The road to Eastwatch was a lesson in dread. The land was fertile, the spring growth vibrant, but a hush lay over it like dust on a forgotten shelf. They passed farmsteads where laundry hung unmoving on lines, where ploughs stood half-turned in fields, the oxen simply standing beside them, heads drooping. No birds sang from the hedgerows. The only sound was the wind, and even that seemed muted, as if passing through wool.
Kaelen's company grew more unsettled with each mile. These were soldiers who understood violence—the clash of steel, the roar of a charge. This serene surrender was an enemy they didn't know how to fight.
"Captain," Sergeant Durn, a grizzled veteran, muttered as they passed a silent farmhouse, its door open to reveal a family sitting motionless around a cold hearth. "Orders? Do we… rouse them? Drag them out?"
Kaelen looked at the faces, blank as smoothed wax. They weren't sick. They weren't prisoners. They were… finished. "No," he said, his voice tight. "Mark the location. We move on to the source." He touched the medallion under his tunic, its persistent, warm hum a counterpoint to the chilling stillness. A small, loud truth.
They reached the outskirts of Brambleford by midday. The village was a picture of rustic peace—and utterly lifeless. People sat on benches, stood in doorways, leaned against fences. All still. All silent. Their eyes were open, but they saw nothing. A child's toy, a wooden cart, lay abandoned in the middle of the dirt lane.
The Eastwatch garrison, a small wooden fort on a hill overlooking the village, was in a state of controlled panic. The commander, a weary lieutenant named Pellen, saluted Kaelen with relief that quickly turned to despair.
"It's been five days, Captain," Pellen reported, leading him to the palisade wall overlooking Brambleford. "It starts at dawn. One household just… stops. Then the next. No struggle. It's like watching a fire go out, one ember at a time. We've tried shouting at them, shaking them, even dousing a few with water. They don't react. They just… are."
Kaelen stared down at the silent village. This was the Gentle Dark's new tactic: not conversion through a central siphon, but a passive, propagating wave. A consensus of surrender, spreading neighbor to neighbor, a psychic yawn that never ended.
"Have you isolated them? Quarantined the unaffected?" Kaelen asked, the soldier in him seeking a tactical solution he knew was futile.
"We tried. The ones who are still… awake… they just walk into the quiet zone to be with their families. They want to go." Pellen's voice broke. "My own corporal… his wife and son are down there. He just laid down his sword yesterday morning and walked into his house. He's sitting at the table with them now."
A profound helplessness threatened to drown Kaelen. He had no army for this. He had a company of brave, confused soldiers and a warm piece of metal around his neck.
"Double the watch on the perimeter," he ordered, his mind racing. "No one else goes in. I'll… I'll go down there myself."
"Sir, is that wise?" Sergeant Durn asked, concern etched on his face.
"I've been close to this before," Kaelen said, thinking of the psychic pressure in Stillwater, of Lyssa's defiant spark. "And I have a theory." He didn't elaborate. He unhooked his sword belt, handing it to Durn. "If I'm not back by nightfall, or if I… stop… you are to fall back to Saltmire and report. Understood?"
With grave nods, they watched as their Captain, armed with only a dagger and a mysterious medallion, walked down the hill towards the silent village of Brambleford.
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A world away, in the damp, perpetual twilight of the Whisperfen, Arden Valen moved like a ghost.
The Fen was a living contradiction—teeming with moss, fungus, and sluggish water, yet eerily silent. Sounds died here, absorbed by the spongy peat and hanging mist. It was a place that had already made peace with quiet.
Arden's senses, attuned to the vital noise of the world, were in agony. Here, the song was a faint, muddy dirge. It was the perfect hiding place for a cult of silence.
He found the first sign not with his eyes, but with his other sight. A patch of fungus on a rotten log, not growing in the usual chaotic sprawl, but in a perfect, geometric spiral. A cultivated silence. He followed the trail of such oddities—a circle of stones where no moss grew, a stream that flowed without a ripple or sound, a grove of willows whose branches were frozen in mid-sway.
He was getting closer.
He crested a rise of soggy ground and looked down into a hidden basin. In the center, where the mist was thinnest, stood a structure. It was not a fortress or a temple. It was a library.
But it was a library of absence. Its walls were made of petrified, soundless wood. Its roof was slate, each tile perfectly aligned. No smoke rose from it. No path led to it. Around it, the Fen was not blighted, but curated. The chaos of the swamp had been organized into a still-life of perfect, neutral forms.
This was no mere outpost. This was the seminary. The archive of the Gentle Dark.
Arden saw figures moving around it, clad in robes of grey and dun. They didn't speak. They communicated with gestures as fluid and silent as the mist itself. They were tending the garden of nothingness, pruning any aberrant growth, ensuring the perfect, lasting peace of the place.
And there, standing at the entrance of the silent library, was the woman from Stillwater. The Speaker. She was looking at a scroll, her head tilted in that same assessing way.
She had come home.
Arden melted back into the shadows, the hunter's cold focus settling over him. He had found the heart. Now he had to decide how to stop it. A direct assault would be suicide and pointless—he could burn the library, but the idea would already be scattered, carried by these silent librarians across the land.
He needed to do more than destroy a place. He needed to discredit a faith. And for that, he needed to understand what they feared most.
He watched a young acolyte carefully uproot a vibrant, orange mushroom, replacing it with a small, grey, flawless stone. The fear was obvious.
They feared life. Not just noise, but color. Not just struggle, but vibrancy. They feared the unkempt, the unpredictable, the beautifully messy song of existence.
A plan, cruel and perfect, began to form in the Warden's mind. He would not bring a sword to this library.
He would bring a cacophony.