This is the epilogue of VOLUME 2. From next chapter, we will start Volume 3: The Impending Crisis.
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The world war 1 ended in the most spectacular way. One moment the world had been a landscape of ashes and screams; the next it was a world of people stumbling out of rubble and staring at one another with the same stunned question: how am I alive? They were whole, and they remembered everything.
Berlin was quiet in an honesty it had never known. Soldiers who had been ready to die for the Reich descended from their posts and ran their palms along buildings that had been ruined hours before as if testing for a fever.
In the Chancellery, men in grey uniforms moved like men waking from a long mandate of terror. Hitler's final act, the sudden, inexplicable repentance, the speech, the suicide, cut a line through the city that did not heal in a day.
His marshals carried the ghost of that last command in their heads: abandon the war; build a better nation. Many obeyed because obedience was easier than the questions left behind. Others obeyed because there was suddenly nowhere else to aim their fury.
Across continents, surrender came not as the thunder of campaigns but as a series of small, stunned gestures that rippled outward: a white flag hoisted at dawn; a radio voice breaking while announcing ceasefire; lines of armored vehicles idle in fields.
Whole divisions pressed down their rifles and, for the first time, noticed the people around them — the mothers with hollow eyes, the children who smelled of smoke, the old men who had watched every generation of their family go to war. There was no place for triumph.
Those who had expected parades found only the weight of mercy and the question that followed: what do you do with a second chance you never earned?
Cities that had been broken were rebuilt by hands that trembled. Men and women who had buried their children sat with them again and did not celebrate; they stitched the wounds of memory into daily life.
Londoners who had crouched in basements now swept soot from doorways and watched their children play as if play could banish the memory of a white flash.
New Yorkers walked along restored avenues and found the same barstool where they used to meet a lover now again warm with breath — and discovered that warmth did not erase the echo of the last time the world had nearly ended.
In Tokyo, parents who had watched empires of wood and paper vanish into flame now held their children until their arms ached, not trusting the future but compelled by a stubborn love to try anyway.
The camps came to matter in a way they had never been able to when death was an unproven rumor. Survivors of Auschwitz, of Treblinka, of places where human cruelty had been measured in bureaucratic precision, returned to the world with the same raw bewilderment.
They were alive and scarred, and when they spoke they were not pleading for vengeance but demanding memory. "Do not let this be undone by forgetfulness," they said. The courts could not pretend the crimes had not happened.
Nuremberg was different after the Miracle. The defense could not deny events whose victims now sat at the dock and testified. The judges, many of them fathers who had seen their own sons returned to them, listened with a monstrous gravity that matched the horrors recounted: train manifests, orders, the names and faces of those who had organized systematic murder.
The world watched as justice tried to stretch to include crimes that the universe had themselves briefly reversed — and found a stubborn, moral clarity. "Restitution," the prosecutors said, "is not simply to the dead but to history." Reparations were organized. Memorials were built. The lesson was written into law: restoring bodies did not erase responsibility.
In halls of power, the Miracle was the subject of prayer and fear in equal measure.
Roosevelt sat with his hands folded until his knuckles ached; he realized the war had been ended by mercy, not merely by the armies he commanded.
Churchill wrote letters in cramped script, trying to find the right phrase for a world that had been both killed and saved in a single day.
Stalin watched the sky and counted possibilities; he did not smile. Power looked different under the knowledge of what could be undone and what could not be unremembered.
For every leader the Miracle had touched, the immediate impulse was the same: to reframe what it meant to rule. If a single voice could save millions and then leave, what did that demand of the men who kept armies? The answer lay, awkwardly and stubbornly, in restraint.
The United Nations formed out of a different impulse than in the history people had once learned. The Covenant that followed the Miracle was drafted as an explicit promise: never again a world where human fire could match the destructiveness of the gods. It was not a fragile treaty of convenience; it was written with the sharp, sacred edge of what survivors felt: an obligation.
Representatives from Vonarland, from Eternia, from Moskva, from Greece — nations that had been changed by Edward's interventions ages ago and by his immediate miracle now, sat at the great table. Their presence had a strange authority. They had been recipients of centuries of Edward's direct influence; they had weapons and magics the rest of the world lacked, but they carried the miracle as a burden rather than a triumph.
"We will not rule you," a Vonarland elder told the assembly, voice low and steady. "We will only remind you why you must choose differently. That's the least we can do to honor him."
