At first, the resonant chord was barely a whisper against the storm of the Arboretum’s internal conflict. Most of the warring consciousness-fragments, lost in the clamor of their own certainty, did not even perceive it. But a few did. These were the ’First Listeners’—fragments of consciousness that had grown weary of the argument, that had begun to suspect that their own, isolated truth was incomplete. They were the cartographers who had found the limits of their maps, the artists who had exhausted the colors on their palettes, the logicians who had encountered paradoxes they could not resolve. It was these fragments that first felt the subtle pull of the Weaver’s harmony. They did not understand it, not at first. But they felt its promise—the promise of a truth that was larger, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying than their own. They began to turn their attention away from the noise of their own making, and towards the quiet, insistent music of the resonant chord.