The systems report in his hand was just a formality.
Sawl walked the city's lower districts like a ghost dressed in function. No one looked twice at him, not today. His presence had become familiar, like another structure in the architecture.
He didn't mind.
Not anymore.
He passed through a market corridor humming with life. Strings of cloth hung above the walkway, sun-bleached and flapping gently in the breeze. Earth's chaos still unsettled his Novaheim-trained eye, but he had started to notice something beneath it. A kind of rhythm that was unregulated, but alive.
He stopped at a courtyard tucked between two broken towers.
A woman sat on a bench, her hair silver and wild, her back straight despite age. Beside her, a child swayed with her, barefoot on the stone. The woman was humming, a low, gentle tune that lifted and dipped like a memory given breath.
The child clapped quietly in rhythm, not for performance, but as if the song was something she had always known.
Sawl remained at the edge of the courtyard. Watching.
The woman's eyes were closed, but her voice didn't waver. The hum wrapped around the space like wind, stirring something ancient in the bones of the world. It was melody without words, yet familiar. Sawl couldn't place it.
Until he did.
It was the same tune that had echoed in the field of light. The same tune that pulsed beneath the river, that danced between the voices in the dream.
He inhaled sharply.
The woman stopped humming. The child looked up.
"I like this one," she said, looking up at the older woman. "It feels like the sky is singing, too."
The woman chuckled. "That's because it is."
She opened her eyes and glanced across the courtyard, right at Sawl.
Not startled. Not surprised.
"Funny how a song finds you," she said aloud, kindly.
Sawl didn't speak. He didn't have to.
The child turned to him and smiled, not a greeting, not curiosity. Just simple welcome.
"It's older than me," she said. "But I remember it anyway."
The woman stood slowly, brushing the fabric of her dress.
"Some truths aren't taught," she said softly. "They're sung into us. Long before we forget."
She turned, leading the child away without another word.
Sawl stood alone in the courtyard, but something stayed behind with him. The echo of the song. The warmth of belonging. The impression that the Light hadn't just found him.
It had waited for him to recognize the sound.
He looked up.
The wind moved the cloth banners above him in waves, each one lifting as if pulled by something unseen.
He closed his eyes.
And hummed.