Chapter 4 - Silence Before the Break

🌒 World Notes: The Moons of Hipos

Before fleeing to the mortal realm, Azaroth and Lumiel lived beneath a divine sky.Their lost home, Hipos, followed the rhythm of Twelve Moons, not seasons.Though that world has long fallen, they still whisper its calendar each year—a quiet act of remembrance for the eternity they once ruled.

🕯️ The Twelve Moons

🌱 Spring — The Season of Awakening

1. Verdance — Renewal and the first bloom of life.

2. Bloomveil — Blossoms, vows, and the birth of hope.

3. Highsun — The rise of warmth and radiant growth.

☀️ Summer — The Season of Power

4. Emberfall — The height of light and fire's breath.

5. Harvest — Balance, bounty, and gratitude.

6. Ashveil — The waning sun, when glory fades to dust.

🍂 Autumn — The Season of Reflection

7. Frostveil — The first chill, when leaves begin to fall.

8. Whiteshroud — The stillness before the snow.

9. Gloamreach — The longest night; dreams and memory entwined.

❄️ Winter — The Season of Silence

10. Dawnswell — The first light after the endless night.

11. Thornmarch — Struggle and endurance; life pushing through frost.

12. Verdantwake — The quiet end of the cycle; seeds sleeping beneath snow.

Between Ashveil and Frostveil lies the Day of Two Shadows,when both suns and both moons rise together,and for a moment, the breath of gods returns to the living.

📜 Current Time: Year 5 — The Fifth Year of Eryndor

For them, time began the moment their son first opened his eyes.

Year 1 marked the birth of Eryndor—their light, their new beginning.Year 5 marks the life they built since,five springs under a mortal sun.

To others, these are ordinary days.But to Azaroth and Lumiel, every dawn is sacred—another heartbeat in the only world they now believe in:the world their child brings to life.

Snow came early that year.

It did not fall in a fury—no roaring storms, no cracking thunder, no sky split open. It arrived the way fear does: quietly, at the edges, until one morning the world simply woke white and thinner than before.

Eryndor woke to the faint sound of wind brushing the shutters and the smell of bread on the hearth. His body ached pleasantly from training; his hands carried the memory of blade arcs, his legs the echo of running until his lungs burned clean.

He rolled over, squinting at the ceiling beam, and felt a hand on his shoulder.

"Up." Azaroth said. His voice was gentle for once. "The day will not wait."

Eryndor pushed himself up, hair a messy spill of black over his eyes. Lumiel set a wooden bowl on the table, steam curling from thick porridge flecked with dried berries.

"Are you hungry?" she asked without thinking.

"Always," Eryndor said, and the answer made her smile in that small, tired way that felt more like a promise than a joke.

Just a morning, she told herself. Let it be just a morning.

They ate in silence broken only by the crackle of fire and the occasional clink of a spoon. Azaroth checked straps and buckles on the wall, then set a hand on Eryndor's head as he passed.

"After breakfast," he said, "forms until your arms shake. Then we work on the binding rune again."

"I already remember it," Eryndor replied.

Azaroth's lips twitched. "Then you can remember it with your muscles as well."

Lumiel watched them both, a warmth blooming in her chest that hurt more than any wound. They looked almost like a normal father and son. Almost.

The weeks after the fountain still held a strange kind of peace.

They still went to market. The baker still nodded. Children still chased each other in the square, though they stole longer glances at Eryndor now—half awe, half suspicion. The boy he had saved wore a charm carved from a bit of smooth bone; sometimes he waved shyly when he saw Eryndor and then hid behind his mother's skirt.

No one spoke of miracles aloud. They spoke of weather and grain and the lord's tax. Human beings are very good at pretending not to see the thing they cannot explain—at least for a while.

But something had changed, and everyone felt it.

Lumiel noticed it in the way people stepped half a pace further aside when she walked past, as if instinct tugged their bodies away from a fire they could not see. Azaroth noticed it in the weight of gazes on his back when he brought tools to mend.

Eryndor noticed it in the quiet.

Once, when they passed the chapel, he heard voices through the stone. The priest's, low and careful—not his market voice, not his soft blessing voice, but something that pressed down like a stone on snow.

"…signs," he was saying. "…unnatural touching of what should be left to God. We must be patient. But we must also be… ready."

Ready for what, no one said. Readiness has a shape of its own; it grows teeth in the dark.

The first cough did not scare anyone.

Gloamreach always brought illness. The air was cold and damp; smoke lingered low and pricked the lungs. An old woman coughed through the night. A small child burned with fever two days later. Life continued.

But something unspoken began to stir beneath that life—a hesitation in the eyes, a quiet tightening of shoulders, a memory everyone pretended to forget.

When the weaver woman did not wake one morning, the priest tolled the bell himself. The sound seemed to sink into the snow. People gathered around the fresh grave, shifting uneasily.

