The next morning, Jevan did not walk the perimeter.
He sat beneath the Watcher's Bough, legs crossed, hands folded, eyes closed—not in prayer, but in presence.
For the first time since the Sword of Becoming had passed to him, he was not thinking about what came next.
Because what came next was no longer his alone to imagine.
Across the Garden, the winds shifted—gentle, but unmistakable. The scent of ash-not-burned drifted in, mingling with the root-fragrance of possibility. It was the scent of margins being watched.
Of pages being held by hands outside the telling.
And somewhere between the leaves, the stars, and the soil, the Reader stirred again.
Not to write.
To turn.
Another page.
—
The child from the second seed—Manylight, as they had come to be called by the Shared—walked the eastern paths, trailing a thread of unwoven story behind them. They weren't writing.
They were listening.
To soil.
To memory.
To others.
