YEAR FIVE — LATE WINTER
The alliance did not break.
That was the good news.
The bad news was that endurance leaves fingerprints on everything.
By the fifth year of the long war of meaning, the dramatic crises had become less frequent, but the quieter damage had become harder to ignore.
Not collapse.
Not panic.
Not threshold tears or cities writing themselves into ruin.
Just strain.
A thousand tiny fractures in ordinary life.
A baker in Portstead stopped singing while she worked.
A magistrate in Greyhaven began making colder rulings because sleep had become theoretical.
A nurse in South Vale forgot her own son's birthday because she had spent three straight nights in the waiting room with delayed medicine families.
A schoolteacher in Bellwake started speaking to children like she was already disappointed in the adults they would become.
None of those things made reports.
Until they did.
Because that was what we had built.
A system to notice.
Not save everyone.
