The shard had been transported in silence.
No celebration. No headlines. Just a sealed titanium crate escorted by Lythrons and elite Tamers through Earth's atmosphere, tucked deep beneath Haven in a vault older than the war itself, a relic from the Cold Era, designed to survive a nuclear winter. Fitting, Athan thought, that it now held the key to humanity's strangest spring.
He stood in the observation chamber above Vault 7, arms crossed as the shard floated weightless in the containment field below. Holographic readouts blinked along the glass, tracking neural pulses, radiation shifts, and psychic frequencies in a dozen spectrums.
Cadence's voice echoed from the playback: "She's dreaming now."
Athan exhaled slowly. "What happens when she wakes?"
Behind him, Dr. Elan Worth, lead xeno neurologist, tapped through a floating interface. Her gray eyes flicked over data without blinking. "So far, she hasn't tried to breach the field. But the pulses are adapting. They're syncing."
"To us?"
"No," Vorth said. "To the tamed Lythrons. All of them. Simultaneously."
Athan turned. "You're telling me the shard is communicating with everyone on Earth?"
"Not communicating. Resonating. Like a heartbeat, but psychic. Low frequency. Deep. If I didn't know better, I'd say it's trying to unify them again."
Athan went silent.
Rho stirred outside the chamber, standing guard beside the vault like a biomechanical sentinel. The tamed Lythron hadn't moved in hours, eyes locked on the shimmering core of the shard through reinforced glass. He hadn't responded to sync requests, vocal commands, or even Cadence's harmonic signals.
Athan activated his neural band.
"Rho. Are you still with me?"
A pause.
Then, softly: "I feel her."
Athan's breath caught. "What does that mean?"
"Not as we once felt her. Not the Queen. Something smaller. Softer. But growing. She is not giving commands. She is waiting."
Athan clenched his jaw. "Waiting for what?"
Zaryans' gaze remained on the shard. "For us to answer."
By nightfall, the city above the vault felt different.
Across Haven grew restless, not violent, not aggressive, just alert. Their pulses glowed brighter. They gathered at high points, building spires, observation decks, cliff ridges, tilting their heads toward the sky as if listening.
It wasn't scary.
It was longing.
Athan met with the Tamer Council in the Reclamation Hall. Cadence sat near the front, still pale from her time on the Queen's ship. Around her were six other senior Tamers and their bonded Lythrons, all seated or crouched in silent attendance.
"We need to decide what happens next," Athan began. "The shard isn't passive. It's broadcasting something that's changing our Lythrons. Their thoughts. Their dreams."
"They're evolving," Cadence said. "Not just mimicking us. Integrating. Thinking beyond the hive. It's Solis' code spreading."
"But where does it lead?" Tamer Harlan asked.
His Lythron, broad and obsidian, emitted a low growl. "We've stabilized Earth, but only barely. If this new consciousness fractures again, we could lose everything."
"No," Cadence said firmly. "We didn't tame them with chains. We did it with trust. This isn't the beginning of another war—it's the start of something new."
Athan nodded slowly. "Then we guide it. Shape it. Carefully."
He pulled up a holographic map of Earth. "We'll establish three resonance sites, psychic beacons, tuned to the shard's frequency. Each one will link with tamed Lythrons in the region and create a stable sync loop. A web."
"A hive of our own?" someone asked.
Athan looked out at them all.
"No. Not a hive."
"A chorus."
The first resonance site went active a week later in what used to be Chile, an observatory retrofitted with alien tech, ringed by standing Lythrons and humans in sync. As the signal pulsed from the shard deep underground, something miraculous happened:
The Lythrons sang.
Not with voices, but with harmonics, vibrations that shimmered through the atmosphere like sunlight through water. It echoed across miles of ruined earth, and where it passed, things grew. Dead soil breathed again. Crops sprouted in hours. Trees twisted upward, old roots remembering.
The Lythrons were changing.
So was the world.
But not all change comes without consequence.
Athan stood again in Vault 7, watching the shard.
It no longer hovered idly. It rotated now, slow and deliberate. The pulses it gave off had become rhythmic-coded, like a language learning to speak.
He turned to Zaryans, a research volunteer member of the first species in his Team. Aliens had no specific name like humans, they each bore the name of their species.
"Is she still dreaming?" He
Zaryans didn't answer right away.
Then: "She is listening now. And choosing."
Athan swallowed. "Choosing what?"
He looked at him for the first time in hours, eyes glowing a soft blue.
"To become something else."
That night, the shard pulsed once, hard enough to shake the walls of Vault 7 and short out half the monitors.
And deep in the minds of every Tamer and every Lythron, a vision unfolded:
A great tree, made of light and bone and memory, rising from the Earth with something at its root.