They felt it before they saw him.
Not as a shockwave. Not as power unleashed.
As adjustment.
Across Tark Island, the air tightened, then settled, like a muscle finally remembering its proper position. Watchfires bent inward, flames narrowing instead of flaring. Old ward-stones embedded in the walls gave a low harmonic hum, not alarmed, but attentive. Even the lagoon beyond the stronghold smoothed unnaturally, its surface flattening as though reality itself had decided to listen.
Imade stopped mid-stride.
She had learned, over years of command, the difference between danger and significance. This was not the former.
This was the latter.
Around her, the Resistance chamber quieted in uneven stages. Conversations faltered. Arguments lost momentum. Hands resting on weapons did not tighten—but neither did they relax. The great strategy table lay half-marked with chalked projections and probability arcs, abandoned mid-debate.
"He's back," someone whispered.
Seyi entered the chamber without ceremony.
There was no flare of light. No shadow surged to meet him. He walked as he always had—measured, deliberate—but the space around him felt newly honest. Corners did not exaggerate darkness. Lamps did not overreach with brightness. Balance had returned.
And balance unsettled them.
Imade studied him carefully. She did not look for glow, corruption, or absence. She looked for fracture.
She found none.
What she saw instead made her wary: Seyi looked like a man who had accepted uncertainty and survived it.
A murmur rippled through the chamber, then sharpened.
"What did it do to you?" Kola demanded, stepping forward. His hand hovered near his blade, not yet drawing, but ready. "No one enters the abyss and returns unchanged."
Seyi met his gaze evenly. "It didn't take," he said. "It listened."
That answer disturbed them more than any display of power could have.
Imade stepped forward before the silence could curdle into fear. "And what did you learn?" she asked. Her voice was calm, firm—leadership stripped of theatrics.
Seyi exhaled slowly. "That we've been fighting an echo. Not the source. The prophecy wasn't written to guide us. It was written to narrow us."
The reaction was immediate.
Scholars bristled. Fighters exchanged glances that mixed relief with dread.
"That's heresy," one elder snapped.
"Editing," Seyi corrected. "Not lies. Omissions. Enough to turn choice into obedience."
Arguments ignited. Old alliances shifted. Some clung harder to belief; others recoiled from it.
Imade allowed it—for three heartbeats.
Then she raised her hand.
The room obeyed.
"This does not absolve us of responsibility," she said. "It clarifies it."
She turned to the strategy table, her finger tracing lines not at the front but deeper, closer to the stronghold's heart. "Everything accelerating now—the pressure, the timing, the provocation—it isn't aimed at us."
Her finger stopped.
"It's aimed at the twins."
The room shifted.
They were not present, yet they were never absent. Their names were spoken less and less—not out of superstition, but out of fear that naming them would hasten what the world already seemed eager to impose.
"The prophecy exists because of what they could become," Seyi added. "Not who they are yet."
"And that," Imade said, "means restraint isn't mercy. It's defense."
A distant tremor rolled through the stone—not from below, but from far away. A runner burst into the chamber, breath ragged. "The outer sentries—the sky is aligning. Like it's waiting."
Seyi closed his eyes briefly. "The edited prophecy has safeguards. Triggers."
Kola swore under his breath. "So it begins."
"No," Imade said firmly. "This is still positioning."
She turned slowly, meeting every gaze in the room—fighters hungry for certainty, thinkers afraid of losing it. "We do not rush because the world demands panic. We hold. We observe. And we protect what actually matters."
Her eyes lingered toward the inner sanctums, where the twins were guarded far from sight.
Outside, thunder rolled across a clear sky.
The Resistance did not charge.
For the first time since the war began, they chose restraint—not as hesitation, but as strategy.