SEMISOFT

But the final sentence was written on the back of the page. Different ink. Added later. No signature. No explanation. It reads: “Not every flame was lit by war.”

The report was dismissed. War does strange things to tired men. Smoke becomes soldiers. Branches become hands. Fear gives faces to things that have none. Perhaps that is all this was. A frightened scout looking too long into the fire.

He ran. That is the only part of the report written without hesitation. No careful wording. No corrections. No crossed-out sentences. Just one line: “I left the ridge before it could look at me.”

The scout stayed until sunset. That was when the valley grew quiet. No birds. No insects. Even the wind seemed to fall away. For several minutes, he heard nothing but the sound of his own breathing. Then something inside the fire breathed back.

Later in the report, he attempts to explain himself. A fallen tree. Two columns of smoke. A trick of distance. Anything that would allow the thing he saw to become ordinary again. He lists six explanations. Then writes beneath them: “None moved when the fire moved.”

The third version remains. “I saw two horns above the fire.” No description follows. Only a blank space where several lines should have been.

At first, he thought it was smoke. Then shadow. Then heat playing tricks on his eyes. He wrote: “There was a shape inside it.” That sentence is crossed out. Below it, he wrote: “There may have been a shape.” That sentence is crossed out too.

He writes that there was fire in the valley. Not a camp. Not a burning village. The earth itself seemed to glow, orange light moving beneath cracks in the stone. He watched from the ridge until he noticed something impossible. The flames were moving against the wind.

The scout’s report begins normally. Wind from the east. Poor visibility. Smoke beyond the ridge. No enemy movement. Then, halfway down the page, his handwriting changes. The letters grow smaller. Closer together. As though he feared using too much space.

And still, the war continued. Because war has a way of making every other danger look small. Right up until it doesn’t.

One strange report is a rumour. Two are coincidence. Three invite investigation. By the fifth, someone should have stopped calling them unrelated. Instead, the reports were filed. The armies marched. The kings argued over Mugna Vale.

The descriptions differed in small ways. One saw footprints. Another saw black stones. A third remembered someone standing very far away. But every account ended the same way. The dreamer woke before the figure turned around.

The fifth report was the hardest to explain. People who had never met began describing the same dream. A grey shore. Still water. No birds. No stars. And above it all, a sun that never rose.

Then the fishermen started talking. Along one stretch of coast, the sea felt warmer beneath their boats. Fish appeared where they had never been seen. Others vanished. One swore he heard singing beneath the water. No one else aboard admitted hearing it.

The third report had nothing to do with soldiers. A village well began to smell of smoke. There had been no fire. The water stayed clear, but children said it tasted warm. The villagers stopped drinking from it. Two days later, the well began steaming before dawn.

The officer ordered the bodies moved. By morning, three had rolled back. That detail appears only once in the surviving report. Someone later crossed it out.

The second report came from a battlefield farther south. Nothing unusual about the dead. The unusual part was how they had fallen. Different wounds. Different armies. Different directions of attack. Yet every face was turned toward the same distant horizon.

The first report was easy to dismiss. A soldier, dead for several days. His body had not begun to rot. The officer blamed the cold. The next morning, another body. Same condition. Then another. By the end of the week, no one mentioned the weather anymore.

Five powers watched the Second Mugna Feud. Altea watched Fandor. Fandor watched Altea. Ahriman watched the borders. Aos Si watched the past. Norn watched something they refused to name. And somewhere between them, the war continued.

A traveller once asked Geddo what Finias was guarding. The old man looked toward the cold horizon for a long time. Then he answered: “Silence.” The traveller laughed. Geddo did not.