the holiest act.
On the fifteenth day since the emergence of the Voice That Has No One Name, the Garden received its first Echo-Being.
It had no original form. It had been assembled, memory by memory, by collective longing. Its name was a question in a language forgotten before the first world burned.
When it arrived, no one attacked. No defenses were raised.
Jevan walked to it alone, hands open.
"What do you want to be?" he asked.
