The Silence That Remains

In a world born from the wish of a lonely god, where the World Tree Yggdrasil breathes life into the land, peace hangs delicately after centuries of war and ruin. The Demon Lord has been slain. The world is quiet. But for one man, summoned from Earth and burdened with the blood of the 13th war, the silence is deafening. Once a cheerful soul, the traveler now wanders the frozen edge of the continent—gray-haired, hollow-eyed, and silent. Emotion has become a stranger to him. Haunted by dreams that no longer stir his heart, he fears not monsters, but the emptiness within. When a snowstorm forces him into a secluded mountain village of beastmen and dwarves, he finds unexpected warmth in quiet lives untouched by war: a playful group of children, a fox-eared innkeeper, and a bard named Fable who sees stories in everyone—especially in him. As he witnesses the villagers’ fragile lives, their struggles against a darkness that still seeps into the world, and listens to old tales whispered in temples and sung beside fires, something stirs within him. A faint echo of what it means to be alive. But the peace is thin. The forest hides new horrors. And the world, though no longer at war, still bleeds from old wounds. To move forward, he must confront not only what remains of the world’s pain… but the silence consuming his soul.