There was a sunrise once. Pale, courteous, routine. Barely a whisper of warmth under grey clouds that had not yet learned to grieve. Days like these were ordinary in the Foundation. Ritual clocks ticked between containment breaches and resource audits. A breeze slipped through corridors of reinforced steel and concrete, not quite gentle, not quite cruel, just indifferent.
By all accounts, the morning began like any other.
But the world had been muttering truths we had not wanted to hear.
In the control rooms of Site 17, technicians sipped cold coffee while monitors blinked with monotonous life. Notifications stacked in neat queues. Emails filed themselves into oblivion. No alarm yet pierced the predictable hum of fluorescence. Somewhere, a janitor hummed a tune no one could place. Somewhere else, a cell door hissed shut behind a tired D Class with no idea what the next hour might hold.
If anyone paused long enough to read the clouds, they might have sensed the shift, the bruised violet at the edges, the way it clung to the sky like a warning.
At 08:17 Foundation Standard Time, everything changed.
They say an event rewrites truth. They say it fractures worlds. They say it humbles gods and rends the seams of stability. They say these things in magazine footnotes, in dusty academic journals with titles no one outside the esoteric circles reads.
But the ones who lived it, those who stared into the unmade heart of catastrophe, remember how quiet it was first.
No screams. No explosion. Just the steady beat of lives unwinding like fraying threads.
Containment protocols ruptured. Alarms blossomed into screams of steel. Messages that should never have been sent were broadcast to civilian airwaves. Emergency tones warped into frequencies never meant for human ears. Across buried archives and forgotten vaults, ancient horrors stirred, answered the call, and stepped into morning light.
At 08:17, the world did not end with a bang.
It twisted.
It sighed.
It became something unforgivingly beautiful in its ruin.
And within that fragile fracture, five souls found themselves stumbling forward, unmoored, unprotected, and unmistakably alive.
This is their day.
This is their undoing.
This is The World Gone Beautiful.