The mother's scream tore through the village.
Not a cry for help.
Not a prayer.
A raw, broken curse hurled into the night.
But Anor'ven was already gone.
He walked, slow and steady, beyond the reach of their fires, beyond the reach of their anger and sorrow.
The wind swallowed her cries.
The earth swallowed her grief.
Nothing remained behind him but ash and regret.
Each step pressed deeper into the dark —
and deeper still into his own hollow exhaustion.
He felt no remorse.
No shame.
Only a vast, slow-wearing tiredness, like a mountain ground down by endless storms.
They had broken long before he raised his hand.
Their trust had withered.
Their fear had soured.
And their love —
if it had ever been real —
had drowned beneath the weight of their own decay.
He had simply ended what had already been dying.
There was no pride in this.
No bitterness.
Only acceptance.
The stars spun above him —
or maybe they stood still.
It made little difference.
He was no demon.
He was no savior.
He was nothing more than what the world had made of him.
And so he walked.
Through fields where no voices called him back.
Through forests that whispered no welcome.
Through rivers that did not bother to mirror his face.
Once, he might have mourned.
Now, he simply continued.
A silent, inevitable thing.
**
He wandered for days —
or perhaps weeks —
the passage of time too thin, too brittle to cling to.
Dreams tried to form at the edges of his mind:
half-shapes, lost memories, shadows of laughter once offered freely.
He pushed them away.
There was no room left for such luxuries.
Only forward.
Only silence.
Only the cold promise of survival.
Yet somewhere, deep beneath the stone layers of his weariness, a thought stirred.
A question he could not quite kill:
"Could it be different?"
Not for them.
Not for the village that had turned its back.
But for something else.
Something not yet born.
A place where his existence would not rot into fear.
Where he would not be a reminder of what men could not endure.
Where the endless tread of immortality would not be a curse, but —
perhaps —
a simple, forgotten fact of the world.
He did not hope.
Not exactly.
He had long since discarded hope with the other soft illusions.
But the thought stayed.
It itched at the edge of his exhaustion, stubborn as a thorn.
He would find it.
Or he would not.
It made no real difference.
But he would move.
He would seek.
Not out of desire.
Not out of faith.
Simply because, in a universe that had long abandoned meaning,
movement was the only answer left.
**
Somewhere beyond the wastelands of broken fields and poisoned rivers,
beyond the fading songs of men too eager to forget,
Anor'ven would build something.
Not for glory.
Not for worship.
Not even for memory.
But for rest.
For silence.
For the stubborn, battered truth that even a monster could want a home.
A home where no gods were needed.
No debts demanded.
No futures promised.
Only existence.
Only breathing.
Only being.
Even if the world would not allow it.
Even if it would tear itself apart again, just to deny him peace.
He would try anyway.
Not because there was hope.
Not because there was meaning.
But because ruin was the only inheritance left to him.
And somewhere, far beyond memory and mercy,
even ashes needed a place to fall.