Kaelen stepped through the village gates.
The world slowed around him.
Everything felt smaller.
Older.
Fragile.
The same crooked streets he once ran barefoot along.
The same battered homes stitched together with love and desperation.
Children chased each other across dusty roads.
Old men sat at the well, spinning tired stories.
Women hung worn clothes over cracked fences.
It was home.
And yet… it wasn't.
Kaelen had changed.
The Sovereign Will inside him blazed too brightly to hide.
He pulled his cloak tighter around himself, dimming the cracked-crown sigil hidden beneath.
Today, he wasn't a Sovereign.
Today, he was simply Kaelen.
A son.
A brother.
A boy who had wandered too far and returned carrying a storm.
The Walk
He passed familiar places:
The broken inn where he once dreamed of being a knight.
The training yard where he first lifted a rusted sword.
The market where his mother bartered for scraps.
Villagers glanced at him, curious but not hostile.
Few recognized him.
It had been years.
And hardship had stolen much from their memories.
But Kaelen saw them.
All of them.
The forgotten.
The left-behind.
The true reason he had walked the Sovereign Path at all.