The signal arrived in Ashenveil four hours and seventeen minutes after Nara sent it.
She felt the reception through the Framework Inscription's bidirectional channel — the communication protocol guidance reaching the Ashenveil nodes and being received by someone who knew exactly what to do with it. The carrier. The trained between-walker who had been teaching others in isolation.
The response was immediate.
Nara had been expecting the between-walker frequency — the transmission register she and Lira and Kael used for direct communication, the bone-level meaning transfer that bypassed language. What arrived was different. More structured. The carrier was using the communication protocol as a framework for something closer to actual language — not the System's architecture language, not the pre-System framework notation, something in between.
Someone who had developed their own transmission method over years of teaching.
"They're linguistically sophisticated," Nara said.
