Distance has a voice.
It does not shout.
It does not whisper.
It echoes.
It echoes through space between people who care about each other.
Through roads that bend.
Through choices that ripple outward and come back changed.
Today, distance begins to speak.
And the city has to learn how to listen.
Morning arrives with the quiet discipline of routine.
Boats tie neatly.
Shops open.
Children are taught.
Meals are cooked.
Life insists on continuing, and the city respects that.
But beneath it all runs a hum.
Not anxiety.
Attention.
People find their eyes drifting, now and then, toward the western path. They do not even realize they are doing it. They simply carry inside them a line stretched outward…
pulled taut by care.
Kael feels it too.
He stands at the boundary stones lon
