Chapter 3:
The Weight of Stillness
The valley never spoke, yet its silence pressed upon Errin like an unspoken truth. Days passed in an effortless flow, marked only by the shifting hues of the sky and the whispering winds that stirred the golden grasses. The people of the valley had long since stopped questioning his presence, yet their eyes held the quiet curiosity of those who knew something he did not.
Errin worked among them, his hands learning the rhythm of planting, of gathering, of shaping clay into vessels that would hold water long after he was gone. He had expected the valley to resist him—to reject the weight of his foreign presence. Instead, it absorbed him like a river taking in a new tributary, neither welcoming nor resisting, simply existing.
It was the quiet that unsettled him most.
In the world beyond the valley, the silence was a void—something to be filled with conversation, ambition, or purpose. Here, silence was a presence, a living thing that wove itself into the fabric of existence. It was in the way the elders spoke without speaking, in the way the stars above seemed to pulse with stories too ancient to be told.
One evening, as the valley burned in the deep amber of twilight, Errin found himself sitting by the old storyteller, a woman whose face bore the lines of a hundred seasons.
"You are not the first to come here," she said without looking at him.
Errin hesitated. "And what became of the others?"
"They stayed," she said simply. "Or they left."
"And those who left?"
The old woman turned to him then, her eyes reflecting the firelight. "They never truly did."
The words sat heavy in Errin's chest. He had once believed himself merely a traveler, passing through, a wanderer in search of something unnamed. But the valley did not ask him to stay or go—it simply let him be. And somehow, that was the most terrifying thing of all.
As the night deepened, he looked up at the sky, at the stars that seemed unchanged by time. And in that moment, he wondered if, somewhere beyond the valley, his old life had already begun to forget him.How long as it been?