At the dawn of an ageless day,
he heard voices.
Not the cries of war.
Not the mechanical chants of broken machines.
Laughter.
Tears.
Words, rough and broken —
but alive.
**
From a ridge, he saw them.
Below, in a valley still untouched,
a group of men and women were building.
Clumsy.
Feverish.
Ignorant of glory,
ignorant of downfall.
They had no temples.
No statues.
No books.
Only their hands,
their breath,
and the raw pain of living.
**
Anor'ven stood still.
For a long time.
A day, perhaps.
Or a century.
**
They had no memory of him.
No murals bearing his face.
No whispers of his name.
To them,
he was nothing.
Not an idol.
Not a guide.
Not even a ghost.
**
And for the first time,
in that perfect forgetting,
something stirred inside him.
Not the need to be seen.
Not the urge to be followed.
But a movement.
Small.
Faint.
The movement of a witness
who, perhaps,
still had something left to see.
**
He stepped down from the ridge.
Not to command.
Not to rule.
To understand.
**
He kept his distance.
He watched.
How they wove their shelters from branches.
How they laughed when they fell.
How they mourned their dead without searching for gods to blame.
A people without burdens.
Without histories.
Free.
**
Anor'ven did not approach.
Not yet.
He observed.
He listened.
He etched their gestures, their voices, their small griefs into the hollow corridors of his memory.
Not to guide them.
Not to claim them.
Only to remember
that something new
could still grow where the past had crumbled.
**
And when the sun dipped low,
when the fires in the valley flickered against the coming night,
he moved forward —
not seeking a place among them,
not seeking a name —
only carried by the silent certainty
that, for once,
he still belonged to the world he walked.