The stars had flickered only once.
To the ordinary people scattered across the world below the floating continents, it became nothing more than an unusual celestial phenomenon — the kind of thing that provoked conversation over evening meals and then was forgotten by morning. To the elders of the Celestial Academy, people who had spent decades understanding the movement of spiritual energy and the patterns of how reality organized itself, it was an omen. The kind of omen that arrived not with announcement but with the specific certainty of something that had been waiting for the right moment to arrive.
