Kaelen did not return until dawn. When he walked back into the heart of Aethelburg, he was changed. It was not a dramatic transformation, not a zealot's wild-eyed conversion. It was something quieter, more fundamental. The set of his shoulders, once braced for debate, now seemed simply… part of the landscape. His eyes, once sharp with analysis, now held a deep, reflective quality, as if they were still seeing the internal echoes of the oak tree's song.
He went straight to the stream, knelt on the bank, and cupped the cold, clear water in his hands. He drank, not as a man satisfying a thirst, but as a man taking communion. He was acknowledging his place in the system he now understood not as a theory, but as a felt reality. The water from the hills, filtered through stone and root, was part of the same whole as the blood in his veins.
