At first, he cried wolf because he was bored, needed attention, or behsps both reasons.
The hills answered him faithfully. The sound carried. The villagers came running. Breathless. Furious. Relieved.
The second time, he cried wolf because he liked the power.
There was something intoxicating about watching grown men drop their tools. Watching women leave their ovens. Watching urgency move at his command. Fear, he learned, was leverage.
By the fifth time, he didn’t even need a reason.
The word wolf was enough.
Each alarm shaved a little trust from the village. Not all at once — just enough that doubt began to travel alongside urgency. People still ran, but slower. They came, but with folded arms.
The sheep kept grazing.
The hills, once eager to carry his warning, began to swallow the sound. The echoes grew faint, as though even the earth had grown tired of repeating him.
Soon, the word lost its edges. It blurred. It became background noise — another shout in a world full of shouting.
And then one day, the boy cried wolf again. Was there a wolf? Maybe.
But something more dangerous had already arrived long before any animal crossed the pasture: indifference.
The villagers didn’t move.
Not because they were cruel. Not because they were foolish. But because fear, when overused, becomes ordinary. And what is ordinary does not mobilize.
The sheep kept grazing. The boy kept shouting. The hills did not answer.
And in the silence that followed, it no longer mattered whether the wolf was real. What mattered was this:
Credibility, once spent, does not regenerate on command.
Power built on panic collapses when panic becomes routine.
And a voice that turns every moment into an emergency eventually becomes indistinguishable from the wind