Somewhere along the path, I learned that to witness something is not the same as to understand it.

We live in an age obsessed with clarity — with explaining, defining, and dissecting everything until it loses its pulse. But there are moments when explanation becomes a form of erasure.
When you name a thing too quickly, you stop hearing it breathe.

Writing *The Witness Cycle* taught me this in quiet, persistent ways.
Every scene I tried to explain fell apart.
Every silence I allowed to stay became more honest than the words around it.

To witness is to stay beside the thing you cannot fix.
To look at it without demand.
To let it exist in the space between certainty and surrender.

In *The Unwritten Path*, that act of witnessing begins as a question — how is truth written?
In *The Crack in the Mask*, it becomes the refusal to explain — how is truth silenced?
Together they form a cycle of observation, not confession.

Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is to stop speaking.
Because truth does not need us to decorate it — only to remain.

**— Vaelion of Ocris**