And remind they did. The Covenant placed prohibitions on certain classes of weaponry, created mechanisms for truth commissions, and required public memorialization of atrocities. It was a legal scaffolding of shame and hope in equal measure.
Science took a different path. The Manhattan Project men were not exiled for having invented nuclear weapons; many of them were haunted into humility. Their laboratories that had once been sealed for the creation of annihilation became places for healing.
Fusion work turned, in large part, toward clean energy. Nikola Tesla — older, clearer-eyed in this world because Edward had spared him a different fate, led the Order of Light, or rather Illuminati, a loose assembly of scientists and mystics that monitored and guided governments and universities on applications of power for civil use from .
He argued often fiercely and late into the night, that the first lesson of a miracle was prudence. The Order had no authority to enforce, only the moral authority of knowledge. That was enough most times.
In the 1950s and 1960s, investments once earmarked for bombs found their way into vaccines, into infrastructure, into irrigation.
The result was not utopia but steadier life: fewer pandemics, wider electrification, harvests that did not fail every few years.
Culture changed in the human places where memory lives: in songs, in plays, in the small rituals of everyday life. There were new liturgies, not always religious, that marked the Day of Light, a day when people of different faiths stood in town squares and celebrated the man who gave them a second chance.
Artists rejected abstract triumphalism. Painters put charred hands back on canvases, poems asked the unanswerable question "Why us?", and children learned the stories in school not as national myths but as human parables.
The Holocaust and the war was taught not only as history but as a charter of moral responsibility. Children practiced listening; they learned the words the survivors demanded: remember, witness, refuse.
The global political map bent in subtle directions. The Cold War, as it might have in another timeline, never fully defined the latter half of the century.
There were tensions — ideological disputes, regional conflicts, old enmities, but the threshold of mutual self-destruction had been seen and felt, and that restrained many impulses that would otherwise have spiraled.
Proxy conflicts still happened, but the specter of 1945 — the knowledge that whole cities could be erased and then painfully returned, made even the most war hungry soldiers pause.
Where American and Soviet leaders might once have calculated gains against the cost of armageddon, they now had the shared memory of a divine intervention and a human chorus demanding a different path.
Agreements on arms reduction came earlier and with greater public support. Nuclear stockpiles were treated as existential relics to be limited, not trophies to be grown.
New power centers emerged, political as well as cultural. Vonarland's Gungnir remained a deterrent, but its existence was now framed in public as a sacred task: never to be fired in anger, only ever to protect.
Moskva grew into a technical and moral force in the Eurasian north, using its resources to stabilize borders and feed crowded cities.
Greece, ancient and continuous without the Dark Age or wars that had once sundered its memory, became a center of philosophical rebirth. It's universities became a cradle for political thought that emphasized remembrance and restraint.
Eternia, for all its worship and strange rites, positioned itself as an exemplar of a different relationship to power; they would not impose, but they would also not share what they knew.
They adopted a more seclusionist policy compared to Vonarland. People could only walk through their lands if they held no malice. The magical barrier still protected them.
Not everything was noble. There was greed and fear. There were men and women who tried to instrument the Miracle for advantage, to harness public religiosity into political capital. Sects arose that called Edward a deity to be served, and cults that rejected him as a deceiver.
Governments fell into scandals when they were found to have tried to weaponize salvation. But the dominant currents of the century leaned toward reconstruction and repair. The public appetite for revenge ebbed into a steadier demand for justice.
Justice, when pursued, was slow and human and flawed but more consistent for being insisted upon by those who had been restored.
The survivors of the camps grew into the century as teachers and witnesses. Their presence in parliaments and classrooms turned abstract phrases like "never again" into living politics.
They argued, again and again, for law and memory — for museums on sites rebuilt but preserved as testimony, for education that taught both the mechanics of atrocity and the ordinary manners of cruelty that allow it to happen.
Their insistence was fierce: the Miracle returned our bodies; it did not give us amnesia. If anything, it made remembrance a kind of sacrament.
By the 1970s, a generation born after the Miracle began to ask its own questions. They were not the people who had crouched in cellars or watched trains pull away; they had clean hands, mostly, but they had inherited a culture that measured faith in the currency of accountability.
Universities taught "Moral Ethics": courses where students studied the legal and moral aftermath of being saved. Musicians whose parents had been revived wrote songs about second chances; some became anthems for the youth movements that demanded better housing and environmental care.
Technology served life: satellites launched for earth observation rather than targeted guidance, medical research pooled across borders rather than hoarded by states.
