The mourning bells had ceased, but the silence they left behind was not peaceful.
Cassian sat at the massive oak desk that had belonged to his father, and his father before him. Spread before him were the first batches of raw sensor logs delivered by the Resonance Authority—thousands of lines of frequency data, oscillations, and timestamps that mapped the literal heartbeat of the castle.
Elias stood at his shoulder, his eyes tracking the same data with practiced ease. His green hair—a little longer than it was at school—was pulled back, exposing the line of his jaw. He was the one who saw it first.
"Stop," Elias whispered, his finger tapping a specific section of the parchment. "There."
Cassian paused. He looked at the sequence. It was a standard extraction of the palace's western perimeter during the succession window. To a casual observer, it looked perfect—a steady, rhythmic hum.
