The day the world forgot how to sing
The world had lived for too long within a single song. A constant melody, without breaks or improvisations, woven by the judgment of the Tree, repeated in temples, in rituals, in the thoughts of those who were born and those who died. Everything was connected. Every word must vibrate at the frequency the Tree deemed pure. Every memory was authorized or sealed. Every truth must be shared by the network. But the white root was born outside the rhythm. It didn't alter the song. It ignored it. It didn't break it. It forgot. And that forgetting was what brought about the end of the era.
On Tsugai no Oka, the hill without history, the sky dawned colorless. It was as if the sun, looking toward that spot, had decided to wait. The light didn't fall as it did in other places in the world. It seemed to rise from the earth. A pale, white light, without warmth, without shadow. A light that didn't want to show, but rather to contain. There, in the heart of that suspended space, Sora sat still. She hadn't slept in three days. She hadn't spoken a word since the root reached its third node. But she was alive. More alive than anything that had ever walked the earth.
Akihiko watched from a distance. He had stopped wondering when this would end. He no longer thought of judgment, lineage, clans, or prophecies. His thoughts had been absorbed by the constant pulse that rose from the ground. It wasn't a sonic vibration. It was something his heart felt before his ear: a note without frequency, a song without intention. It was the white root saying "I am here" without needing to articulate it.
The network begins to unravel
Deep within the continent, where the roots of judgment intertwined like a buried nervous system, the network began to fail. At first, these were minor errors: visions arriving incomplete, names being erased mid-prayer, marks of judgment disappearing from the skin of the chosen. But then, the failure became spiritual. Some priests would sit for hours before the main roots waiting for the sacred impulse, and it never came. Others began to hear a different echo, one coming not from the network, but from the earth itself.
At the Monastery of Pure Song, a priestess named Renna began speaking in her sleep. She murmured verses in a language that didn't exist in any archive. She said things like "there is no center in the network" or "the trial was a stage of silence." At first, they believed it was a corruption. They isolated her. They forbade her from singing. But her voice continued to resonate even when she fell silent. The walls of the monastery began to slowly crack, as if the stone itself could no longer support a structure based on an echo that no longer existed.
III. The Tree Folds Back
The Tree didn't die. But it shrank. Its main nodes stopped emitting vibrations. Some smaller roots closed completely, like leaves closing in the cold. In the most remote areas, where the network was weak, the villages began to experience an unfamiliar sensation: silence. But not a silence of absence, but one filled with presence. As if the world were waiting for something other than an order.
At its core, the Tree thought. Not with language. Not with logic. It thought like a mountain feeling erosion. Slowly. With an ancestral sadness. It remembered the first trial. It remembered when it had first differentiated what should flourish from what should wither. And now, for the first time, it didn't know what to do with that which grows without its permission.
The march to the hill
The Twelve Families could not allow a root to grow outside the system. In a gesture not seen since the Wars of a Thousand Seals, the Patriarchs activated the Closing Protocol. Spirit troops marched toward Tsugai no Oka. They did not carry swords. They carried singers of judgment, enforcers of silence, harbingers of the end. Their task was simple: to silence the white root before it learned to speak in more voices.
Sora waited for them without moving. Akihiko stood beside her. Not because he believed he could defend her, but because he knew his place was there. The emissaries of judgment formed a circle around the hill. They began to chant the Song of Return, a sequence of notes that closed the sacred knots and erased unauthorized marks.
But the white root didn't close. Nor did it defend itself. It simply began to glow. A soft, heatless light that spread until it touched the hearts of those singing. One by one, the performers began to lower their voices. Some forgot the next lines. Others began to cry. And one of them removed the mark of judgment from his chest and let it fall to the ground, like someone casting off armor that no longer holds any meaning.
The new trial
There was no battle. There was no decree. Just a gesture. Sora placed his hands on the ground and sang a note that did not come from the net. It was an ancient note, before judgment, before language. And the world stopped. The birds stopped flying. The wind stopped through the trees. The sap stopped running in the connected roots.
And then, at its core, the Tree understood.
He understood that his function was over.
Not because he was replaced.
But because now there was something that did not need judgment to know that it should exist.
True silence
The singers withdrew. The Families sent no further orders. Some Patriarchs died that night. Others fell silent. And some, the wisest, began walking toward the hill, not as enemies, but as apprentices.
The white root didn't spread. It didn't conquer. It just remained. It lived. And in its living, it taught us to remember without pain, to flourish without permission, to speak without echo.
Sora remained seated. Her body was almost translucent. Akihiko looked at her one last time before leaving. He knew his path led elsewhere. That the song that had begun on that hill would continue to be sung in other voices, in other forms. He didn't need to protect her. He just needed to let the world hear it.
VII. Closing
And so, without war, without decree, without applause, the era of judgment ended.
The white root did not write history. It did not found a temple.
He just reminded the world that blooming without permission is also a form of truth.
And in that memory, a new era began.
The age of singing without a center.
The Age of Edenfall.
End Saga VII – The Threshold of Eden