... | Searching For- Blacked April Dawn In-

“Maryam Voss! Your son is here! The dawn is breaking! Come home!”

The phrase arrived in fragments, as all truly important things do.

April light flooded the Hollow City. Brick crumbled to dust. The telegraph machine screamed once and fell silent. I was standing on an empty beach, knee-deep in freezing water, as the sun rose clean and gold over a normal bay.

He wasn’t looking for treasure, or glory, or answers.

The end.

“You search for it,” he’d said, his eyes clear for the first time in months. “Not the city. The dawn. The one that was blacked. You find that morning, you find everything.”

I read it three times. Then I understood what my father had been searching for, what he had given me the key to find.

And then, the black.