No one ever announced that the crisis was over.There was no declaration from Bastion. No gathering at the Sanctuary. No commemorative date later marked in textbooks. The struggle that had defined so many lives simply lost its center gradually enough that most people did not notice when it stopped being the primary force shaping their decisions.The world continued.That was all.And perhaps that was the most significant change of all.For decades, humanity had existed in relation to something. A problem. A threat. A solution. A destination. People organized themselves around what needed to be prevented, achieved, defended, solved, optimized, survived, or reached. Even Bastion, for all its sophistication, had ultimately been built around the same instinct. It arose in response to suffering. It justified itself through necessity. It promised a future safer than the past.Now, increasingly, people were discovering what happened when necessity loosened its grip.At first, many found the
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