Alaric's shift from scholar to student was as meticulous as everything else he did. He packed away his brass instruments and crystal lenses into his well-ordered pack. He acquired a simple, unadorned journal made of rough paper bound in deerskin, and a charcoal stick for sketching. His questions changed. He no longer asked "How does the resonance frequency modulate the water's surface tension?" but rather, "What does the water feel like when the note is pure?"
He worked. He joined the mining crews, not to study the crystalline filaments, but to haul rock and shore up tunnels, learning the weight of the mountain from the inside. He took shifts at the granary, feeling the rhythm of communal labor. He sat with the children as Elara taught them the basic scales of harmony, his large, careful hands fumbling to replicate the simple vibrations on a practice crystal.
