On a stair where no light has failed in nine hundred years, one lamp goes out.

The war arrives as paper first, then as armies: a claimant house marching on a claim twenty centuries old, a crown that has mistaken the nature of the ground, a church splitting along the oldest seam in its doctrine. Every power in the east converges on a city that none of them can hold, because the city is deciding, lamp by lamp, name by name, that none of their hands are clean enough to hold it.

And out of the high east, along roads still marked in a script older than any kingdom, everything the world forgot begins to return. The wolves are moving. The mountain has opened what it buried. The old bloodlines wake to what they were bred for.

The Era of Return was never a prophecy about a god.

One lamp does not announce an ending.
It announces that endings have resumed.