"It didn't begin with fire. It began with silence."
They called it *The Shattering* — not a war, not a plague, not a natural disaster.
It was something else. Something older. Something that broke more than just the world.
The first time it happened, the skies didn't scream. They whispered.
Seventeen years ago, the *First Shattering* tore through reality like a blade through skin. No warnings. No mercy. One moment, the world breathed. The next, it bled.
A black rift opened in the sky — a jagged, seething wound that bled pure darkness. From it came the *Wraiths*. Creatures with no single form, born not from only flesh but of something deeper — destruction, sorrow, hatred, memory. Some towered like ancient gods, others slithered like fog. All of them... *hungered*.
They didn't just destroy cities. They unmade them.
No rubble. No remains. Just... absence.
Entire continents were erased in hours. Communications died. Borders dissolved. Time itself felt slower, heavier. The lucky died quickly. The rest lived in silence.
And then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
The rift sealed. The Wraiths vanished.
No reason. No warning. Just... gone.
The survivors called it a curse.
The historians, a reckoning.
The fools, a myth.
In the nine years that followed, mankind learned to exist in fear. Civilization became whispers and fragments — scattered enclaves living behind cracked stone and ancient defenses, surrounded by the bones of the old world. Electricity was rare. Guns jammed without reason. Radios only broadcast static.
Technology failed where the Wraiths once walked.
But the silence couldn't last forever.
The **Second Shattering** came without compassion.
Without restraint.
Without hope.
It began with a hum.
Low. Sickening. Endless.
The sky, once stained red from pollution, turned pitch black. Not like night — but like ink blotting out stars. Lightning crackled sideways. Animals fled in blind terror. Machines sparked, then died.
And then... the sky *split again*.
The rift was larger this time. It stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, a tear in the very idea of sky. From it poured the Wraiths — but not as before. These weren't mindless beasts. They moved with purpose. Some wore armor made of bone and ash. Others wielded weapons shaped like ancient blades or twisted instruments of torture.
They no longer resembled monsters.
They resembled executioners.
One city tried to fight back with old-world tech — , missiles, gunfire powered by pre-Shattering knowledge. They were wiped out in eight minutes.
Another city begged. Lit candles. Wrote Wraith type symbols almost like their language in blood and sand. The Wraiths never entered. They just stood outside, unmoving, as if *watching*... waiting.
And then the city collapsed from within.
Not all Wraiths attacked. Some observed.
Some whispered in unknown tongues that turned men insane.
Some left symbols — burned into stone, frozen in air, pulsing on the skin of the dying.
Scholars found patterns. Cults formed.
Some worshipped the Wraiths. Others hunted them in secret. A few believed they were not creatures at all, but messengers — sent to cleanse a world that had forgotten something.
Forgotten *what*, no one could agree on.
But everyone remembered the fear.
The Second Shattering left the world in ruins once more — but worse. The skies never fully healed. Storms hover above old battlefields. Shadows flicker without source. People vanish in their sleep, their final words choked in silence.
And above it all, the rift remains.
Unclosing. Unforgiving. Watching.
Humanity now exists on borrowed time — clinging to myths, fearing the day the sky splits a *third* time.
They say the Shattering wasn't an ending.
They say it was the knocking of something older.
Something beneath this world.
Something waiting to be answered.