The light that pierced the chamber did not fade when the clouds shifted.
It remained—thin, deliberate—like a bookmark left in a page not yet finished.
West stood slowly, the Stillroot settling into a quieter rhythm beneath his skin. The chamber felt different now. Not merely altered—attentive. The ice no longer pressed inward with cold indifference. It held space.
North was the first to sense it.
"They're not dormant anymore," she murmured, brushing her fingers across one of the etched walls. The markings shimmered faintly at her touch, lines too intricate to be purely geometric, too ordered to be random fracture. "They're synchronized."
Sun squinted at the nearest wall. "It still looks like someone scratched frost poetry with a divine chisel."
"It is a language," East said quietly.
West turned. "You recognize it?"
"No," East replied. "But the structure is familiar. It resembles the early frameworks of the Cycle's drafting matrices."
