The sky above the kingdom had stopped moving.
No clouds. No wind. Not even the subtlest shift in light. As if time itself had frozen, held in suspension by a fear no instrument could record. Satellites went dark. Clocks lost their rhythm. Data vanished the moment it was captured.
And no one knew why.
In those first days, chaos was quiet. A generator would shut down for no reason. An observatory recorded images that no longer matched any known laws of physics. Scientists, skeptical at first, began speaking only in whispers, unable to craft a coherent theory. The enemy wasn't coming from the sky. Nor from the ground. It wore no armor, carried no banner. But it was there, everywhere, in the numbers, in the air, in the fabric of matter itself.
