The shaking didn’t travel through the air where a shrine guard or a passing herbalist might hear it. It came up through the deep flaky rock bedrock of the valley floor, rang softly through the dry-stacked fieldstone walls of the hospice. Then it struck a corresponding chord directly beneath Seyun’s chest bone. Place III—the silver curve sworn to Nara Soth in the Hollow Summit vault—hummed once like a deep cello string touched in an adjoining room.
On the three cedar beds inside the linen enclosure, the effect was immediate. Maren’s knotted shoulders dropped an inch into the mattress. The tight, whistling catch at the top of Tov’s fourth breath in smoothed out. And young Vey let out a long, warm sigh as the constriction around her heart-sac relaxed.
For ten measured breaths, the faint stone pulse held steady through the floor, giving the three temporarily disconnected patients just enough external return rhythm to turn their stalled Coal breath back toward their hearts. Then, as cleanly as it had arrived, the bedrock shaking ceased.
Mina kept her fingers on Tov’s wrist for thirty seconds after the floor went still, verifying that his outward pulse had settled back into a comfortable four-hour baseline before she looked up at her brother.
