The sun did not rise that morning.
The sky remained covered by an opaque gray, as if the world itself were holding its breath. A dense fog, laden with an inexplicable incense, coiled between the pillars of the sacred temple and the stone steps. Each step someone took seemed to drown in a heavy silence, as if the mist had swallowed the sounds of the world.
The monks remained motionless, their eyes fixed on something that seemed to defy the law of nature. They did not speak, did not pray; they only contemplated the solitary flower that had bloomed where nothing should bloom: right in the center of the path of the ancestors.
It was a lotus. Black as ash.
And it was... alive.
