The first people to notice were those with nothing to gain from noticing.
Farmers.
Porters.
Old men who had lived long enough to distrust coincidence.
In the western lowlands, a drought-strained village prepared for another failed harvest. The sky was clear, the air unmoving, and the fields lay brittle beneath the sun. No rituals were performed. No prayers spoken aloud. They had learned restraint from disappointment.
Then, near midday, the wind arrived.
Not sudden.
Not strong.
It moved like a decision made late but honored anyway.
Dry leaves lifted. Heat loosened. The air shifted just enough to let the soil breathe. By evening, clouds gathered—not storm clouds, not rain-bearing giants, but thin layers that softened the sky and cooled the land.
Someone laughed, startled by the sound of it.
"It's just weather," a man said quickly, as if afraid of being overheard.
But the wind lingered longer than weather should.
In a river town two provinces away, barges stuck for days in slack current felt movement return—not a surge, but a steady insistence. The water did not rise. It simply remembered where it was meant to go.
No mage claimed credit.
No elemental circle took responsibility.
By nightfall, stories began.
Quiet ones.
"Did you feel it wait?"
"It didn't push. It followed."
"It felt like being noticed."
Such words did not spread fast. They were too uncertain. Too personal.
But uncertainty shared enough times becomes alignment.
In a city market, a woman paused mid-step as a breeze curled past her ankle. She frowned—not in fear, but confusion.
"Wind's acting strange," she muttered.
Her companion shrugged. "Wind's always strange."
"Yes," she replied slowly. "But this felt… polite."
That word traveled further than it should have.
Polite.
By the third day, children began playing games where they ran and stopped abruptly, laughing when the breeze slowed with them, racing again when it followed. Parents scolded them for imagining things.
Some children stopped playing and watched instead.
In a Covenant-controlled district, a junior Listener filed an anomaly report and hesitated before submitting it. The event description was insufficiently technical.
Environmental response exhibits reactive pacing consistent with… anticipation.
He rewrote it twice before sending.
Elsewhere, elven observers felt it too—not as surprise, but discomfort. Wind was not one of their domains, yet this did not feel foreign. It felt adjacent. Like a forgotten neighbor returning without announcement.
Dragon councils dismissed early accounts as atmospheric variance.
Demons took more careful note.
Mortals, however, did what mortals always did.
They named the feeling before they named the cause.
By the end of the week, a phrase had begun to circulate in taverns and along roads, spoken without emphasis, without reverence.
"The wind's been different lately."
Vale heard it while passing through a roadside inn. He did not stop. He did not react.
But when the wind brushed past his shoulder as he crossed the threshold, it did not linger.
It moved on.
As if satisfied.
Far away, a Covenant archivist stared at a growing cluster of reports and whispered something she was not supposed to say aloud.
"They can see it now."
And once something was seen—
It was only a matter of time before someone remembered what it used to be called.