The Shrouding

We do not speak of the night the world changed — we speak instead of the years that followed, for memory itself recoils from the beginning.
The scholars name it The Shrouding, though none can say who first whispered the word. It was not a war, though kingdoms burned. It was not a plague, though the dead walked in numbers that eclipsed the living. It was not a storm, though the skies wept ash and the seas swallowed entire fleets whole. 
Something was unmade. 
The bells rang in every cathedral at once — though no hands pulled their ropes. Livestock refused their feed. Dogs howled until their throats bled. The sun dimmed, not darkened, but dimmed, as though the world had been placed beneath mourning cloth. 
And then the silence came. 
For seven days and seven nights the wind did not move. 
In that stillness, graves split. 
What followed was not immediate ruin — that would have been mercy. Instead, it was a slow drowning of hope. Borders collapsed. Faith fractured. Ancient wards failed as though their makers had never existed. 
Some speak — quietly — of champions who vanished that night. Of a final stand never witnessed. Of a covenant broken not by malice, but by miscalculation. But such tales are dangerous, and the Church of the Veil forbids speculation on “the precipitating cause.” 
We are told instead that the age simply turned. 
That this was destiny. 
Yet the oldest among us remember something else. 
They remember that before The Shrouding, dawn felt different. 
Brighter. 
As though the world had once believed it would be saved.

Author unknown — believed written approximately 38 years after The Shrouding