The city slept poorly.That was how Terry knew the shift had taken root.It wasn’t panic, there were no bells, no fires, no mass gatherings in the square. Valoria simply… rested uneasily. Doors closed earlier. Conversations lingered longer. Lanterns burned a little later into the night, as if people were reluctant to surrender awareness.Expectation had replaced faith.And expectation, Terry was learning, was heavier.He walked the upper terraces alone, boots quiet on stone worn smooth by centuries of passage. The archive quarter lay behind him now, cordoned off, marked for reinforcement by hands that had shaken but not faltered. Edrin lived. The woman’s gratitude had been fierce, wordless, human.It should have felt like victory.It didn’t.The hunger pulsed beneath his ribs, not raging, not starving, resentful. Like a tool kept sharp and never used.You denied me again, it murmured.“Yes,” Terry replied silently.You endangered a life to preserve an idea.“Yes.”The hunger paused, r

Valoria did not thank Terry.That, more than anything, told him the experiment was holding.The morning after the trade pause was raw and loud. Prices chalked on boards were erased and rewritten before noon. Tempers flared in the markets. A fistfight broke out over bread, not because there wasn’t enough, but because the expectation of certainty had finally died.People were no longer angry at him.They were angry at reality.Terry walked the streets with Mira and Jalen, hood down, face uncovered. He did not hide. He did not glow. He did not heal.He listened.A woman shouted at a merchant. A merchant shouted back. A third person stepped between them, not to calm them, but to clarify numbers scratched in chalk.Messy.Human.Alive.Mira exhaled slowly. “This is worse than when they feared you.”“Yes,” Terry said. “Fear centralizes. Friction distributes.”“And if it snaps?”“Then it snaps honestly.”They passed the western cistern, where the panel’s slate had been updated. Not names, ti

The road did not greet Terry.There was no threshold-marker, no shimmer in the air, no sense of arrival or departure beyond the dull ache in his calves and the steady rhythm of his breath. Gravel shifted beneath his boots. Wind moved through scrub and low grass. Somewhere far off, a bird cried once and fell silent again.The world had not noticed him.That was new.For a long time after leaving Valoria, Terry kept waiting for the pull to return, for the subtle tension that always told him where suffering clustered, where fate bent inward, where his presence mattered. He had lived with that pressure so long it had become a second heartbeat.Now there was nothing.No hunger pressing against his ribs.No chorus of distant needs whispering his name.Just the road.Just his body.He stopped walking when the realization finally settled deep enough to steal his breath.“I’m really gone,” he murmured.The silver-haired man stood a few paces behind him, hands clasped behind his back, expressio

The road widened after the hillcrest, not into a proper highway, but into something older and less certain. Cart tracks overlapped and diverged, some worn deep, others barely ghosts pressed into the dirt. It was a road shaped not by decree, but by repetition. By people choosing it again and again because it worked well enough.Terry walked it slowly.Not because he was tired, though he was, but because something in him resisted speed now. Moving too fast felt like habit, like the echo of urgency that had once defined him. Back when every second carried weight, back when delay meant death somewhere he could feel but not see.Now, delay was just… delay.The silver-haired man walked a few paces ahead, as he usually did. Not guiding. Not following. Simply present, like a boundary marker that refused to tell you which side you were on.They passed a pair of farmers arguing beside a broken fence. One held a hammer. The other gestured wildly, pointing at warped wood and uneven ground. Their

The camp woke slowly.Not with bells or shouted orders, but with the soft friction of bodies stirring against canvas and earth. A cough here. A murmured complaint there. Someone poking at last night’s embers until they caught again, thin smoke curling into the pale morning air.Terry watched it happen from the edge of the clearing, seated on a low rock with his hands wrapped around a chipped mug of water that tasted faintly of ash. His shoulders ached. His palms stung where blisters had broken overnight. Every sensation felt… earned.The hunger did not comment.That, more than anything, unsettled him.He had grown used to argument, to the constant push and pull between instinct and intention. Silence from something that had never known restraint felt like standing beside a cliff with no wind.Corvin stirred at last, faint as breath on glass.You’re waiting.“Yes,” Terry replied.For what?Terry considered the camp. People moving, arguing quietly over tools, deciding who would fetch wa