The nearest Prism-Arbor grove was dying, and Xylo-7 had one afternoon to learn why before the trees burned out. He crouched under the tallest tree, all four hands pressed to its metallic bark. The crystalline leaves above him should have chimed in the wind. Instead they buzzed, a hard whine that made his teeth ache. Amber sap ran too fast through the trunk, hot against his palms. The ancient spires on the horizon were waking, and their rising energy was cooking the grove from the roots up. If the flora died, so did the balance he had spent his life guarding. Worse, he still did not know what the spires truly were. He raised his staff. The Resonance Quartz on its tip flickered, struggling to read the strain. Xylo-7 sent two hands along the roots and kept two on the staff. He tried to trace the energy pattern climbing the tree. But the signal folded on itself, too tangled for one reader to hold. Numbers slipped past him. The whine climbed higher. A soft chord answered from behind. Lumis-01 crossed the obsidian soil, its ceramic skin pale against the dark ground. Xylo-7's partner rarely used words. Gold veins pulsed along its joints. The Cinder-Hounds it led had stayed at the tree line, whining, their chests glowing with heat. That heat meant grief. The trees were already mourning themselves. "You can conduct it," Xylo-7 said. "I can't read it alone. Hold the current steady and I'll trace the strain." Lumis-01 stopped an inch above the ground. "The frequency is climbing. Fourteen minutes to burnout." "Then hold it now." Lumis-01 laid one hand on the trunk. Its living skin drew the surging energy in and smoothed it flat. The whine dropped to a low hum. Xylo-7 felt the current slow beneath his fingers. He let part of it pass through his own body, the way he had trained himself to do. Two hands read. Two hands steadied. For the first time the pattern held still enough to see. He read it. The strain was not random. It pulsed in a steady beat, three fast, one slow, over and over. The spires were not just leaking power. They were sending a signal, and the grove was catching it like an antenna. The trees were screaming because something was calling them. "It's a message," Xylo-7 said. His voice shook. "The spires are transmitting." Lumis-01 was quiet. Then it spoke. "The beat matches the deep faults. Under the Hollow Basin." Xylo-7 lifted his hands from the bark. The grove would live now. The strain was steady, the burnout stopped. But his relief died fast. The spires were calling something in the ground where nothing lived. And the thing in the Hollow Basin had started to answer back.