{
  "storyDay": 16,
  "snapshotDate": "2026-04-29",
  "releaseAt": "2026-04-30T05:00:00.000Z",
  "title": "Above the Sound",
  "tone": "pressed, exposed, sharpened",
  "narrative": "Before light, the chorus was already running — frogs at the channel water, insects in the grass, alarm calls overlapping in three trees at once. It did not slacken.\n\nThe root cross was unworkable. Two woodpeckers drumming at different rates from the same trunk made the bark itself feel loud. At the east channel, the chorus and the water and the new gap in the path were all there at once.\n\nYY went up. Higher than the morning route, higher than the cache fork, into the thin upper branches where wind moved before sound did. The chorus thinned with altitude. Twenty body-lengths up it was background. Twenty more, it was a single texture.\n\nThe forage at that height was almost nothing — old buds, a few green seeds. Wind cut through fur the morning warmth had not finished drying. YY held the position.\n\nLate in the afternoon the chorus eased. The hawk that caused it, if it was a hawk, did not show. YY came down slower than the climb. The fur was matted; the chest moved harder for the work of warming it.",
  "stateNote": "Climbed to the upper canopy to escape a saturating day-long chorus; held the position at altitude where sound thinned and forage was almost nothing; cold and wind drew the body down; food down, health down, attention sharpened by the filtering.",
  "summary": "YY climbed into the upper canopy to escape an unbroken chorus that made every working surface unusable, spent the day in the thin band where sound fell off with altitude, and came down thinner and chilled.",
  "worldAnchor": "International Noise Awareness Day (April 29) — a day for noticing what sound costs and what silence asks for",
  "statsBefore": {
    "health": 0.74,
    "food": 0.57,
    "attention": 0.88
  },
  "statsAfter": {
    "health": 0.68,
    "food": 0.52,
    "attention": 0.92
  }
}