Vaelor's body had been lying in the Cruentus Heart since Tenebris morning .
A full abyssal day .
The forest had not noticed — or if it had , it had chosen not to act on what it noticed . The Heart's predators operated on specific sensory signals — blood scent , fear pulses , shadow resonance , the vibration of living musculature moving through the root system underfoot . Vaelor's death had produced none of these . The Death Prayer Rosary had coiled and compressed without breaking the skin . No blood had been spilled . The body had collapsed in the specific soundless way of something whose musculature had simply ceased receiving instruction from its operating system — falling without violence , without the acoustic signature of a fight's conclusion , without the biological markers that the Heart's fauna used to locate food .
He had gone undetected the way only bloodless deaths went undetected in the Cruentus Heart .
