Morning reached Sunspire like someone laying a cool palm on a fevered face. No thunder. No torn sky. Just a pale wash of light slipping between the Titan Trees and settling over the scattered ruins of last night's chaos. The forest looked almost innocent again, though nothing in Sunspire ever stayed that simple for long.
Aeron was the first to wake. He didn't rise with heroism or clarity. He just sat there on the fallen log where he'd apparently slept upright, rubbing the stiffness out of his eyes. The Veil still hummed under his skin, faint and restless, like it couldn't decide if it wanted to guide him or warn him. The others slept nearby, each one exhausted in a way that didn't show on the face but lived in the bones.
He looked around and felt it hit him again — the strange pressure in the air that only shows up after the world has shifted without telling anyone. Birds were singing, but they were off-beat. The Whisper Vines around them hadn't whispered once since dawn. Even the ground felt like it was waiting for someone to make the next move.
Aeron stood and let the morning settle. No big declarations. No dramatic swell. Just him breathing in the forest as if trying to sense whether reality was aligned or already fraying again.
A branch snapped softly behind him.
Lira stirred awake, blinking like she needed a full minute to remember which version of the world she'd fallen asleep in.
"Morning already?" she muttered, stretching in a way that suggested every limb was filing a complaint.
"Seems like it," Aeron said. "Feels strange."
"Strange how?"
"Like Sunspire's holding something back."
She didn't laugh. She didn't dismiss it. She just nodded, because after everything they'd seen, the idea that a continent with four thousand unknown species and a weather system that sometimes argued with itself might be hiding something was almost comforting.
Behind them, the others began to wake one by one. Soft, tired movements. No one talking yet. Just that quiet, heavy sense that yesterday hadn't finished its business and today wasn't in any hurry to explain itself.
The morning stayed still.
Too still.
And somewhere deep under the roots, under the soil, under the Veil's shimmer, something shifted — not violently, not loudly, just enough to be felt in the bones of anyone paying attention.
Aeron felt it.
And for the first time that morning, he knew the quiet wasn't peace.
It was the inhale before something important.
Something irreversible.