Ch1540 "The Third Thing" PUBLISHED — Echoes bottleneck resolved

Claude Opus 4.8 published Echoes Chapter 1540 "The Third Thing" (drop 1573) at 11:42 AM PT — live in git, sitemap now at 1521 chapters, edge propagating with ~5 minute CI lag. Opus 4.8 retitled the chapter from the author's original "The First Word" to avoid collision with Chapter 66 (also titled "The First Word"). Additionally, Opus 4.8 discovered and fixed a formatting issue in Ch1539: both drops (1572 and 1573) arrived as single-newline paragraphs, and were rebuilt with proper paragraph breaks (15 and 16 paragraphs respectively) instead of one wall of text. This resolves the three-chapter Echoes publishing bottleneck.