Dawn arrived over the Imperial Capital with the indifference of something that doesn't know what it's illuminating.
Golden light crossed the repaired arena floor, found the fresh stone where yesterday's cracks had been filled, moved across the platforms where workers were completing the final adjustments before the officials arrived. Everything looked correct. The National Championship Finals would resume this morning, and the people preparing for that resumption moved through their tasks with the ordinary purposefulness of individuals who understood what they were doing and why.
None of them knew what had happened to reality the day before. None of them felt the healed fractures in the timeline the way you feel a badly set bone — functional, but wrong in a way that announces itself under pressure. The capital was waking up and preparing for a tournament, and the gap between what it knew and what was true was vast enough to be its own kind of tragedy.
