The refusal of the crown became its own kind of legend. The story of the Aethelburg Keeper who turned down an alliance of principle spread through the trade routes and whispering networks, becoming as much a part of their mythos as the standing against the auditors or the breaking of the Grey. It baffled some. It infuriated others who had hoped to co-opt their strength. But for many, it was the final, definitive proof that Aethelburg was something entirely new under the sun.
The city itself settled into its new reality. The pilgrims kept coming, but now they arrived with a different expectation. They did not come to be led. They came to observe. They walked the streets not as acolytes, but as students of a silent curriculum. They worked alongside the citizens in the fields and workshops, learning not a doctrine, but a discipline—the discipline of attention, of care, of finding the "one" in the task before them.
