The radio stopped playing music two months ago.
Now it only broadcast casualty numbers.
At school, we no longer studied mathematics. We studied evacuation routes. Teachers stopped writing on boards and started folding maps. One morning, my teacher stood at the front of the class for a long time without saying anything. Then she rolled down the projector screen, turned off the lights, and we all sat in the dark together, watching a live broadcast of something none of us were old enough to be watching.
That was the last day of school.
My name is Saviour. And I want you to understand what ordinary felt like before everything ended, because ordinary is the thing this story took from me first and the thing I have missed every day since.
I was eighteen. My mother made tea every morning at the same time. My father read the news and folded the paper and set it on the left side of the table where it always went. I had three more exams before the end of the year. I had a list of things I planned to do afterward. Small things. Human things. The kind of things that seem embarrassingly insignificant until the world makes it clear they are actually everything.
Aryavarta had been afraid for a long time before it admitted it.
You could feel the fear in the way adults talked around things rather than about them, in the lowered voices and the meaningful looks and the conversations that stopped the moment you entered a room. But Aryavarta was proud. Pride and fear occupy the same chest differently, and for a long time, pride had more space.
Then Trishul Pass fell.
Not to war, exactly. Not to armies or missiles or any of the conventional violence Aryavarta's military had spent decades preparing for. Trishul Pass had simply been presented with an alternative: surrender governance to Above All, or be unmade. They had chosen survival. Nobody blamed them for it. Above All had already demonstrated, across four other territories, that the word 'unmade' was not a metaphor.
The problem was that Trishul Pass bordered Aryavarta. And Above All, having acquired Trishul Pass, now had both the proximity and the mechanism to press the same offer on Aryavarta's door.
The government called it an act of aggression. The military called it an existential crisis. My father called it something under his breath that I was not supposed to hear.
The soldiers came on a Tuesday.
My mother was gripping the doorframe so tightly I thought the wood might splinter. My father spoke to them in the careful, controlled voice of a man trying to sound like this was a conversation he had any power over. I stood across the room and watched his shoulders, and somewhere between one sentence and the next, I understood from the set of them that the outcome had already been decided before the soldiers knocked.
I don't remember the journey to the front with any clarity. I remember the weight of the gear, how wrong it felt on my body. I remember the other boys on the transport, all of us looking at the floor or out the windows, the silence between us too fragile to fill with words.
What I remember with total, merciless clarity is the Ashveld Wastes.
A sprawling expanse of cracked earth on Aryavarta's eastern border, where the ground had been baked into pale plates that shifted and groaned underfoot, where the air tasted of mineral dust and old heat, where nothing grew and nothing moved except the wind and whatever passed through it. It was the kind of place that felt, even before anything happened, like somewhere chosen specifically for endings.
We had technology. Real technology.
Aryavarta had invested decades in its military infrastructure, and it showed. Shooting drones with targeting systems precise enough to track a heartbeat through reinforced concrete. Military robots that did not tire, did not fear, did not hesitate. Missiles with ranges that made distance irrelevant. Armaments that had, in every previous conflict, been more than sufficient. And the special humans...
None of it was sufficient.
Above All's forces, operating under his command from Trishul Pass, had moved through every defensive line we constructed with a patience that was almost contemptuous. Not because they overwhelmed us with numbers but because some of them simply could not be stopped by anything we had the capacity to deploy. And at the absolute apex of that force, its highest and most terrible point, was the one they called Above All.
Nobody had ever seen his face. He wore a helmet, always. Full coverage, visor sealed, the face of it smooth and expressionless as a closed door. Rumour said he had worn it since the beginning. Nobody knew what lay beneath it, and those who might have found out were no longer available to report back.
He wanted to conquer everything. Not from greed. Not from any comprehensible cruelty. He wanted it because he believed the world was broken, fractured and bleeding under the weight of its own chaos, and that the only cure was total, complete order. His order. Balance enforced by the only authority capable of maintaining it.
His motto, they said, was simple: Keep balance in the world.
It would almost have been admirable if it weren't for the part where he arrived at the Ashveld Wastes to finish us.
I did not know, standing on that field, that I was about to become the most important problem he had ever encountered.
I did not know that my face was going to stop a war.
I did not know anything.