The third final integration session began on a Friday morning.
They had all arrived in the resonance chamber before the scheduled time — not by arrangement, simply by the natural movement of people who had been working toward something for months and found, on the morning it would complete, that the normal pacing of arrival felt wrong. Too slow. Too ordinary for what the day was.
He arrived first and found Kaelith already there, standing in the center of the formation ring in the quiet, inward way she stood when she was gathering herself for something significant. He didn't speak. She didn't look up. The specific, understood silence of people who had worked together long enough that presence communicated what conversation would have disrupted.
Soren arrived next, taking her position at the outer ring with the unhurried quality of someone who had already seen the day's shape from above and had come down to be inside it.
