It was early dawn—or what remained of it.
The sun, once proud in its rise, now crept timidly across the scarred horizon. Its light was no longer golden, but pale and bruised, as if it too had suffered in silence. No birds greeted the morning. No wind whispered through the trees. The world held its breath, suspended in a silence that felt more like mourning than peace.
Where once there had been warmth, there was now only the hollow memory of it.
Even the sun—God's eternal sentinel, the great eye that watched over the living—seemed dimmed, distant, and dying. Its rays no longer reached with assurance, but faltered across the land like the last breaths of a fading god.
This was not just the aftermath of ruin. This was a world unraveling.
A soft knock—barely more than a whisper—was all it took to summon a family of twenty-five.
