Aria’s POV
Peace makes you notice things.
When you’re always running, you don’t hear the small sounds. The wind in the quarry grass.
The way Tav’s knife scrapes when he’s thinking. How Mara hums under her breath when she thinks no one’s listening.
Three days of “monitoring” and the pack was still learning how to be quiet without being afraid.
The mark on the ward-stone stayed. Three lines, crossing. But the stone started doing something new. At dusk, it would pulse once for each of us. Seven pulses. Slow. Like it was counting.
Ridah noticed first. “It’s learning our names,” she said.
Coren shook his head. “It doesn’t use names. It uses… shapes.”
“Same thing,” Lyra said. “To the ridge, we’re not words. We’re patterns.”
That night the bowl was different.
We’d stopped callin
