It had been raining for seventeen years.
Not the kind of rain that soaks fields or nourishes seeds,
but a quiet, stagnant drizzle—as if the sky had forgotten how to release or hold back.

The color of the world had blurred into tones of rust, ash, and dried bone.
The once-majestic rivers no longer flowed—they simply hung in place,
as though even water had grown tired of movement.

Erah walked through what remained of the city.
Or what used to be a city.
Now, it was a hollow maze of broken metal and bent glass,
where shadows had grown roots and silence breathed louder than voices.

People no longer kept time.
They no longer measured days or hours.
Time had become a flavorless repetition,
a cycle that spun without moving forward.

But Erah could feel it—something shifting behind the curtain of monotony.
A pulse, soft and deep,
beating beneath the crust of reality.

He followed that pulse through alleys swallowed by mist,
through rooms stripped of memory,
until he reached a collapsed tower—its tip bent like a dying finger pointing skyward.

There, beneath rubble and vines of black moss,
he found a glyph—etched not by hand, but as if the stone had grown around it.
The symbol shimmered faintly, not with light, but with absence.
A kind of void carved into shape.

As he touched it,
the world blinked.

Not a flicker of light,
but of sequence.

The rain paused.
The clouds stilled.
Even his heartbeat lost rhythm.

For the first time in seventeen years,
time took a breath.

And with that breath,
something opened.