"A held breath is not peace. It is only the prelude to a scream."
They came, and they kept coming.
Drifters, broken clans, the lost and the desperate, drawn by rumors they barely understood, pulled toward a beacon they could not name.
Tents became streets.
Fires merged into districts.
The air thickened with the smell of sweat, dust, and that bitter, slow fermentation of survival.
Children were born in the dust, their first cries swallowed by the silence that ruled all things.
Old men died without songs, buried hastily in dirt too dry to remember them.
Fields scratched their way into the dead soil.
Paths hardened under tired feet.
Shelters rose like brittle teeth against the endless wind.
Without command, without blessing, a kingdom took shape.
It had no crown.
No pride.
Only need, and hunger, and the kind of fear too old to have a name.
Anor'ven watched it rise from afar, the way a stone watches a river cut its banks.
Not with anger.
Not with sorrow.
Just… patience.
He had not called for it.
He had not built it.
But it grew anyway, like mold blooming across a dying tree.
Small fractures came first.
A cart missing.
A blade left where no blade should have been.
A whisper passed along the edge of the markets, fast and sharp like a thorn.
No one dared to speak loudly.
Not yet.
But the cracks were there, crawling under the skin of every man, every woman.
Anor'ven saw them.
He saw everything.
He saw how hands gripped tools a little too tightly.
He saw how laughter died halfway out of mouths, how eyes flicked away faster than before.
He saw it and did not move.
Decay did not need help.
One night, when the sky above seemed too tired even for stars, the first real break came.
It started small — a man clutching a child's hand, slipping between two tents.
Then another.
Then a dozen more.
Then thirty, maybe more.
They fled with nothing but what they could grab, scraps of food, battered tools, threadbare hopes packed in cloth.
They didn't flee from Anor'ven.
They fled from what his presence made clear —
that they were small, that they were weak, that no silence could hold back the rot in their own bones.
Anor'ven did not follow.
He stood at the edge of the settlement, still as dust, and watched as the fugitives stumbled into the wasteland.
By the time the first pale light dragged itself over the horizon, they were already gone.
Gone — or dead.
It hardly mattered.
When morning came, the camp still stood.
Fires still smoked.
The tents still clung together like broken ribs.
But something inside was gone.
Not missing.
Destroyed.
Men passed each other like ghosts, their steps heavy, their mouths dry.
The water ran slower at the wells.
The children played quieter, shadows among shadows.
Where once there had been the shell of trust, now there was only suspicion, bleeding out across the dirt like slow oil.
Rumors moved faster than footsteps.
"They stole from us."
"They betrayed us."
"They meant to lead others away."
No one needed proof.
No one even wanted it.
The fracture had been opened, and there was no stitching it closed.
Blame thickened in the air, a bitter taste that no breath could clear.
Hands tightened on old tools, on broken blades, on nothing at all.
Men watched each other from the corners of their eyes.
Women pulled their children closer when others passed.
Old friends crossed the camp in silence, heads low.
It was not fear anymore.
It was something uglier.
And Anor'ven saw it all.
He did not act.
He had nothing left to say.
What they had built was never a kingdom.
It was a carcass animated by the stubbornness of men too scared to lie down and die.
And like all corpses dragged too long through the dust, the smell of its ending was already thick in the air.
He had seen it before.
He would see it again.
There is no wall high enough, no silence heavy enough, to hold back the oldest hunger of all:
the human heart, desperate to tear itself apart.