The Garden grew strangely quiet.
Not the ordinary quiet of evening settling over the meadow, the kind Sarya had grown used to across her days here. This was different — no birdsong drifting from the trees, no wind moving through the grass, even the streams seeming to slow their usual murmur into something closer to held breath. Not emptiness. Something more attentive than that, the particular stillness of a room falling silent because someone important has begun to speak.
Sarya noticed it as she sat near the great tree, the distant white blossoms along the meadow's far edge unmoving even as she watched them, the air itself carrying a quality that felt, unmistakably, like an audience settling in.
