Lysander's mission to the Echoing Font was a race against the entropy still festering there. He took a small team, including the grizzled janitor, whose name was Elara. They navigated the dark, now-quiet tunnels by the light of hand-held glow-orbs charged by the ambient magic in the air—a first, practical use of the new paradigm.
At the Font, the silver corruption churned angrily, reacting to the new Chord from above. It had grown, crystallizing into jagged, malignant structures around the pool.
"The Chord is containing it globally, but locally, it's festering," Elara observed, her voice calm. "Like a wound sealed over infection."
Lysander unpacked a device—a modified resonator, this one shaped like a funnel. "We tap a thread from a minor capillary. We don't force it. We invite it. We show the clean water the path to its sick cousin."
It was a delicate operation. Using the old Aquifer principles of invitation and resonance, they tuned the funnel to the pure Chord. Slowly, a trickle of opalescent, unified Aqua Vitae—vibrant with blue water, gold energy, and silver magic—began to flow down the funnel and into the corrupted pool.
The reaction was not an explosion, but a struggle. The silver corruption recoiled, then lashed out, trying to invert the pure thread. But the thread held, sustained by the immense Chord from the Spire. Where they met, a furious, silent battle took place in the water: unmaking versus renewal.
Slowly, agonizingly, the pure thread began to spin. It adopted the Stillpoint pattern. A tiny, healthy vortex formed within the sickened pool. It didn't destroy the corruption; it began to weave through it, disentangling its chaotic structure, offering a pattern to follow.
The first blackened crystal dissolved, not into nothing, but into a clear, singing drop that joined the vortex.
"It's working," Elara breathed. "The song is healing the scream."