Chapter 39: The Homeward
The silence that followed the fading of the Aetherial Loom was not empty; it was full. It was the fullness of a breath held too long, finally released. As the Aethel's Promise turned its nose from the Empyrean Reach, the ship itself seemed to sigh, its elemental core thrumming with a smooth, effortless resonance it had never achieved before. They sailed not through dead air, but on a gentle, universal current the exhale of a cosmos that had just remembered how to hold itself together.
