The first skirmishes did not feel like war.
That was deliberate.
War announced itself. It came with banners snapping in wind, with speeches rehearsed until they sounded inevitable, with drums that told men when to be afraid and when to feel brave. War demanded allegiance.
Skirmishes asked only for reaction.
They arrived like sickness—quiet, deniable, explainable after the fact. A bad decision. A hot temper. A misunderstanding that could have happened to anyone. And once a body hit the ground, reaction replaced thought. Reaction repeated often enough hardened into identity.
By the time people realized they were at war, they had already chosen sides.
The border between Halruun and Sereth Vale had never truly existed.
It was not a wall or a river or even a road. It was a thinning—a slow unraveling of certainty. Farmland softened into scrub. Scrub gave way to low hills where grass grew in stubborn patches. Beyond that lay nothing anyone could agree belonged to anyone.
Shepherds crossed it daily without thinking. Children chased goats and dogs across it laughing. Old men told stories that placed their childhood homes on different sides of the line depending on who was listening.
Maps disagreed.
Tharos loved that.
Ambiguity was fertile ground. When blood soaked into uncertain soil, ownership stopped being legal and became emotional. People no longer asked who had the right. They asked who had paid the price.
The first patrols were not soldiers.
They were farmers.
Men who knew how to hold tools that doubled as weapons. Spears sharpened from fence posts. Axes still smelling faintly of sap. They wore no uniform, only the clothes they had worked in that morning.
They did not march.
They walked.
On one side, a Halruuni patrol moved out at dawn, six men led by a miller whose son had been conscripted the week before. On the other, a Sereth Vale group did the same—five men and a woman, all older, all quieter, carrying shields patched so many times they barely resembled what they had once been.
They met near a dry streambed where animals still came to drink.
No one shouted.
No one raised a banner.
They stared.
Someone said, "You shouldn't be here."
Someone else replied, "Neither should you."
A spear shifted.
That was enough.
The first blow was clumsy. A thrust meant to push back caught a thigh instead. Blood spilled dark and shocking against pale dust. The wounded man screamed, more in surprise than pain, and the sound snapped whatever restraint remained.
They rushed each other.
It was not a battle.
It was a mess.
Men tripped over roots. Blades glanced off shields and bit into arms that had never worn armor. A woman from Sereth Vale took an axe to the shoulder and went down hard, teeth cracking together as she hit the ground.
Someone killed her because she was screaming too loudly.
When it was over, two were dead and three wounded badly enough that they would never work fields the same way again.
The survivors stood panting, staring at what they had done.
Then someone said, "They started it."
And the story was born.
By sunset, both villages knew.
By the next morning, both sides had added details.
The Halruuni patrol had been ambushed.
The Sereth Vale farmers had been defending their land.
The woman had been butchered.
The miller's son had been threatened.
None of it was entirely false.
None of it was entirely true.
That was the brilliance of it.
Tharos watched without touching a thing.
He did not need to.
Reaction took over.
In the days that followed, skirmishes multiplied. Not larger—more frequent. A cow slaughtered and blamed on "the other side." A grain store burned under cover of night. A well poisoned just enough to make people sick, not enough to kill.
Each incident demanded response.
Each response justified the next.
Soon, men stopped carrying tools and started carrying weapons openly. Soon after that, they began wearing colors—armbands at first, strips of cloth tied to spear shafts. Nothing official. Just enough to recognize friend from enemy in the dark.
The first real soldiers arrived a week later.
They came to "restore order."
They failed.
A Halruuni unit marched into a village to disarm farmers "for their own protection." The farmers resisted. One soldier struck a boy who refused to drop a spear taller than he was.
The boy's father buried a knife in the soldier's neck.
The unit burned the village to the ground before retreating.
In Sereth Vale, a commander ordered a punitive raid against what he called "Halruuni agitators." The agitators turned out to be a mixed family who had lived on the border for generations. They died screaming in their own home while neighbors watched from hiding.
No one intervened.
Intervention had become dangerous.
Fear spread faster than orders ever could.
Kael arrived in the aftermath of one such clash, stepping over churned earth and broken tools, the smell of iron thick in the air. He found bodies laid out in a line near a collapsed fence—four farmers, one soldier, a child too young to understand why he had been struck down.
No banners marked the site.
No prayers were spoken.
People watched Kael as he knelt, eyes hollow, waiting to see what he would do.
He did not raise a hand.
He did not shout.
He did not call anyone to account.
He stood, turned, and walked toward the next village—where smoke still rose and screams still carried faintly on the wind.
Behind him, someone whispered, "He came too late."
Another replied, "He always does."
That, too, was becoming a story.
The skirmishes grew sharper after that.
Men learned to aim for tendons instead of torsos. Learned to strike from concealment. Learned that killing one person publicly was less effective than wounding three and letting panic do the rest.
Violence evolved.
It always did.
And still—no declaration came. No formal war. Just an endless chain of justified reactions stretching backward until no one could remember who had moved first.
Tharos remained distant, satisfied.
This was how systems ate people.
Not all at once.
But bite by bite, until resistance no longer felt like resistance at all—only survival wearing a different face.
And somewhere along that bleeding gradient of land, Kael walked from skirmish to skirmish, carrying the weight of every reaction he did not control, knowing with grim certainty that the longer this continued, the harder it would be to stop—
because soon, there would be no farmers left holding spears.
Only soldiers who believed they had always been soldiers.
And they would not hesitate.