The Darkened Sun

It wasn't a solar eclipse.

Eclipses pass. This didn't pass.

Scientists measured it at dawn on the fourth day after the water crisis. The sun rose — but only to two-thirds of its normal brightness. Not dimmer. Literally smaller.

A third of its light was simply gone.

The moon that night gave two-thirds of its light. The stars — a third of them invisible, not blocked, not clouded over. Gone from their positions.

And the third part of the day shone not, and the night likewise.

Days shortened. Not because the earth had changed its rotation. Something else.

Crops that had survived the fire and the hail started failing under the reduced light. The cold that came with partial darkness crept into regions that had never known hard winters.

But the visible impact was almost secondary.

What the darkness did to people was worse.

There is something in human beings that needs full light. Full days. The confidence that the sun will rise completely, will arc fully across the sky, will set when it's supposed to.

When that broke, people broke with it.

Depression spread faster than any disease. The suicide rates in the darker regions tripled within a month.

The leaders held conferences. Offered explanations. Proposed solutions.

Nobody believed them anymore.

Because this was the fourth thing. The fourth extraordinary judgment in sequence.

And even the people who had refused to call the first three supernatural were starting to lose their other explanations.

The sky itself was being dimmed. And nobody upstairs had asked for permission.

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