The end of the world arrived in the flagstone-tiled courtyard of an unassuming abbey tucked into a backroad in a city grown around it. in a crowd of other children. They were the unclaimed children of the world, pulled so soon from the flotsam of storm-destroyed homes and wreckage torn like toys across the whole of Inlin Bay that their eyes still bore shadows of the storm; not fully realized still but inescapable beneath the glaze of shock.
Mafan sat down in the middle of a plant that smelled like something comforting and watched her future given to the watchers of the abbey-- "until their parents come for them," was promised like a certain thing. She watched the other children as if she stood very far away, and was studied back by equally distant eyes. It all felt very much like a dream.
