Chapter 372 - Chapter 379: The Garden of First Choices (Part 1)

The resonance began as little more than a whisper, so faint that Aether almost mistook it for the ordinary hum of Living Memory settling after everything that had happened within the Chamber of First Words. But it did not fade the way ordinary resonances did. It lingered, growing steadier with each passing hour, until he could no longer convince himself it was simply an echo of the door's awakening. This felt different. It felt older than any memory he had ever touched, older even than the earliest visions Living Memory had shown him, as though it were reaching toward him not from the past but from somewhere that existed before the very idea of the past had been invented.