–A Quiet Song
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Years passed.
Not quickly. Not easily.
But they did pass.
And the world did not forget.
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The cracks left by the Choir King's fall never sealed completely.
Here and there, the land still whispered songs from old wounds—memory-ghosts, fragments of unfinished lives. But they no longer tried to rewrite the present. They simply... lingered. Like scars.
They served as reminders.
Not of failure.
But of what had been overcome.
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The Wells were gone.
All six.
Burned, buried, buried inside men and women who had chosen to carry their weight, then let it go.
Anterz had been the last of them.
And he had not died.
He had simply... stepped out of history.
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There was no statue.
No monument.
By his request.
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A small home stood at the edge of a cliff where the stars could be seen clearly, night after night.
Its walls were made of soft stone, its windows wide. A tree stood beside it. No one could name the species—it hadn't existed before the Tower fell. But its roots sang softly in the wind.
It was not haunted.
But it remembered.
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Elaria lived there still.
And sometimes, so did he.
When he wasn't walking the world.
When the roads didn't call to him.
When he remembered to rest.
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They never married.
They didn't need to.
What they had wasn't a vow—it was a survival.
They'd survived the world unmade.
They'd survived being made gods.
They'd survived each other.
And through that, love had grown. Slowly. Quietly.
It had no name.
But it didn't need one.
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Sometimes children came to the house at the cliff.
Stragglers. Wanderers. Orphans of storms long since passed.
Elaria never turned them away.
She taught them to sing.
But not songs of power.
Songs of self.
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Anterz taught them to fight.
But only after he taught them to choose.
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One day, a child asked Elaria what the stars used to mean.
She told them the truth:
"They used to spell names."
"Whose names?"
"Gods."
"Like Anterz?"
She smiled, watching him in the garden, shirt damp with sweat, pruning a vine that still remembered the firestorms of the Old War.
"No," she said. "Anterz was never a god."
"But he killed one."
"He killed a story," she said softly. "And he let the world write new ones."
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The child nodded, quiet.
"Will he die someday?"
"Yes."
"Will he be remembered?"
Elaria looked to the horizon.
Where the sun always rose.
Even when it shouldn't have.
And said:
"Only if he wants to be."
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Some nights, when the wind was just right, the forest echoed with a faint hum.
Not a song.
Not a threat.
Just the memory of music.
And sometimes, Anterz sat on the porch and listened.
He didn't fear it anymore.
Because the Choir was gone.
But its echo remained.
And that was good.
Because forgetting was never the answer.
But neither was worship.
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He no longer needed to be remembered.
But he had chosen to remember himself.
That was enough.
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In the far cities, new leaders rose.
Not perfect.
But aware.
They no longer built statues of saviors.
They built schools.
Places where memory could be kept, questioned, carried.
The new world had no gods.
Only people.
And people could be stubborn, petty, brilliant, cruel, kind.
But above all—
They could choose.
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And sometimes, if the stars shone just right—
You could almost see the outline of the constellation they once called The Crownless Blade.
Dim now.
Faded.
But still present.
Not demanding worship.
Just witness.
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And that was the ending.
Not glorious.
Not tragic.
But earned.
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A quiet song.
A healed wound.
A man and a woman on a porch.
And a world, at last, free to dream again.
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End of Epilogue – A Quiet Song