The silence went wrong before anyone understood why.
It wasn't the ordinary silence of the shrine, the held-breath quiet that came before something moved. This silence had a texture to it, thick and airless, the kind that pressed against the eardrums instead of merely occupying them. Lin Yue noticed it first in the smoke.
It had stopped.
Not slowed, not thinned, but stopped, mid-curl, a black ribbon frozen in the exact shape it had held the instant before, as though someone had reached into the world and simply switched off whatever force made things move. The Mourning Mother's veils hung suspended above her half-raised arm, the fabric caught in a fold it should never have been able to hold on its own, gravity apparently no longer interested in claiming it.
