The lesson of Alton's healing settled over Aethelburg like a second snowfall: deep, quiet, and transformative. The anxiety that had begun to coil around their reliance on the Shard loosened its grip. People still paused to listen to the silence, but now it was with the ear of a collaborator, not a supplicant. They were learning the grammar of a language where their own intuition, skills, and knowledge formed the nouns and verbs, and the Shard's influence was the subtle, guiding syntax.
This new balance was tested not by a crisis of survival, but by a crisis of creation.
