The silence did not stay empty for long. At first, it felt calm after everything that had happened, but slowly, it began to feel heavier. Aurelion noticed it before anything else changed inside the system. Everything around him looked stable, and nothing seemed to be breaking or shifting, but something outside of it had started to change.
The system itself remained steady. Its structure held, and the pathways stayed aligned just as they should. But that did not mean everything was fine. Aurelion could sense that something beyond the system had begun to move, even if it was not visible in a direct way.
He extended his awareness carefully, following the faint connections that linked this system to others beyond it. Those connections had always been there, but they had felt distant and inactive before. Now, they felt different, like something on the other side had started to respond.
