The quiet did not deepen.
It widened.
Aurelia felt it as a kind of expansion not outward into distance, but inward into possibility. Where urgency had once compressed every moment into reaction, there was now space between stimulus and choice.
That space frightened people.
She could see it in the way conversations lingered too long on simple matters, in the way leaders who once spoke with iron certainty now circled their own words as if testing the floor before stepping.
The world was not used to deciding without pressure.
Neither was she.
A delegation from the northern ridge settlements arrived just after midday not in crisis, but in confusion. Their crops were failing in irregular patches. Not disease. Not soil exhaustion. Just sections of land refusing to respond to cultivation w
