I walked.
Not to reach anywhere.
Not to flee.
I walked because there was nothing else left.
Nothing to defend.
Nothing to understand.
Nothing to hope for.
Only this body.
This breath.
And the earth stretching endlessly beneath my feet.
The world changed around me.
Mountains crumbled.
Forests were born.
Rivers carved new scars into the land.
I crossed ruins I had never seen before,
and others I had already forgotten.
Sometimes, human shapes appeared —
painted skins, wary eyes.
They saw me.
They feared me.
Sometimes they attacked.
I fell.
I bled.
I rose.
Always.
But I never struck back.
Not out of mercy.
Not out of pride.
Just… because it was useless.
The world no longer understood what I was.
And I no longer understood why I remained.
At first,
I still noticed the seasons passing.
The faces.
The fires.
The cries.
But little by little,
everything blurred.
Everything became distant.
One day, I heard a whisper.
A name.
Distorted.
Faint.
But repeated.
Anor'Ven.
I did not know what it meant.
I did not know it was meant for me.
But slowly, I became him.
The stranger.
The shadow.
The one who walks.
The one who endures.
Stories grew around me.
They said I could not die.
That I carried the weight of centuries.
That I no longer spoke.
That I no longer had a name.
That I was no longer a man.
I let him walk.
I watched him from inside,
the way one watches a dying fire without trying to save it.
He crossed continents.
He followed dead shores.
He walked under alien skies.
Sometimes they attacked him.
Sometimes they fled.
Always, they stared.
And then one day,
he stopped.
Without reason.
Without wound.
The body had endured.
But what beat within it
had fallen silent.
He collapsed.
Face down.
Into the dust.
The wind passed.
The rain.
The leaves.
The centuries.
The name remained.
And with it, the stories.
No one knew anymore if he had truly existed.
But they still spoke of him.
Anor'Ven.
The one who walks without end.
The one who cannot be killed.
The one who never dies.
And beneath the earth,
in the silence,
I breathed still.
Not by will.
Not by hope.
Only because
it was the only thing I knew how to do.
Waiting.
Enduring.
Until the world would call again.