The gold light did not fade gently. It vanished, a snuffed candle in the vast, dusty dark, leaving a blindness deeper than night. The afterimage of the dome—a perfect, incandescent hemisphere holding back a mountain—was burned onto every retina. But it was the silence that truly defined the moment. The roar of collapse was over. The shouting was over. Even the panicked breathing had hitched, caught in forty-one throats.
All that remained was the faint, blue glow from the orb far below, painting the edges of the new rubble pile in cold monochrome. The source of the sun that had just briefly been born and died was me, on my knees with my head bowed in the center of our huddled group on the landing.
Me.
