The valley hummed with rough human voices.
Not songs.
Not prayers.
Only the stumbling rhythm of life finding itself again.
Laughter.
Cries.
Broken calls across the open fields.
**
Anor'ven no longer watched from a distance.
He lingered at the edges —
close enough to catch the sharp breath of effort,
the rasp of hands scraping wood,
the short bursts of laughter after a fall.
They built without wisdom.
They failed without shame.
No kings.
No gods.
Only the fragile stubbornness of flesh and hope.
**
When no one was near,
he tried to mimic them.
He shaped clumsy signs with his fingers,
crooked and stiff.
He forced dry, broken sounds through a throat
that barely remembered speech.
A harsh grunt.
A hoarse hum.
He tried to hum a child's simple tune.
It fell apart after the first, wounded note.
No applause.
No mockery.
Only the stillness of the ruins
and the slow forgetting of the wind.
He looked up at the sky —
not seeking meaning,
only marking that the silence would swallow even this.
**
One afternoon, as he traced meaningless shapes in the dust,
a boy noticed him.
A scrap of life —
barefoot, sun-streaked, bold.
The boy stared.
Grinned.
Scooped a clump of dirt and threw it.
It struck Anor'ven's leg with a soft, dull sound.
Crumbling back into the dust it came from.
Anor'ven lowered his gaze to the mark on the ground.
Then lifted it again,
meeting the child's fearless eyes.
He did not move.
He did not speak.
The boy hesitated, shrugged,
and ran laughing back to the others.
Anor'ven watched him disappear —
and for the first time in longer than he could measure,
he felt something stir,
something not sharp,
not hollow,
something almost warm.
A memory, maybe.
A memory of what it was to belong to nothing
and still find joy in it.
"Today, it is only dust,"
he thought.
"And dust does not wound."
**
He continued to learn.
Not their words —
his mind could no longer grasp their weaving.
But their breaths.
Their gestures.
Their stubborn way of being alive against the pull of the void.
He watched.
He listened.
He carved the rhythm of their small lives into the hollow of his own silence.
Not to command.
Not to teach.
Not even to be seen.
Only to stay close to the warmth
without daring to step into the fire.
**
And when the fires of the village flickered under the breath of the night,
he whispered —
not a word,
but a broken sound,
half-remembered from a time he no longer owned.
A sound close to a promise,
spoken only to the dust beneath his feet.
And he remained there,
between silence and life,
without knowing which one still held him.