Night fell over the Imperial Palace with an almost unnatural silence, as if the world was holding its breath. Each shadow seemed deeper, each echo more prolonged. In the Tower of Eternal Knowledge, where scrolls and treatises of centuries accumulated like the heartbeats of the Empire, a thunderous crash broke the stillness: a fire roaring like a beast freed from its cage.
The fire was not ordinary; its blue flame and the smell of forbidden alchemy announced that this was no accident. It was deliberate, studied, precise. The ancient scrolls, witnesses to the glories and defeats of generations of emperors, burned in celestial flames, and history itself seemed to scream as it was consumed among sparks that danced in the air with beautiful and terrible violence.
