It started with a humming.

It wasn’t the sound of transformers or old cables; it was deeper, more deliberate, like a heartbeat under the pavement.

For a second, the streetlights along the industrial strip by Elland Road flared white, then dipped to amber. Every CCTV camera froze on the same frame.

03:03 a.m.

Inside the warehouse; once a factory, now a haven for those who’d run out of sects to swear to; the night had been quiet.

Two dozen of them sat around a mismatched collection of chairs, the air heavy with ash and the faint iron scent of stored blood.

Then the humming began.

One of the elders, a woman with silver-thread hair, raised her head sharply. “Do you feel that?”

Nobody answered. The sound was inside their skulls now, a pulse that made teeth ache.

Someone tried to open the steel door. Before he could even react, the handle had seared his skin.

Outside, frost bloomed across the windows in intricate spirals. A moment later they ignited; not shattered, but burned, edges curling like paper. The flame rolled across the ceiling in complete silence before sound caught up, bursting into a roar that shook the city’s fabric.

On the opposite side of the road, a man in a long coat stopped and turned toward the blaze.

For a heartbeat the reflection of fire lit his face; calm, unreadable, the smoke haloing him like a saint’s crown.

Then he walked on.

By the time the fire engines reached the site, the roof had collapsed. The heat was wrong; too clean, too controlled.

One firefighter swore he heard voices in the static of his radio: a chorus whispering the same word over and over.

Concord.

When the flames finally died, the ruins still glowed faintly blue, the air humming with residual charge.

Under the charred floorboards, something metallic pulsed once, slow and steady, like a sleeping heart.

And as the first engines pulled away, every clock in the city blinked from 03:03 to 03:04, as if nothing had happened.