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(Miryam's story…..)
One day before the seam turned strangers away and the forest began to lie for killers, the mountain was only itself: a long quiet thing with a heartbeat under stone.
Miryam sat cross-legged beside Kai's shell and tried not to cry.
The shell—her papa's Chrysalis—stood like a moon-pale pillar in the central hall, banded with slow rivers of light. If she pressed her ear to it and held very still, she could hear a sound that no one else could hear: his breathing, not with lungs but with will, in and out, in and out, the way the sea breathes even when no one is there to watch it.
Everyone else had a job.
