The Garden of Voices did not solve everything. Disagreements still arose, frustrations still flared. Bren would sometimes look at a meandering path and sigh with a engineer's pain at the wasted seconds. An elder Deep Note might cluck their tongue at the "sterile" geometry of a new herb bed. But now, these moments were different. They were no longer fundamental clashes of worldview. They were conversations. They had a shared language, a shared space—both literal and metaphorical—in which to have them. The garden was their tuning fork, a physical place to return to when their collective song began to waver.
The harmony they achieved was not the static, perfect chord Alaric had sought. It was something far more resilient: a dynamic equilibrium. It was the sound of a community that had learned to listen to its own dissonance and understand it not as a flaw, but as a source of richness and strength.
This new strength was tested not by outsiders, but from within the mountain itself.
