The next morning...

The silence when he awoke was deafening. There were no sounds from the restless animals, no muffled talking from the men already awake and moving through the camp, and no sound of preparations being made for the upcoming battle. It was so quiet in fact, that it had been the silence itself that had awoken him.

Now that wasn’t to say that there was no sounds at all, but simply that they were not the sounds that he was accustomed to waking up too. Instead, there was the sound of the breeze as it whispered through the trees outside the gates of Paris, and the twittering of the birds as they started their morning songs. And inside the gates, he could just hear the faint sounds of the people as they started to prepare for the coming day.

They were the sounds of a new day, and of Darius’ new life.