POV: Guildmaster Yorrik Venn
The first sign wasn't the light.
It was the absence of it.
Color bled from the horizon. The kind of light that should've meant sunrise didn't arrive. Instead, everything beyond the fourth dune line turned pale, washed-out—bleached, like the sun had looked down and changed its mind.
Atop the high terrace of the Flame Citadel, Yorrik Venn gripped the railing with fingers already too tight for comfort. The edge of his gauntlet clicked once against carved obsidian. Then again. He didn't stop it.
His breath left a thin trail of mist as the desert wind rolled up from below.
Solmark's sand, usually gold, now glittered silver under the shifting hue. It wasn't snow. It only looked like it. The air bent in the wrong places, like heat distortion without the heat. Shapes moved at the edge of vision and failed to cast shadows.