"Some winters come harder than others," the priest said softly. "Some burdens fall before their time. And sometimes… the world tilts, and we do not understand why."

He accused no one. He didn't have to. He planted the thought like a seed in frozen soil.

More coughing followed. More fever. More bodies that grew still.

The priest walked the village quietly—touching doorframes, praying under his breath, listening to rattling chests as if each sound carved another weight into his heart. He looked tired, worn, as though he fought the sickness personally.

He never mentioned Eryndor. But people remembered without being reminded.

At the well, whispers drifted between the rising curls of steam.

"My sister's village is sick too… but not this fast."

"They didn't have anything strange happen.""Ever since the fountain—"

They fell silent as the priest approached, drawing water.

"Fear spoken aloud does not make it grow," he murmured, "only honest."

The women exchanged uneasy glances.

"Father… was that boy a blessing? Or… something else?"

He looked into the bucket at his reflection—dim, warped by ripples.

"God sends life," he said quietly. "God sends death. But what rises outside His order… shifts the scales. And when the scales shift, everything resting upon them trembles."

A hush fell. Fear is always strongest when wrapped in gentleness.

One afternoon, a mother hurried to him, desperate.

"Please—my son's fever won't break. Lumiel healed before—maybe she could—please—"

The priest's expression folded into sorrow.

"Child… I know what a mother feels. But listen to me."

She clutched his sleeve. "If she saved just one more—"

"And after that one?" he whispered. "You saw it yourself."

Her breath hitched.

"The child lived," he said, "and four others fell sick in the days that followed."

Gasps rippled through the people nearby.

"You think heaven does not answer such meddling?" he continued. "That we can pull a soul back where it no longer belongs, and pay no price? The world does not work so kindly."

The mother stepped back as though burned—not by him, but by the idea that her hope had become a danger to others.

From that moment, whenever Lumiel walked through the market, people shifted aside just a little more. Not out of politeness. Out of fear.

When a boy slipped on the ice and cracked his head open, blood bright against the snow, mothers rushed—but when Lumiel instinctively stepped toward the child, half the crowd moved reflexively to block her. As if she brought something with her. As if hope itself were contagious.

No one spoke of it, but the action lived longer than any word.

The priest's next sermon overflowed the chapel. Snow clung to cloaks; breaths fogged the air.

"We are simple folk," he began. "We have little but our labor, our children, our faith."

He let that settle.

"When death comes in its time, we bow our heads. When life comes in its time, we rejoice."A pause. "And when something is taken back from death's gate—pulled against heaven's will—doyou think the world simply smiles? No. It shifts. It tilts.And everything tilts with it."

He spoke with sorrow, not fury—as though he begged them to understand a pain he carried alone.

Grief moved the crowd more deeply than anger ever could.

By then, people no longer asked Lumiel for help.They no longer dared.To ask was to tempt the scales.To hope was to risk four more graves.

And though the priest never spoke Eryndor's name…

everyone was already thinking it.

Life continued. Eryndor trained.

He danced across the snow with a wooden blade, breath turning to ghost-clouds around his mouth while Azaroth watched with arms folded.

"Again," Azaroth said whenever he hesitated.

Eryndor adjusted his stance, shoulders relaxed, wrist loose, and felt the weight and angle of every cut. The sword never whistled. Azaroth beat that habit out of him early.

"Sound is wasted motion," his father had said. "Make your enemies hear nothing until it's already done."

After sword drills came hand-to-hand—Azaroth explaining how leverage mattered more than strength, how a smaller body could break a larger one by listening to the direction of its weight.

"Listen with your bones," he told Eryndor, and the boy did.

Later, under Lumiel's eye, they cleared the snow from a patch of frost-hardened ground and drew symbols in charcoal. Binding circles. Protective wards. Small sigils meant to numb, to daze, to cleanse.

Eryndor traced each with his finger, repeating the underlying principles: focus, equivalence, exchange. A flame does not appear from nowhere; it is called from somewhere else.

Lumiel watched him finish the last sigil perfectly, faster than she had the first time even with all her angelic memory.

"You learn too quickly," she said before she could stop herself.

"Is that bad?" Eryndor asked.

She looked at him for a long moment and shook her head.

"It's… dangerous."

The cough did not remain gentle.

It became harder. Rattling. Guttural. It began to steal the breath from chests already too thin from winter.

At first, it was more of an inconvenience than a terror. People grumbled about bad years and damp wood. The apothecary's doorway grew busier. He suggested boiling more water, burning different herbs, sleeping with warm stones.

Then someone didn't get up.

A woman whose hands had woven half the cloth in the village simply… stopped. She lay still in a bed that still carried the shape of her body, and no one could call her back.

The priest tolled the bell that day himself.

Lumiel heard it from the house while she chopped carrots for stew. The sound carried through the trees—one long, measured note that seemed to sink into the snow instead of echoing.

