The air in the old train yard was a solid, suffocating mass of despair. They were the forgotten, the ones the Plague Cannon had touched indirectly-those who had drunk from the poisoned reservoir or inhaled the drifting spore-clouds from the Granary District. They weren't the rapidly mutating horrors caught in the beam's direct path, but they were dying nonetheless. Their skin was mottled with the same phosphorescent lichen, their lungs filled with the same rotten-honey fluid, their blood turning to a sluggish, septic sludge.Amelia moved through them, her medical bag empty, her knowledge useless. It wasn't a sickness of bacteria or virus. It was a sickness of reality, a metaphysical poison. Her herbs could not fight it; her scalpels could not cut it out. All she could do was hold hands and watch the light die in their eyes.A mother clasped her infant, both speckled with the glowing fungus. The baby's cries were weak, wet gurgles. "Please," the woman rasped, her eyes locking onto Amel

The dawn did not bring light, only a gradual lessening of the oppressive dark. A cold, damp mist clung to the ruins of the train yard, muffling sound and painting the world in shades of grey. In the hollowed-out train carriage, Amelia lay as she had for hours, a pale, motionless effigy. Her breathing was the only sign of life, a shallow, fragile rhythm that seemed to defy the stillness of death itself. Leo stood guard at the doorway, a statue of grim vigilance, while Anya maintained her silent watch inside, her face etched with the helplessness of a healer with no cure.Before, the camp had been buoyed by the miracle of the Healing Inferno, but now it was adrift on a sea of dread. A glimpse of their fallen queen had smothered the small, bright flame of hope. Whispers swirled desperate and full of fear:"What do we do now?"“The Council will find us here.”“Without her, we’re nothing.”“We should scatter. Go to the ground.”The old fractures were reopening, wider and deeper than before

It began, not with a sound, but with a silence. A sudden, profound void where the Obelisk's low, pervasive hum had been for centuries. A silence so deep it was louder than the war, a negative space sucking the air from lungs and the purpose from actions. On the ridge, the Plague Cannon's operators paused, their fingers hovering over firing controls. In the ruined train yard, rebels and victims of the new corruption froze mid-flight, their heads turning as one towards the city's heart.And then the sound came. A deep, grinding shriek of tortured stone, a sound held in check for millennia and now being unleashed. It was the sound of the world's spine breaking.High atop its seamless black surface, the hairline fracture—the wound Amelia had first seen weeks ago—blazed with the intensity of a newborn star. The sickly weeping glow was gone, replaced by a furious white-hot light. The fracture spiderwebbed, branching out in a chaotic lightning-fast lattice across the Obelisk’s face. The anci

The shards at her belt were a comforting weight, a constellation of recovered selves. With each one she had gathered, a sliver of warmth had returned to her veins, a fragment of memory to her hollowed mind. She could now stitch a wound with steady hands again, and could brew a fever-reducing tea from memory. But she was a mosaic, not a monument. The roaring, all-consuming fire of the Healer Queen was gone, replaced by the careful, gathered light of a lantern in a vast dark.It was this new, quieter Amelia that stood before the stump of the Obelisk.The great spire was no more. What remained was a jagged, blackened tooth jutting from the earth, its peak a chaotic mess of crystalline facets where it had shattered. But it was not dead. Power, vast and ancient and wounded, throbbed from it like a dying heartbeat. The air around it hummed with a potential that was both terrifying and sorrowful.She had come here alone, drawn by the same instinct that had guided her to the shards. This was

The light did not fade so much as it was absorbed. The silent, crystalline wave of Amelia’s final sacrifice washed over the capital, through its stones and its people, and then it simply… settled. It seeped into the foundations, into the water, into the very air, becoming a part of the city’s new, clean reality. The hum of the Plague Cannon was gone. The rattle of the Weeping Pox was gone. The pounding of war drums and the screams of the dying were gone.A profound unearthly silence fell.In the street where it had ended, Leo and Sophia stood frozen. Before them, the Purge Trooper sat on the ground, weeping quietly into his hands, a broken man remade by a grace he could not comprehend. The young boy slept peacefully beside the body of his mother, his small chest rising and falling in an untroubled rhythm, his mind mercifully shielded from the horror he had witnessed.And Amelia was gone.There was nobody there. No glowing ember. No trace. Where she had stood, the air itself seemed dif