Location:Seven Peaks — Residential Quarter, Root-Network Hub, Verdant Spire
Date/Time:TC1855.04.08-10
Elian woke because the mountain was humming.
Not through the walls — through the floor. Through the roots that threaded beneath the residential quarter like veins beneath skin. Through the deep channels where Sylvara's oldest growth reached down into stone that hadn't seen light since before the Cataclysm. The hum was low and slow and patient, and it had been getting stronger for days.
He lay still. The room was dark except for the faint glow of the formation nightlight that Silas had built into the doorframe — amber, warm, just enough to see by if you needed to find the washroom at three in the morning. Aren's bed was two meters away. The frost on his blanket — the thin, delicate crystals that formed when Aren slept deeply — had arranged itself in a pattern Elian hadn't seen before.
