The first deaths did not sound like the beginning of a war.
They sounded like confusion.
A wind shift on the border plains twisted a signal flag just enough that its color bled into the sky. A young sentry—barely past his first winter watch—hesitated, squinting, trying to remember which pattern meant hold and which meant warn. He chose wrong.
A horn answered from the hills, its echo fractured by stone and distance. What should have been a single clear note returned as many—overlapping, distorted, urgent. Men heard what they were already afraid of hearing.
Steel left sheaths.
No one gave an order.
The first strike came from panic, not hatred. A shield slammed forward. A spear thrust too fast, too hard. A blade caught a throat meant only to be pushed aside.
Three men died in less than a minute.
One choked on his own blood, eyes wide in disbelief.
One fell backward into the grass, fingers clawing at nothing.
One screamed until someone ended it for him.
When the shouting stopped, when hands finally froze mid-swing, everyone stared at what lay between them.
Bodies did not look like enemies when they stopped moving.
Tharos made sure the men who saw this lived.
The wounded were carried back to camp. The shaken were given water and time to speak. No divine punishment followed. No omen appeared in the sky to declare wrongdoing.
Just silence.
Silence invited explanation.
By nightfall, the story had already changed.
They attacked first.
They were testing us.
If we hadn't responded, more would be dead.
None of these statements were entirely false.
That was the elegance of it.
Survivors talked.
They always did.
Pain demanded narrative the way wounds demanded bandages. The men who had watched their friends die could not accept that it had been meaningless. Meaning was the only thing that kept grief from curdling into madness.
So meaning was supplied.
In Halruun, the deaths were spoken of as restraint barely holding. In Sereth Vale, they were framed as proof of inevitable aggression. Mothers listened with tight mouths. Fathers nodded grimly. Old veterans said nothing—and sharpened blades they had hoped never to use again.
Tharos did not intervene.
He no longer needed to.
Militias began forming along the border without command. Not because anyone ordered them to—but because fear travels faster than authority. Young men gathered in barns and training yards, arguing over maps scratched into dirt, reliving the moment where confusion had turned into blood.
Commanders noticed the energy and rewarded it.
Decisiveness was praised.
Hesitation became suspect.
In Halruun, an officer who ordered a preemptive patrol deeper into contested land was promoted after returning with prisoners. No one asked too closely how those prisoners had been taken. In Sereth Vale, a captain who fortified a crossing and repelled a scouting party was hailed as a protector of the old ways.
Defensive measures quietly became strikes.
Strikes became demonstrations.
Demonstrations became retaliation.
No declaration was issued.
Declarations implied choice.
This was momentum.
The registrars—priests and officials who tracked numbers rather than bodies—watched the curve with calm satisfaction. Reports came in neatly folded and carefully phrased.
Casualties were still low enough to be palatable.
Supply strain was within acceptable margins.
Faith gatherings were increasing, not decreasing.
People prayed before marches now. Not for peace. Not for mercy.
For accuracy.
For strength.
For the courage to finish what had begun.
That distinction mattered more than any banner.
The first village burned on the twelfth day.
It was small, unnamed on most maps, its allegiance ambiguous enough that both sides could claim justification. A skirmish spilled into the streets when a patrol met resistance it did not expect. A torch fell. A thatched roof caught.
Fire does not care who is right.
A woman ran screaming with a child in her arms, hair already burning. A man tried to pull a door open against the crush of panicked bodies inside and had his arm broken by someone desperate enough to climb over him.
When dawn came, there were bodies in the river.
Someone counted them.
Someone else recorded them.
Someone else decided the number was acceptable.
Tharos felt it all—not as pain, not as pleasure, but as alignment. The system was behaving as designed. Identity was hardening. Memory was being refreshed with fresh blood. The Moon of Memory hummed under the load, strained but compliant.
And still—
There was interference.
Not from armies.
From absence.
Kael's refusal lingered like a negative space in the pattern. Officers who had seen him in Halruun remembered that a man could walk away from sanctioned violence and remain intact. Soldiers who had heard stories of him wondered—quietly, dangerously—what it meant that someone capable of killing chose not to.
Tharos compensated.
He ensured that the next clashes were uglier.
Ambushes replaced skirmishes. Prisoners died "while resisting." A supply convoy vanished entirely, its wreckage discovered days later, bodies stripped of insignia so blame could be assigned freely.
Pain escalated.
Grief deepened.
The window for hesitation closed.
By the time the first formal declaration was drafted, it no longer mattered. The war existed already—in graves, in songs, in children playing at soldiers with frightening accuracy.
Tharos withdrew further, satisfied.
Gods did not need to stand in the fire to be worshipped.
They needed only to make sure it spread.
And somewhere between Halruun and Sereth Vale, on a road darkened by marching feet and whispered prayers, Kael walked beneath a sky that did not break—feeling the weight of lives being spent without his consent, and knowing with a clarity that burned worse than guilt:
This war would not end because it was wrong.
It would end only when something strong enough to disrupt inevitability stepped directly into its path.