"What is it?" Eryndor asked, moving to the window.

"A death," she said quietly. "They call for the soul and tell the world it has gone."

He frowned. "Do we answer?"

"No." She set the knife down, fingers pale around the handle. "Not this time."

The sickness spread like ink in water—slow at first, then everywhere at once.

A child fell ill on the eastern side of the village. An old man on the west. It did not care for age or virtue, for labor or prayer. It crawled into lungs and sat there, heavy and stubborn and disinterested in remedies.

One evening, when Lumiel came to buy honey, the baker's face looked older by years. His wife lay curled in the back room, hair plastered to her face, breath coming in wet, shallow pulls.

"Do you—" he started, then swallowed the words. His eyes flicked to Eryndor, standing just behind Lumiel. "No. No. If God wishes to spare her, He will. I won't…" His jaw clenched. "I won't meddle."

Lumiel's hand tightened around the jar of honey. "I wouldn't ask you to," she said. "I'm only here to buy."

The baker looked at her for a long moment, then nodded and wrapped the honey in cloth, his hands clumsy.

On the way back through the square, Eryndor asked, "We could have helped."

"Yes," Lumiel said.

"Why didn't we?"

She stopped walking. The air smelled of smoke and wool and something sour just beneath. A dog coughed somewhere by a wall.

"Because it isn't just life anymore," she said. "It's… lines. Boundaries. Fear. People don't want only healing now. They want a story where the sickness has a villain they can touch."

"And we fit that better than something small and invisible," Eryndor said quietly.

Her eyes widened. "You understand that?"

"I'm not stupid, Mother," he said gently.

No, she thought. That was the problem.

The priest's sermons changed.

He did not shout. He did not wave his arms. The more graves the village dug, the calmer he became.

"We are being weighed," he said, voice carrying through the nave like water over stone. "Our faith, our obedience, our humility."

He spoke of balance—how the world was made with rules, and what happened when those rules were broken.

"If something that should stay takes is called back…" He let the sentence hang. "Then the scales tilt. And something must tilt them back."

Eyes moved, subtly, toward the back, where a few newer faces sometimes stood. Toward the door, where the memory of a little boy pulling another boy from water still clung.

He never said Eryndor's name. He didn't need to.

At home, things felt smaller.

Azaroth oiled the wooden sword every night as if it were steel. Eryndor's drills grew sharper, colder. He still laughed sometimes, but the sound came shorter and vanished quicker, as if he worried it might draw something.

One morning, when his foot slipped on ice and he went down hard on his wrist, the joint bent at an angle that would have broken any other child's arm.

Lumiel gasped and reached for him.

He sat up, flexed his fingers. The wrist twisted, then slid back into place with a small, wet pop. He shook it once, as if throwing off snow.

"See?" he said in a small proud voice, looking between them. "I'm harder to break now."

Azaroth's stomach twisted.

"Don't show that to anyone," he said. "Ever."

Eryndor's brows knit together. "Why? That means I'm safer."

"It means," Azaroth said, "that others will feel less safe around you."

The day it broke was quiet to begin with.

No storms. No omens. No voices in the sky.

Snow lay thick along the branches. Smoke from the village chimneys rose in thin, straight lines—the kind that said no wind was coming to help or hinder anyone.

Eryndor and Azaroth were in the clearing, blades in hand.

Not wooden, today. Steel.

Eryndor's sword was shorter, balanced for his smaller body. He moved with practiced care, each step placed deliberately, each swing precise. The cold bit his nose and cheeks; his breath came in slow, measured clouds.

"Again," Azaroth said.

Eryndor lunged and turned, parried an invisible strike, rolled his shoulder and brought the blade around. The motion was clean, the follow-through correct, but something was missing. Azaroth watched, eyes narrowing.

"Stop."

Eryndor froze mid-stance. "What did I do wrong?"

"You're moving as if you expect them to play the same game," Azaroth said. "They won't. They won't come one at a time. They won't wait their turn. They won't aim for the chest when they can aim for a child's face."

He stepped forward, faster than Eryndor could follow, and rapped the blunt edge of his sword against the boy's throat, hard enough to bruise.

Eryndor flinched, hand flying up.

Azaroth held the position. "You cannot fight in chaos with form alone," he said. "You meet it with will. With resolve. With the knowledge that if you fail,the world takes everything."

"Azaroth," Lumiel called from the porch. "Enough. He can't breathe if you crush his windpipe."

He pulled back, eyes still pinned to Eryndor's. "Again," he said more quietly. "Then you eat."

"Are you hungry?" Lumiel called to Eryndor instead, with a faint, exasperated laugh.

"Yes!" he answered in a brighter tone, rubbing his throat. "Very."

"Good," she said. "Do what your father asks, and then come claim your prize."

For a heartbeat, the world was nothing but that. A mother's teasing. A father's harsh lesson. A boy's shallow bruise.