Timeline: TC1853.02.01 (Night)
Location: Northern Forest → Broken Song Shrine Perimeter
The forest had learned to weep.
Frost coated every surface despite it being the wrong season for it—spiritual contamination manifesting as unseasonable cold that made breath visible and ground crunch underfoot. Trees stood skeletal against the night sky, branches reaching upward like desperate hands seeking help that wouldn't come.
And they hummed.
Not wind through leaves. Resonance. The trunks themselves were vibrating with a frequency that suggested consciousness rather than a simple atmospheric phenomenon. Low tones that made teeth ache, and bones feel wrong, as if reality's fundamental pitch had shifted into something human bodies weren't designed to process.
