The villages beyond the main roads lay hushed beneath the weight of uncertainty.
Seran moved through them like a shadow.
By day he was a grain broker, a mule driver, a wandering overseer with calloused hands and a ledger stained by weather and use.
By night he was what he had always been—Hiral's second-in-command, his ever loyal overseer, his ultimate contingency.
He slept lightly, rose before dawn, and never let his back face an open door.
The promises made from the capital were fragile things.
Words carried by messengers with too-clean boots, sealed by officials who had never felt soil beneath their nails.
Seran made those promises real.
He watched storehouses himself as sacks of grain were counted and redistributed.
He ensured the iron tools arrived where they were meant to, not siphoned off to line another noble's cellar.
When carts went missing, he found them. When a village elder hesitated, fearful of retribution, Seran stayed until the fear thinned into trust.
And when an official arrived with too many questions and too much authority—
Seran was already gone.
His men were scattered in the same way, never clustering long enough to be seen as a force.
They helped plant crops, repaired irrigation channels, guarded night roads just long enough to break bandit routes before melting back into the fields.
No banners. No uniforms. Just hands that worked and eyes that stayed sharp.
He was relentless about it.
"Discretion is survival," he reminded them quietly. "We're not here to be heroes. We're here to support the pillar of our nation, we've done it before and will do it again. As our general commands so it shall."
Yet despite his great show of sternness, his gaze often drifted eastward when he thought no one was looking.
Hiral.
Seran never said the name aloud.
Not even in private.
But it lived beneath everything he did—the tension in his shoulders, the way his hand lingered on his blade before sleep.
He trusted Hiral.
Gods knew he always had.
Every reckless order, every impossible plan had ended in survival, in victory twisted into something better.
But this time…
Unease crept through the country like fog through low ground.
The capital shifted under unseen pressure.
Officials grew bolder, then quieter. Rumors contradicted each other by the hour.
Something was moving, aligning, waiting.
Seran felt it in his bones.
At night, when the villages slept and only insects bore witness, Seran sat alone beneath open sky, sharpening his blade until it gleamed.
He told himself the same thing, again and again—that Hiral had calculated this too, that his general would never fade out just for fun, there's always a hidden scheme in his actions.
"You better be alright," Seran muttered once, staring at the stars. His mouth twisted into something like a smirk.
"Because if you're not… I'm dragging you back myself, whether you want to or not."
There was no answer, just the whistle of the wind.
So Seran rose, pulled his cloak tight, and returned to the work.
The plan would hold—because it had to.
****
The unease Seran felt was not an accident.
It was the echo of a net tightening—one that only Hiral had ever vision in its entirety.
Across the empire, something subtle but irreversible had begun to shift.
It did not start with banners or proclamations.
There were no shouted slogans, no calls to arms.
Instead, it crept into conversation the way doubt always did—quietly, reasonably, carried on the breath between neighbors.
In river towns and hill villages, people spoke of soldiers they had seen not as conquerors, but as helpers.
Men who repaired collapsed roofs after storms. Women who stood watch through the night so farmers could sleep. Veterans who shared rations with children and asked nothing in return.
"They were Hiral's," someone would say, almost as an afterthought.
The name carried weight.
It traveled faster than any official decree.
People began to ask why it was those same soldiers—battle-worn, loyal, disciplined—who now lived scattered like drifters while the capital sent no relief, no summons, no word of gratitude.
Why was their general, the one who had shielded the empire time and again, left in enemy hands without even the pretense of negotiation?
And inevitably, the questions sharpened.
Why had Empress Shana not moved heaven and earth to retrieve him?
Why had she condemned her own soldiers to suspicion and neglect, as if loyalty itself had become a stain?
The more people talked, the more they remembered.
They remembered how the war had been declared with thunderous certainty, how alternatives were dismissed as weakness.
How grain levies had risen while border villages starved.
How messengers returned from the front speaking of restraint and dignity—only to find the capital deaf.
"It was her war," someone said quietly in a tea house.
"And they paid for it," another replied.
The capital, once distant and unquestioned, began to feel… small. Removed. Wrong.
Officials tried to tighten their grip, but their words rang hollow. Each attempt at control only highlighted the contrast between decree and deed. Between command and care.
Courage grew not as flame, but as ember.
A merchant refused a levy and was backed by his neighbors.
A village elder demanded answers and was not silenced.
A town guard chose not to disperse a gathering—and nothing happened.
Unseen by all but the careful few, Hiral's design unfolded exactly as intended.
No accusation could touch him.
No charge of treason could stick.
He had not raised a hand against the throne.
He had simply reminded the people of what justice looked like.
Now they were the ones asking whether obedience, blind and unexamined, was truly loyalty—or merely fear dressed as duty.
Far from the capital, Seran watched it happen village by village, breath by breath.
He did not interfere. He did not guide.
He merely ensured the soldiers remained visible in their kindness, their restraint, their quiet endurance.
And somewhere beyond borders and battlefields, Hiral slept—his body broken, his name alive in a thousand mouths.
The spark had been lit.
All that remained was to let the fire decide its own shape.