Location:Seven Peaks — Root-Network Hub, Boys' Room, Mountain's Eastern Slope
Date/Time:TC1854.12.01-05
The deep thing was closer.
Elian felt it during morning meditation — the daily session with Shen Wuyan in the root-network hub, the routine of descending through Sylvara's awareness layers to the place where surface roots gave way to deep roots and deep roots gave way to memory. He'd been making this descent for weeks now, each session reaching a little further, each time finding the same thing at the bottom: the slow pulse. The ancient presence. The mountain remembering what it used to be.
Today, the bottom was higher.
Not the surface — the surface roots hummed at the same frequency they always did, carrying the day's sensory data, the network's operational traffic. The individual trees gossiped and grumbled and trembled in their usual patterns. Nothing had changed at the level that Silas's formation arrays could measure.