None of it made humanity pure. Mall scale wars still flared in places where old resentments never fully healed, in newly independent nations that stumbled toward self-rule. But none escalated without the whole world remembering how close it had been.
When a provincial war in the 1970s threatened to draw in major powers, an emergency council convened with representatives from Vonarland and Eternia alongside fearful diplomats.
The council proposed a transparency protocol: any extreme arms buildup required independent inspection and public justification. It was imperfect but it worked because no leader wanted to face the global shame of flouting the final mandate.
By the final decades of the millennium, the Miracle had taken on the hard softness of myth: spoken of in hushed reverence by some, invoked as moral leverage by others.
Pilgrimages to memorials were common. A child in Lagos could recite the names of those from Auschwitz as easily as she could the names of her grandparents.
A school in São Paulo had a memorial garden where children planted trees and read aloud promises to remember. In small towns and great capitals, people celebrated the Day of Light not with triumph but with silence and small acts of service. "Hope lies beyond despair," the old plea went, and communities tried to live like it.
In the early 2000s a man named Jonathan, who had been a boy when the world nearly died, stood atop a quiet hill in Greece, looking at the ancient altar dedicated to the Hero Edward, built more than 3000 years ago.
He carried his grandmother's story in his heart: how she had held him when the world burned and later watched him grow in a peace that had cost so many tears.
The man was not a leader, just a scientist before his accident, ordinary and unheroic, and yet he had the weight of that century in his lungs. He whispered as his eyes glowed, not to command or plead, but because the habit of prayer had entered the culture: "We will not squander it."
The words were simple and almost stupidly small compared to the world's history. But history is often moved by small things, by a man's humility repeated in the millions.
Across the world, towns named the Miracle in different tongues: a festival in Athens where old poets read lines about mercy; a quiet assembly beneath maple trees in Játvarðr where veterans set down their guns for the last time; an art exhibit in Manhattan where an artist painted a child's hand melting into a radio and titled it "Memory."
The past remained a wound; the new order built itself around tending that wound. Public laws enshrined transparency, truth, and the public remembrance of past crimes.
International courts found new strength by virtue of being asked to sit in judgment not only of deeds but also of the stories nations told themselves.
And in the quiet places — the small kitchens and hospital corridors, the fields where children learned to plant instead of drill — ordinary people carried the miracle not as a doctrine to defend but as an obligation to practice.
They fed strangers, taught literacy in rubble-cleared schools, and argued fiercely in town halls about whether their city should accept refugees. The answer in most places was yes, and the reasons varied: moral duty, the memory of being saved, the pragmatic fact that the world was safer when fewer people starved and learned.
That did not end sorrow. There were those who suffered quietly, parents who had watched children die twice in one lifetime — once to ashes and once in the nightmares of memory. They spoke rarely in public but were never far from the conversation in private. The world learned to hold their silence without trying to fill it.
By the time the century after the Miracle came to a close, the man who had vanished from the sky was no longer an immediate presence but a living absence.
Statues were debated, altars were refused by councils that feared idolatry. The last proclamation Edward had made, the promise of a final gift, the exhortation to choose peace had become a kind of civic scripture: read in parliaments, quoted in classrooms, muttered by old men who had once crouched in cellars.
The world had been changed not by one day of magic but by the way that day settled into the structure of human institutions.
On an evening in the sixth decade after the Miracle, a child looked up through the leaves of a tree in a city that had been rebuilt more than once, and asked his grandmother, "Do you think he sees us?"
Her grandmother had been a little girl during the war, had watched a neighbor vanish into ash, and later had held him as he lived again. She did not answer with certainty. Instead she took his hand and said, "Maybe. But even if he does not, we have to be the ones to keep the light." The child repeated the words like a promise.
That vow, small and stubborn, spread like a seed. It was not enough to keep the world perfect. It only kept the world trying. And perhaps that was the miracle's deepest legacy: not the restoration of bodies, but the remaking of will.
And just like that , the world welcomed another new millennium. Yet the questions remained. Where did the hero who saved the world disappeared to? Will he ever come back? Is he happy with the path humanity was walking?
Nobody had the answers.
Meanwhile, Edward was currently busy dealing with an annoying emo brat with a penchant for veangence.
***** Volume 2 ENDS*****
Soooo, how was it? Hope you enjoyed that. Let me know your thoughts on Comments.
Also, how many of you watched Gurren Lagann ? Do you know about it or the plot? I need to know to figure out some details.
We're halfway through for the milestone for first bonus chapter. Go crazy!