YEAR FIVE — AUTUMN
By the fifth year, we stopped calling them incidents.
That was the first sign the war had changed shape.
Incidents implied interruption.
A break in ordinary life.
Something exceptional.
This was no longer exceptional.
It was weather.
Not constant.
Not apocalyptic.
But recurring enough that every city in the Alliance had learned to ask new questions before accepting old fears.
Who wrote this?
Why now?
What wound is this trying to use?
Who benefits if we believe the simplest version first?
Those weren't slogans anymore.
They were habits.
And habits are how democracies survive long wars.
We met in the old north chamber because no one trusted the main council hall to hold all the maps, all the reports, and all the accumulated exhaustion of five years of narrative defense.
The room was full.
Not crowded.
Layered.
Kassandra at one wall with intelligence routes and half the criminal underworld pinned under colored thread.
