Arameor had a particular way of going quiet before something terrible.
It was not the quiet of peace. Peace had a softness to it, a looseness in the shoulders of the people who carried it. This was something else entirely. This was the quiet of a kingdom that had read the signs and was now in the process of deciding what to do with what it knew. Market stalls that usually stayed open until the lamplighters made their rounds were closing two hours early. Women who lived in the outer villages were sending their youngest children to cousins in regions further inland, packing small bags with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this before or had been told stories by those who had. The city did not empty but it thinned, the way a forest thinned before a fire moved through it, the trees that could move finding ways to move.
The palace felt it too.
