The dawn that broke over Oakhaven was not the herald of a new age, but the quiet witness to a ghost story. The square remained littered with the pulverized dust of the marble sentinels, a silent graveyard of stone that the citizens stepped over with trembling feet. They did not understand what had transpired in the sky, nor did they recognize the hollow ache in their own chests—the sudden, inexplicable feeling of being orphans to a history they had never been allowed to own.
In the cathedral ruins, the air had lost its static charge. The silence was absolute, save for the rhythmic dripping of water from the cracked ceiling.
A young girl, barely ten years of age, wandered into the nave, her eyes drawn to the center of the altar. There, where the golden beam had once torn through reality,
