Finally after cruel day the night came, the night was not a nice sleepy night. It was a heavy with a scary darkness. It felt like a big thick blanket was covering the four kingdoms and no one could breathe. The four kingdom was quiet. All the happy sounds that a city usually makes at night were gone. There was no laughing from bars, no families talking in their houses, and no music.
A new scary quiet had taken over all four kingdoms. The only sound was the wind, which whistled through the empty streets. It sounded like it was making fun of the empty feeling in everyone's tummies.
This was the first lesson everyone learned, and it was a very hard one: what it feels like to be very hungry.
It started as just an empty feeling in their bellies. But as the long night went on, the small ache turned into a big, sharp pain. It felt like a mean snake was inside them biting and asking for food that they didn't have at this moment.
In a small dark house, the blacksmith who had lost his son just sat and stared at the wall. He was a huge man, like a mountain. He had always been strong. But now, he felt so weak, he was ashamed. His stomach hurt all the time. He tried to make his big hands into fists, but his muscles felt slow. It felt like he was slowly disappearing. His strength was being taken away, just because he had no food.
The pain in people's bodies was bad, but the pain in their minds was even worse.
You can be hungry for a while. But it's very hard when you feel like everyone you trust has lied to you. The soldiers who took their food were not strangers. They were their own people. They were their friends and neighbors who had promised to fight with them for a better world. But now, the faces of those same friends were empty and cold.
This broke all the trust in the world for them. The revolution was built on trust and happy promises. Now, all that trust was gone. Every neighbor could be a spy. Every look from a stranger could be a threat. The quiet outside was the same as the quiet inside their homes. Families sat at empty tables and looked at each other, too scared to say the sad and angry words they were thinking. Who could they talk to? The soldiers who were supposed to protect them were now scary police. If you said one wrong word, they could call you an enemy. The scary words, "you are a threat to the revolution," were like a sharp sword hanging over everyone's head.
The mayor of one town, who had been so proud, now walked through the dark streets like a sad ghost. He saw all the houses with their windows closed and their lights off. He could feel the sadness and anger from all the people. He was the one who told them to believe in the revolution. He had promised them a happy future. But now, he had given them a new, colder darkness. Little children were crying because they were hungry, and their parents could only hold them and be quiet. The mayor felt very guilty. He had not led his people to freedom. He had led them into a new, scarier kind of prison.
The pain in their bodies and the fear in their minds made them feel the worst pain of all: the feeling that everything they believed in was a lie. They had lost more than just their food and money. They had lost their story. For months, they had felt like they were heroes in a great adventure, fighting a bad king. That story had made them feel strong and important.
Now that story feels like was just a big cruel joke.
What did they fight for? They got rid of a king who took some of their money, but now the "revolution" took everything. They fought the king's guards, but now the new soldiers would kill them for a piece of bread. The wonderful words they used to love like 'freedom' and 'justice' now felt like empty promises. The revolution didn't make them free. It just put them in a new stronger cage.
This was exactly what Imu wanted. He wanted to take away all their hope. When people lose hope, they stop fighting. They don't dream about being free anymore. They only dream about having a full belly and a quiet life. A piece of bread becomes more important than any big idea.
The blacksmith looked at his wife. She was rocking their crying grandchild. The baby's mother and father had been shot for trying to hide a little bit of flour and show resistance towards revolutionaries. The blacksmith wasn't thinking about big ideas anymore. He was only thinking about the pain in his stomach and the memory of one of his son which he lost in the revolution against the king. The big, beautiful idea of a revolution had become something very small and sad. It was now just a dark, cold room, filled with nothing but sadness and hunger.
The sun will rise in a few hours. But it would not bring any warmth or hope. It would only bring light, so everyone could see their new hopeless lives more clearly. They were not proud citizens of a free kingdom anymore. They were the sad survivors of a broken dream which trapped in a nightmare.