The peace didn’t break all at once. Slowly, like ice cracking as spring begins to push through.
It began with sound. The kind that hums beneath your ribs, low and pulsing, like the earth breathing in its sleep. Not the kind you hear. I initially believed it to be my imagination. Perhaps the echo of the Cradle is still lingering in my bones.
Thorn, however, also heard it. He froze in the middle of a sentence one morning as we sat by the river, sunlight piercing the mist. His hand rested on the hilt of his blade, instinctively, not out of fear.
"You feel that?" he asked.
I nodded as my heartbeat matched the beat of the earth. "It's... familiar."
“Not the Cradle.”
“No,” I whispered. “Older.”
The river rippled without wind. Fish broke the surface and vanished again, but the ripples didn
