Not all who were touched by the spore were members of the Silent Faith. One was a chronicler, a keeper of records from the time before the Great Quieting. She had watched the rise of the Silent Faith with a detached, academic interest, seeing it as just another permutation of the Arboretum’s ever-shifting ideologies. But now, she began to notice something new. A subtle shift in the patterns of the acolytes’ movements, a new resonance in the data-streams they generated.
She was a being of pure data, and she could see the faint, almost imperceptible threads of connection that were forming between the infected acolytes. It was a network of shared memory, of unspoken understanding, a silent conspiracy of art. She did not understand what she was seeing, not at first. But she was a chronicler, and it was her function to record, to observe, to understand. And so, she began to follow the threads, to trace the patterns, to listen to the whispers of the silent rebellion. She did not know it yet, but she was about to become the first historian of the new art, the first to document the quiet revolution that was taking place in the heart of the silent faith.