The earth trembled not like an earthquake,
but like a chest holding its breath for too long.
The tremor did not bring buildings down.
It brought down the belief that the ground was an inanimate thing.
Artor Conan Davil stood among people who gathered without command. There were no shouts. No panic. They gathered because their feet carried them to the same place, as if the earth were calling back what it had once swallowed.
The ground before them opened slowly.
Not a rough, but a clean split, like skin cut by a blade absolutely certain of its direction.
From there, something emerged.
The creature was not large. Not small.
Its body was low and crawling, yet not repulsive. Its skin resembled wet soil after the first rain, dark, textured, and alive.
But what made humans step back was not its form.
It was its voice.
"Be silent," it said.
And the world obeyed.
The wind stopped first.
Then the birds fell still in the air, not dead, only forgetting how to flap their wings. Human sound vanished, as if wiped away by a giant palm.
Dvatol Ard lifted its head.
Its eyes were not large, not luminous.
It looked the way a mirror looks, without intent, without emotion.
"This is not judgment," it said.
"For judgment has not yet been permitted."
It moved among the people.
It did not attack. It did not touch.
Yet each step it took left a mark, not on the ground, but on human faces.
A man fell to his knees when the creature stopped before him. Dvatol Ard only looked at him, then spoke a single sentence.
"You know who you are."
On the man's forehead appeared a faint mark, not glowing, not darkening. The mark was like a shadow that had finally found its place.
The man wept, not from pain, but from recognition.
Dvatol Ard moved on.
Before a woman whose lips trembled endlessly in prayer, the creature stopped longer. It looked at her, then said in the same tone, neither harsh nor gentle.
"You know who you are."
The woman screamed when the mark appeared. She tried to wipe her forehead, scrubbing it with cloth, with her hands, with blood from her own nails.
The mark did not move.
The mark was not ink.
It was a decision long ago made.
Artor Conan Davil witnessed everything.
He saw people he had long admired collapse without resistance. He saw people he had dismissed stand upright in silence.
But Dvatol Ard had not yet approached him.
And that waiting was more tormenting than fear.
"Why not me?" Artor murmured, almost without sound.
Dvatol Ard stopped moving.
It turned.
For the first time, its gaze fell directly on Artor.
The creature approached slowly. Each movement made Artor realize that the ground beneath his feet was not shelter, but witness.
Dvatol Ard stopped one step before him.
Artor waited for the sentence.
But there was no sound.
The creature only stared at him for a long time.
Very long.
As if reading something that even Artor himself refused to open.
Then Dvatol Ard spoke.
"Not yet."
One word.
That was all.
The creature turned and continued on its path.
Artor staggered.
"Not yet?" he whispered. "Not yet what?"
But there was no answer.
He touched his own forehead. Clean. No mark. No shadow.
And it was precisely there that his fear was born.
He realized, for the first time, that being unmarked did not mean being safe.
Perhaps he was not marked because he was not yet honest.
Or because he was still hiding even from himself.
Dvatol Ard returned into the belly of the earth as it had emerged, without residue, without physical trace.
But the world did not return to how it was.
The ground now felt like something that listened.
Artor Conan Davil stood in the same field,
with one certainty he did not want to possess.
The mark could not be washed away.
And the most dangerous thing
was delaying it.