The Dawn of Ash

The crown screams as it shatters — a sound like centuries of grief compressed into a single, blinding instant. White light tears through Valdremor's shadow-bones, and the city folds inward around you, ancient stones sighing as they finally, mercifully, fall.

You crawl through settling dust and silence. Above the rubble, the sky is pale gold. Dawn. Real dawn, unhurried and indifferent, the first in three hundred years to find this place unguarded by darkness.

You are changed. You know it the way you know a scar — not with pain, but with a quiet, permanent awareness. Something vast passed through you and left a hollow it will never entirely fill. Your notebooks survived. Your name survived. That will have to be enough.