I stood once more among the crowd, their faces upturned, waiting. The fractured sky above us shimmered strangely, as if even the heavens anticipated her words. And when Wind raised her hands, silence spread like ripples across the plain.
Her voice carried not the edge of rebellion, but the softness of dawn.
A Vision Without War
“Imagine,” she began, “a reality without war. A world where swords are forgotten, where cries of battle are erased from memory. The scars of conflict—gone. No child will ever inherit the pain of ancestors. No heart will ever bleed for a struggle that has no end.”
As she spoke, the air around us seemed to shift. I saw images rise like phantoms in the shimmer of light: fields unbroken by fire, skies free of ash. Men and women walking together with no fear in their eyes. Soldiers laying down their weapons, never to lift them again.
And I—against my will—felt the lure of her promise.
A World Without Suffering
Wind’s voice flowed on, clear as running water. “Imagine a world without suffering. Hunger will no longer gnaw at the belly. Grief carved into the soul will fade. And the endless nights of loss will not return again and again. Instead, only peace. Only joy.”
Again the plain trembled with vision. Children laughed in radiant gardens. Rivers ran clean, untainted by memory of blood. Families gathered beneath gentle suns that neither faltered nor burned too harshly.
The people around me wept openly. Some reached for one another’s hands. Others fell to their knees as if they had glimpsed paradise itself.
For a moment, I too wanted to fall.
The Pure Dawn
“Imagine,” Wind whispered, “a pure dawn. Not merely the end of cycles, but a beginning untainted. A reality that breathes without shadow. A cosmos reborn, pristine, unchained.”
Light shimmered again, and I saw children playing where ruins had once stood. I saw laughter echo where silence had lingered. I saw my son—Hoàng Long—free of fear, free of tears.
The knot in my chest loosened. My heart nearly believed.
My Hidden Doubt
Yet even in that brightness, something in me recoiled.
For every field without fire, what memories had been erased? For every child without grief, what history had been stolen? Could such a world exist without cost? Could paradise be purchased by stripping away the memories that made us human?
Wind’s eyes burned with conviction, but to me they seemed almost too bright, too certain. Her utopia was flawless—and therefore suspect.
I thought of the echoes I had lived, the cycles suffocating reality. And I asked myself the question I could not silence: If we erase the scars, do we also erase the ones who bore them?
The crowd roared in devotion, swept away by her vision. They chanted her name, proclaimed her as the voice of salvation.
But I stood still, half-shadowed in doubt, tasting the sweetness of her promise and the bitterness that lay beneath.
