Part III – The Silence After
For a long time there was nothing. Not sleep, not waking—only the slow, unseen breath of the world.
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When sound returned, it was not the roar of fire or the clash of steel. It was the sigh of wind over grass. The mountain that had once bled light now lay quiet, its slopes buried beneath soil soft enough to grow heather. Rain polished its flanks smooth. The black stone of the old battlefield lay scattered in the valleys like pieces of a forgotten crown.
The first birds returned before the first people. They nested in the cracks of the cooled rock, their feathers bright against the gray. Each dawn they filled the valley with song, and the echoes—thin, bright, endless—became the only voice the mountain allowed.
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Years folded over years until even the shape of the land changed. Rivers wandered, carving wide, lazy arcs through the meadows. Forests crept back down the hillsides. When the first settlers came, they saw only fertile soil and gentle slopes and a high place that caught the morning sun. They named it Westernlight, because every sunrise broke over that mountain and painted its shadow gold.
They built their homes near the river's bend. Stone by stone, they raised walls and halls, markets and gardens. Children ran where once soldiers had fallen. The old fortress became a quarry; its carved dragons were hauled away to adorn gates and fountains. No one remembered what those carvings had once kept at bay.
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Peace settled like dust on everything it touched. The kings of Westernlight came and went, and each one swore that the age of darkness had ended forever. The stories of gods and dragons became festival songs—safe to laugh at, safe to forget.
But deep beneath the foundations of the kingdom, in chambers older than language, the chains still glowed faintly. Once in a great while, when thunder rolled across the plains, a single mote of heat would rise through the stone and vanish into the sky. The people above called it storm-fire and took it as a sign of blessing. They didn't hear the whisper that came with it.
Soon.
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The whisper passed through roots and rivers, through the bones of the hills, until it reached the dreams of a child not yet born. A child whose blood would remember what the world had chosen to forget.
And far away, beyond the river and the gilded walls of Westernlight, in a village too small to bear a name, two infants would take their first breaths under a red moon—their skin touched with the faint shimmer of scales.
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The mountain slept. The world moved on. But the silence it left behind was only the pause before another heartbeat.
— End of Prologue Arc