The war ended without ceremony, not with victory cries or the raising of banners, but with silence so complete that it felt heavier than the screams that had filled the air only hours before, as though the world itself had grown tired of watching people die and simply turned away.
I stood where my village had once been, barefoot on earth that was no longer soil but ash and blood pressed together by fire, holding a broken wooden sword that had splintered when the fighting reached us, its cracked handle rough against my palm, though I barely felt the pain.
Around me lay what remained of a life that had never been important enough to be remembered by history—collapsed homes, scattered tools, bodies lying in positions that suggested they had believed, until the very last moment, that they might still survive.
I did not cry.
Not because I was strong, and not because I understood what had happened, but because the tears had already come earlier, violently and without restraint, until there was nothing left inside me that could break further.
The smoke lingered long after the flames died, drifting lazily through the ruins as the sun lowered toward the horizon, staining the sky red enough to resemble the battlefield below, and it was in that light that I noticed the man.
He walked without urgency, stepping over corpses and shattered stone with the calm precision of someone who had seen destruction often enough for it to lose its novelty, a sword wrapped in cloth resting against his side as if even now he refused to let it be seen.
He stopped a short distance away and looked at me.
There was no pity in his gaze, and no horror either, only a sharp, quiet awareness that made me feel as though I was being measured, not as a child, but as something that had either broken or endured.
"Can you stand?" he asked.
I nodded, though my legs trembled as I straightened, the effort sending a dull ache through my body that reminded me how long I had been standing there, unmoving, waiting without knowing what I was waiting for.
"Can you walk?"
I nodded again.
That was all.
He did not ask my name, nor did he ask what I had lost, and he made no promises of safety or comfort, because he did not speak as a man offering salvation, but as one acknowledging a simple fact.
"Then follow," he said, turning away.
I followed.
Each step away from the ruins felt like betrayal, yet staying felt meaningless, and so I walked behind him without looking back, the broken sword still clutched in my hand, unaware that I was leaving behind not only my past, but the last moment in my life when survival had not yet been a choice