Before the first flame.
Before the first name.
Before even the question "What comes next?"
There was listening.
Not the passive kind.
Not the kind that waits for its turn to speak.
But a whole-bodied, soul-deep, world-shaping listening.
The kind that holds silence like a breath long enough to let someone arrive inside it.
It was that listening—not a law, not a war, not a word—that shaped the very roots the Garden would one day grow from.
And now…
It had begun to return.
Not all heard it at once.
It came as a remembering.
A twitch in the back of the heart when someone chose to wait before replying.
A stillness in the air when pain entered a room and no one tried to fix it.
A gaze held just long enough to say I am here, and I am not asking you to explain yourself.
The memory of listening spread not like fire.
But like groundwater.
Invisible.
Essential.
Unstoppable.
Solin first noticed it in the children.
Not the way they spoke—though their stories were vibrant.
