The first sign that the Script was planning something arrived through a channel I hadn't expected.
Aiden Crest stopped sleeping properly.
Not insomnia in the conventional sense — Aiden's body still required rest, and his Starfire metabolism still processed exhaustion through the standard mechanisms. The problem was different. He slept. He dreamed. And the dreams were — wrong.
He told me on a Tuesday morning, ten days after the cure protocol began, in the predawn quiet of the training terraces where he and Draven met every morning at 5 AM for the structural combat work that Kaelthar military doctrine had been hammering into the protagonist's instinctive style.
I'd come early. Not to train — to think. The Garden of Whispers was occupied at predawn by faculty members maintaining the leyline gardens, and the training terraces were empty enough to allow the particular quality of solitude that strategic planning required.
