The Weight of Unasked Questions

The silence in Joric’s camp was heavier than any argument. It was a silence filled with the weight of unasked questions, the kind that hang in the air and change the shape of a room. Tamsin had given voice to a doubt that had been a nameless unease in many of them. They had followed Joric out of a belief in the righteousness of their cause, a conviction that the Symphony’s path was one of chaos and dissolution. But the Symphony’s quiet resilience, its persistent creativity in the face of their opposition, had begun to tell a different story. It was a story not of weakness, but of a different kind of strength, one that did not need to be asserted to be felt.