"Loss comes like a silent wave, crashing down without warning, until nothing's left but the water you once loved."
– Alastair Swift, to his younger brother, as they prepared for battle.
Alastair.
The silence of the island is louder than any noise I've ever heard. A creeping, unsettling stillness that wraps around me like a thick fog, suffocating, relentless. It's the kind of silence that only comes when everything is on the edge of collapse, the kind of quiet you can't escape, no matter how far you run.
I pull my coat tighter around my shoulders as I move through the crumbling stone walls of the old fortifications. The island stretches out before me—green and untouched by the chaos that has plagued the mainland. But the peace feels fragile. False. I've been here before, walking the edges of this place in the dead of night, the shadows hiding more than just the physical terrain.
