Lucien stood beneath the fractured archway of the ancient observatory, perched high above the sleeping metropolis, his coat tugged lightly by the wind as though it wished to drag him back from the precipice of understanding.
The sky above shimmered with subtle distortions, shapes and lights that once might have been dismissed as tricks of tired eyes, but now could no longer be denied. Silver glitches, fragmented and pulsing, blinked with a rhythm that suggested intelligence, a quiet heartbeat spread across the canvas of night like fractured stars asserting their presence.
This was not a shift in the world around him. The stones of the observatory, the rooftops stretching below, even the distant thunderclouds that stirred at the horizon remained as they had always been. What had changed
