The loudest sound in the new world was disagreement.
Markets rang with it. Classrooms thrummed. Council halls echoed—not with shouts of command, but with interruptions, revisions, and the awkward pauses where someone realized they might be wrong.
Travelers noticed it first. "Your cities are noisy," they said.
"Yes," came the reply. "That's how we know they're alive."
From time to time, a figure would rise—eloquent, decisive, promising relief from the exhausting work of choice. They gathered followers quickly.
Then the questions began.
Who decides when you're wrong?
What happens if we stop agreeing?
How do we remove you without blood?
Some leaders answered well and became coordinators, facilitators, temporary centers of gravity. Others bristled, tightened their grip, and were quietly abandoned.
Power learned to travel light.
In distant villages, children learned games with rules that changed mid-play. Not to frustrate them—though it did—but to teach them something older than certainty: adaptation.
No one taught them Kael's name.
They didn't need to.
They inherited the noise—the friction, the unfinished sentences, the courage to keep arguing without demanding an ending.
And when night fell and the stars drifted, some steady, some wandering, the world slept without waiting for instructions.
It would decide again tomorrow.
And that was enough.