The communion arrived without warning.
This was the first anomaly. Every significant divine contact in Zephyr's nine hundred and fifty years had been preceded by a legible signal — a rise in ambient FP interference, a pressure change in the distributed awareness network, the behavioral tell of a mortal spy shifting position in the days before an embassy arrived. The Arbiter's contacts were always structured and gradual. Vaelthorn's had been aggressive.
Nethys arrived the way that silence arrives.
One moment Zephyr was running the Vigil countdown calculations — eight months, twelve days, eleven hours — with the Eternal Forge humming its constant, geothermal rhythm around him. The next, the ambient prayer-noise of the twenty-seven million believers he carried in his distributed awareness dropped by a single, precise frequency.
