No one expected the end to begin in silence.
As humanity busied itself with the ordinary—work, war, love, loss—time moved forward, indifferent to our ignorance. We lived as we always had, never realizing just how fragile our world truly was.
Then, without warning, the sky cracked.
Not thunder. Not storm. A fracture.
A jagged scar tore across the heavens, slicing through a veil we never knew existed.
The animals knew first. They howled, scattered, lashed out at shadows only they could see. Their panic was primal, prophetic. Then the earth followed—trembling, groaning, awakening. Mountains shuddered. Oceans recoiled. Forests wailed. It was as if the world itself had remembered fear... and responded the only way it could: with violence.
And then the sky shattered.
Like stained glass under divine pressure, it splintered apart, revealing a vast and pulsing void. From that rift spilled threads—not wind, not light, but something else. Something alive.
They glowed. They shimmered. They were runes. Threads of meaning. Of magic.
Where they touched, they rewrote reality.
Monsters followed. Born of nightmares and impossibility, they plummeted from the sky like living meteors. They did not land—they crashed. They tore into cities, into streets, into people. Buildings crumbled. Blood soaked the ground. Humanity ran, screamed... died.
And nature? Nature did not mourn. Nature fought.
Awakened by some buried instinct, the world turned against the invaders—and against us. Mountains erupted. Trees twisted into weapons. Lightning hunted indiscriminately. The skies became wild, and the seas more savage.
There was no mercy. Not for monsters. Not for mankind.
The threads had already begun to weave themselves into the fabric of all things.
Fear became the new global currency.
Governments either collapsed or clung to each other in desperation. Borders faded. Flags meant nothing. There was no time for politics when reality itself was tearing apart at the seams. The sky, the sea, even gravity—none of it followed the rules anymore. Something older, stronger, colder had taken hold. A greater order, alien and absolute.
But if nothing else, humanity is stubborn.
In our desperation, we turned to the very thing that broke us.
Through sleepless nights, through fire and failure, we learned to bind the threads—to cage them, twist them, weaponize them. From that madness came machines, war engines, miracles. But more than anything else, from the threads was born something new.
The Veilers.
Children bred with runes in their blood. Humans reforged into vessels for magic itself—able to bend the very threads that once tore our world apart. They became our sword and our shield, our last hope... and our quiet fear.
Because this new era did not bring peace. It brought power. Uncertainty. And questions no one dared answer.
It all began with a single event—whispered like myth, feared like prophecy.
We called it the Shattering.
But the terror didn't end there. What followed was worse. It was smarter.
The survivors called it the Shift Phase.
At first, hope tried to return. The world seemed to exhale. Days passed where the sky was clear, the air calm, and the monsters silent. Blue above. Green below. For a fleeting moment, people believed the worst had passed.
They were wrong.
Because the world had changed. And it no longer cared for logic or mercy.
Without pattern or warning, what began as an ordinary day would fracture. The air would thrum with wrongness. Shadows would glitch. Colors would bleed into each other. Buildings would groan with no wind. Reflections would move out of sync.
Then everything would twist. Shift. Tear.
Reality would collapse.
The world itself would transform.
What followed became known as the Layers. Two distinct realms. Two states of existence, forever at war. One would be the Stable Layer—a brief respite where life could almost feel normal again. People would go about their daily lives. Cities would rebuild. A sense of peace would try to settle, but it was always fleeting. The air would feel lighter. The sun would shine. But even in these fragile moments, something felt wrong. Something out of place. A quiet hum in the air. A warning that the world was never quite as it seemed.
And then, with no warning, the world would fracture again.
The Broken Layer.
The shift was violent. One moment, everything was as it had been—safe, calm—and in the next, everything tore apart. The air would shimmer with distortion. Buildings would collapse. People would vanish without a trace. Time itself would splinter, twisted by whatever force ruled this new reality. Gravity would warp, crushing anything in its path—or, in the most dangerous cases, erasing gravity entirely, throwing everything into anti-gravity chaos.
Storms, Spellstorms, would appear, twisting magic into monstrous forms—acid rain, lightning that could burn reality itself, and the most terrifying of all: gravity storms, where entire cities were lifted and crushed in moments.
Every shift was different. Every Broken Layer was its own nightmare.
There were no rules. No way to predict when one phase would end and the other begin. Only signs. Glitches in the world's fabric. Strange flickers in the sky. A hum that started faint, then grew louder. And then, the shift would come.
A new world. A new nightmare. A new fight.
It was no longer a question of if. Only when.
The Shift Phase was a war with no end, no escape. And for humanity, there were only two choices: adapt or perish.
There were signs, yes—but they were cruelly subtle or dangerously late.
A sudden glitch in the sky—brief, like a screen flickering in and out. Shadows that lagged behind their sources. Objects that trembled without being touched. But the worst sign of all, the omen that silenced even the bravest, was the arrival of a Spellstorm.
These storms defied comprehension.
The most common brought acidic rains that dissolved steel and bone alike. Others inverted the very rules of existence. Some reversed time within bubbles. But the most feared of all was the Gravity Weather—where space bent itself, crushing everything in its radius or, in the cruelest twist, eliminating gravity altogether, casting entire cities into the air only to let them fall when the storm passed.
No place was safe. No moment was certain. People lived between realms—between peace and ruin.
And beneath it all, the threads pulsed, whispering of deeper truths yet to be known. Of something...watching.
The world now exists between two realms—one of memory, and one of nightmare. And it is said, by those who whisper in the ruins, that the threads still hunger. That the sky is not yet done breaking. And that the worst of it… is still to come.
At least, that is what human civilization has knowledge of—for now. Who knows what other terrors will emerge in time? Will we evolve to face them? Or will the world break first… before we are given the chance to fight for our future?