Location:Seven Peaks — Various
Date/Time:TC1856.01.11
The day before was quiet in the way that days are quiet when everyone knows something is coming and nobody wants to be the first to name it.
***
Raven found Elian in the garden at dawn.
He was sitting at the guardian's base with his hands on the bark, and his eyes closed — the morning meditation that had become his routine since the threshold crossing, the Pillar Soul listening to the continental root network the way other children listened to the radio. Aren was beside him on the retaining wall, frost tracing lazy patterns across the stone, not mapping anything specific — just the idle geometry of a boy whose ice moved when he was calm.
Bryn was asleep against the guardian's trunk, wrapped in the blanket that Freya brought every night. The guardian had grown a root canopy over her sleeping spot — a shelter of living wood, curved and close, shaped for one specific child.
Raven sat beside Elian. Waited for him to surface.
