Rewritten Prologue (Nakamura Style, World of Zerk)
With original names, rich setting, and distinctive writing.
Prologue: The Voices That Never Sleep
"We must return to the Circle," murmured Garelth of the Dark Trunks, as the shadows began to lengthen among the hissing oaks of Nyhalem Forest.
"Do you fear the Silent?" replied Sir Vaymor Rhoss, the new blade of the Order of Kaelyth, with a smile as faint as the edge of a waning moon.
Garelth did not answer immediately. His eyes, deep and heavy with memories, watched the darkness unblinkingly. He had been a squire, a soldier, and now a sentinel—for more than five harvest cycles. He had seen lords rise like dawn and fall like autumn leaves.
"Dead is dead, Rhoss. The shadows that do not breathe are no concern of ours.
Vaymor raised an eyebrow, puzzled.
"And if they are not dead? What proof can you give us other than the whisper of a squire?"
"Wyllen saw it with his own eyes. He does not lie, not in this kind of darkness."
Wyllen Lyr, the youngest of the trio, shivered. The mist tightened like invisible fingers around his ankles. The forest sounded like tides and smelled like living mud. He felt he would be drawn into this argument one way or another.
"My grandmother said the dead do not sing," he murmured, remembering the old Naiar with the glass eyes who read the wind.
"Nurses say many things when they hide from the world," Rhoss replied. "But even the dead have songs—if you dare to hear them."
His voice was too loud for the stillness of Nyhalem, and the leaves shivered with its echo.
"We have a long way to go back to the Circle of Swords," said Gárelth, remounting his gray droven. "Eight moons, if the trails do not weep. And night licks at our heels." Sir Vaymor looked up, staring at the purple sky through branches that writhed like anguished hands. "Darkness always comes, old sentinel. That does not change. You, perhaps, are changing." Wyllen noticed the way Gárelth's jaw clenched, hard as wind-carved granite. The man, hardened by forty winters in the Shadows of the Wall, was not one to be hurt by empty words. But there was something else in his silence. Something that clinked like glass about to crack. It was fear. A raw, ancient fear that trembled beneath the skin of his words. And Wyllen felt the same. Though he had faced ice storms and cave creatures from the north, tonight… tonight was different.
The dead eyes he had seen between the willows were not completely empty.
They had followed him.
They were, somehow, listening.