The world had turned.
Not once.
Not twice.
But enough times that the ruins no longer remembered they had once been cities. The spires were gone. The old walls swallowed by moss and wind. What had once been the Chains was now just dust and myth.
But silence?
Silence endured.
The child wandered alone through the forest of broken stone, small hands clutching a piece of bone-carved driftwood, shaped like a crown. She didn't know where it came from only that it called to her in dreams.
She'd heard the stories.
Told in ash-hushed whispers around fire pits.
Of the Wardenfall.
Of the Ash Reign.
Of the man who wore no name, and made no throne, and yet reshaped the world.
Her village called it myth.
She called it truth.
She found the garden at the edge of what had once been a city.
Not wild, but tended.
Rows of white ash-roses bloomed quietly in the black soil.
No fence.
No altar.
Only a stone bench and a tree older than any god she'd heard of.
And beside it
Sat a man.
Cloaked in grey.
Hunched.
Face lined like parchment.
Hands weathered but steady, pruning the dead petals from a rose bush with a small, rusted blade.
He didn't speak.
Didn't look up.
But she felt him notice.
And in that silence, something in her heart slowed.
As if the noise she'd always carried
Her doubts,
Her pain,
Her endless need to belong
Had been heard.
Without words.
Without judgment.
Without condition.
She stepped forward.
The bone crown clutched to her chest.
And finally asked:
"Are you him?"
The man didn't answer.
Just looked up.
His eyes were empty of pride.
Of legend.
Of need.
But not of memory.
He looked at her.
Then at the crown in her hand.
Then whispered, as if tasting the name for the first time:
"I was."
She knelt beside him.
He handed her the pruning knife.
No speech.
No blessing.
Just a quiet invitation.
And together
They tended the roses.
Because some legacies are not written in war, nor rule, nor ruin.
But in remembrance.
In planting what should never have bloomed.
In choosing silence not as absence
But as grace.
The wind passed gently through the garden.
And for a moment
Even the gods paused to listen.
End.
Of Silence.
Of Nihil.
Or perhaps
Just the beginning.