"Even in the deepest solitude, a light may sometimes flicker.
But it is only a memory of time — not a promise."
**
There came a day when he stopped.
Not to contemplate.
Not to decide.
Simply because a child had fallen at his feet.
**
The boy's leg was twisted, broken.
His face — raw, terrified,
gazing up through eyes too young to understand despair.
And Anor'Ven, without thought,
without plan,
reached out a hand.
Not to save.
Not to comfort.
Simply…
Because it was easier to move forward that way.
**
He lifted the boy onto shaking legs.
Released him.
And continued onward.
Wordless.
Weightless.
**
But the world saw.
**
The gesture crossed generations like fire through dry grass.
They said he had blessed the child.
That he had pardoned mankind.
That his hand carried redemption hidden in silence.
A sanctuary was raised on the dust he had once disturbed.
Banners flew in winds he never summoned.
**
Later, a woman crawled broken through the ashes of battle.
Blood caked her skin, her breath a dying whisper.
Anor'Ven approached.
Paused.
He shifted a fallen stone, clearing a path.
Nothing more.
**
She screamed of salvation.
Her people crowned her a prophetess.
Shrines rose in her name.
And with each silent movement,
Anor'Ven became less a man —
and more a god he had never chosen to be.
**
In his gaze,
no light flickered.
No anger blazed.
No regret lived.
Only silence.
Endless.
Heavy.
**
The lie grew thick and tangled behind him.
Fed by hunger.
By memory.
By desperate, failing faith.
**
And the world…
continued to turn.
**
It was no longer the world he had once known.
The forests thinned into broken veins.
The plains deepened into scars.
Even the mountains bowed under the burden of centuries.
**
Anor'Ven's steps lost their mechanical rhythm.
Sometimes, he halted before a twisted tree, bent by ancient winds.
Sometimes, he sat upon crumbled walls, staring at a sky too young to remember gods.
Sometimes, he turned away from villages drowned in their own dead beliefs.
**
Solitude had ceased to be a cloak.
It had become his skin.
**
Men crossed his path still,
but less often.
Thinner.
Quieter.
Some knelt —
out of instinct or old stories.
Others turned their faces away,
ashamed to look.
Most simply passed him by,
as if he were a shadow already.
**
One day, he drifted through a field of broken crosses.
The corpses had long since vanished.
Only shadows remained, twisted by time,
and a wind heavy with the scent of ancient ash.
He paused.
Not to pray.
Not to mourn.
Only because here, at last,
the earth demanded nothing.
**
Further along the wasteland,
his steps carried him past a woman clothed in rags,
a stone raised in trembling hands.
Her eyes — wild, hollow, starving.
Anor'Ven did not flinch.
Did not lift a hand.
The stone slipped from her grasp.
And she collapsed at his feet,
weeping,
as if hatred itself had betrayed her.
**
Sometimes, he listened.
Not to words.
But to the fractures between them.
The aborted prayers.
The muffled cries.
The songs broken before they could ever soar.
It was there —
in the broken spaces —
that the true voice of the world whispered.
**
Days were no longer days.
Time no longer a thread.
It gathered like dust upon his shoulders,
but never enough to bury him.
**
On distant horizons,
lines of black scarred the sky.
Crumbling towers.
Cities dragged into being by hands too desperate to know why they built.
Not born of hope —
but of hunger.
**
He wandered on,
untethered by time,
unclaimed by memory.
**
The world moved.
Not toward light.
Not toward wisdom.
Only toward something else.
Something stranger.
Something lost.
**
And so he continued.
Not by duty.
Not by desire.
He had to.
**
Because even as memories rotted and civilizations crumbled,
he endured.
Because he was the last echo the world could not silence.