The fall of modern Europe did not come with bombs or armies. It came with a whisper of displaced air and a subtle, wrong-color shift in the morning light. It happened simultaneously, at precisely 8:00 AM local time, in three beating hearts of the continent.
London
James, a banker glued to his Bloomberg terminal in a glass skyscraper, saw the numbers first. All the screens in the open-plan office flickered, went black for a single, heart-stopping second, and then lit up again. But instead of market data, they displayed a single, pulsating rune—the same one for Tyranny that had been carved on an obsidian coffin. He tapped his keyboard. Nothing. He pulled his smartphone from his pocket. A dead, dark brick. A collective murmur of confusion began to rise, punctuated by shouts from the trading floor below.
