In a blink, the vision retreated.

In a blink, the vision retreated.

The delegates found themselves back in the General Assembly Hall, but the air was different. The microphones were active again, but no one reached for them. The delegates looked at the flags of their nations—the red, the white, the blue, the gold—and for the first time, they looked like mere scraps of cloth.

Outside, the city began to roar back to life, but the people who had been in that room walked out into the streets not as diplomats, but as pilgrims. The "United Nations" had ended not by a vote, nor a war, but by the shattering of its necessity.