.
---
Chapter 31: The Threshold
They started calling it The Resonance Line.
The point where one person’s voice wasn’t just theirs anymore — when someone else carried it forward without instruction, without approval, without even realizing they’d been changed by it.
Rane didn’t ask for that power.
But he understood now that trying to disown it didn’t erase the effect.
So he stood at the edge of the new courtyard, watching someone paint a mural on the wall beside the kitchen — one of the newcomers, a boy named Aluin from Prague.
The mural wasn’t of Rane.
It was of a door.
Wide open.
Beyond it: people walking into light.
No soldiers. No commands. Just movement.
“Why a door?” Rane asked.
Aluin smiled, not stopping his brushstroke. “Because what you gave us wasn’t an answer. It wa
