Chapter 72 - After the Flame

The world welled back like air into frozen lungs — sudden, and full of life. Lucian was on his back, looking up at a sky he hardly recognized. The molten red was gone, the seething golden veins that had pulsed overhead once like the arteries of some sleeping god. Instead, it extended a great blue arch, high and calm, with a streak of white cloud. It was quiet — not the creepy silence of time on pause, but the living quiet of nature at rest. And the kind that hummed with bees and rustled with unseen branches in the wind.