Everything changed, not slowly, not softly. It was as if reality exhaled and forgot to inhale again. It lasted sixty-three seconds. Sixty-three seconds where the sun once the center of time, life, and truth vanished without warning. Not an eclipse. Not an atmospheric illusion. It simply ceased to shine. Astronomers couldn't explain it. Satellites stopped responding. The stars didn't shift they froze, as if some unseen script had paused the cosmos.
The Earth stopped turning. Not gradually. With a terrible stillness, tectonic momentum halted mid-cycle. Tidal forces collapsed. A silence fell deeper than death. Then, the scream of nature tore the heavens.
In the east, oceans rose in walls of salt and rage, swallowing coastlines in minutes. In the west, the absence of solar warmth cracked the air itself, sending spirals of frost blooming like dead flowers across once-living fields. Magnetic forces flickered and bled auroras, dancing in colors no eye was meant to see.
But the horror wasn't in the storms or the silence. It was in the narrative. People reported... Threads. Glimpses of glowing, silver lines that hung in the air barely visible as if connecting people to places, objects, even ideas. And somewhere, in the deep skies over collapsing cities, a loom turned once, and then again, and again. Fate had awakened.
Not as prophecy. Not as destiny. But as structure, as a being. Something behind reality had become aware of its story, and with its awareness, it began to write back, and from the part of the sky where the sun had disappeared, some reported seeing something else.
Not a shape. Not a creature. A wrongness. A hole (a black hole but it wasn't pulling the planets towards it) that was somehow full of presence. Something that watched but cast no gaze. Something the silver lines itself recoiled from, leaving its threads loose around it.
The oldest religions called it the Shadow of Becoming. Scientists called it data corruption in spacetime. Poets whispered of a second fate rejected by the world.
But children, the ones born after, would come to know that ripple by its silent name in the era of arcborne.