The hum of the bedrock is a new sensation.
It doesn't vibrate in my skull like the pack-wide lattice did. It doesn't carry the chaotic, bright anxiety of the human children or the deep, protective hum of the wolf elders. It is a slow, tectonic rhythm, a deep bass note that I feel in the soles of my boots and the marrow of my bones. It is the earth itself, breathing in time with the silver and golden veins Asher wove into the bedrock beneath the Academy.
I stand in the center of the eastern grove, my left arm resting heavily in the carbon-fiber sling. The morning air is crisp, smelling of pine needles and the sharp, metallic tang of ozone. The iridescent emerald moss on the ancestral stones pulses with a faint, steady light, completely immune to the digital-biological Resonance Scrambler
