Chapter 207

Autumn returned with a clarity that felt earned.

The valley no longer felt like an experiment.

It felt like a place.

Fields were harvested without ceremony. Disputes were shorter now—not because people agreed more often, but because they recognized when they were repeating themselves. Children who had once played near the old boundary stones no longer remembered why those stones had mattered.

That, more than anything, unsettled the elders.

Memory had once been a tool for ...