The Threshold

Prologue

Elandri has always been a realm that breathes. Its rivers carry the memory of old rains, its trees hold counsel in languages older than kingdoms, and at its heart — threaded through the silver dark of the Whispering Woods — stand the Portal Stones: great obsidian archways that have hummed their quiet, steadying note for longer than anyone living can remember. That hum is changing. Three of the stones have gone silent in ways that do not feel like silence at all. Something is being done to them. Deliberately, carefully, by someone who has spent a long time learning how. The Whispering Woods have grown stranger in response — paths that knew themselves a season ago now shift without warning, and the voices between the trees no longer belong to anything that lives. The ruling court of Aeltharion senses that something is wrong, but politics and procedure are slow, and the portals are not waiting. Out in the Woods and at their margins, those who move by instinct rather than institution are already in motion — drawn inward by broken sounds, by unanswered reports, by the particular restlessness of people who cannot leave a wrong thing alone. They do not know yet what they are walking toward. They do not know yet who else is walking. The fifth portal — the keystone — still stands. For now.