The end began with silence.
Not war, not fire, not thunder. Just... silence.
One morning, the skies over England cracked like glass, and the world changed forever.
Nuel had been asleep when the first rupture tore across the clouds. He'd woken not to sirens, but to stillness—eerily thick and unnatural. No birds. No traffic. No hum of civilization. Just the buzz of his alarm, obliviously chirping away like it didn't know the world had stopped turning.
He silenced it with a slap and stared at the ceiling of his tiny flat in Derby. A headache throbbed behind his eyes. The dreams had come again—hazy, broken images of people he couldn't remember but knew he'd once loved. Faces blurred by time and pain. A woman's voice whispering his name. A hand slipping from his own into shadow.
He sat up, rubbing his face.
That's when the sky growled.
It wasn't thunder. It was something beneath thunder. A deep, resonant vibration that settled into his bones. Then came the light—purple, searing, unnatural. It bled through the curtains and cast long, twitching shadows across the floor.
He moved to the window and pulled the curtain aside.
Above the city, the sky had torn open.
It wasn't just a storm or an eclipse. It was a fracture. A jagged line of light stretching across the heavens, pulsing with energy. Around it, the clouds twisted unnaturally, spiraling like they were being sucked into something beyond sight.
Nuel's breath caught.
And then the screaming began.
Chaos unfolded in moments. People poured into the streets. Lights failed. Signals died. Gravity flickered, then shifted. Buildings groaned as if the earth itself was adjusting.
Nuel didn't have time to grab much. A coat. His phone. A dusty backpack he hadn't touched since university. Something told him this wasn't going to be a short outage or a freak storm.
He didn't know where he was running. Only that staying meant death.
The ground cracked behind him as a nearby street buckled. A swirling rift burst from the pavement, spewing violet energy that warped the air and tore apart anything it touched. Cars crumpled like tin. Trees twisted into alien shapes. People—
He couldn't look.
He ran.
Weeks passed.
Civilization unraveled faster than anyone could've imagined. Governments failed. Communication fell silent. The Fracture—the name people gave the rupture in the sky—never closed. Instead, it grew.
And with it came things.
Creatures that didn't obey the laws of this world. Shadows with eyes. Winds that whispered in languages no human should understand. Some places were swallowed whole. Others changed, as if rewritten by another reality.
They called it the First Fracture.
And Nuel survived it.
Barely.
Now, six months later, he stood in the ruins of a service station on the outskirts of what used to be Nottinghamshire, backpack slung over one shoulder, crowbar in hand. Dust clung to his jacket. His hair had grown unruly, his beard rough. He hadn't seen a real mirror in weeks.
He moved cautiously, eyes scanning for movement. The creatures didn't always make sound when they approached. Some stalked in silence, watching. Waiting.
He found a half-empty can of beans and pocketed it. It wasn't much, but it'd do.
As he turned to leave, he caught his reflection in a shattered window—just a flash. And in that moment, the same dream surged back. The hand. The voice. The woman crying his name.
Why did it always feel real?
He shook it off and stepped outside.
The sky above was dull grey now, but the Fracture still pulsed faintly across the clouds, like a scar that refused to heal.
Nuel adjusted his backpack and started walking again.
He didn't talk much anymore. Most survivors didn't. Talking meant trusting, and trust got you killed. People had changed as much as the world had. Some were desperate. Others... twisted.
He'd seen enough betrayal to know that even now, when humanity should've stood together, greed and fear still won.
Still, some helped. There were groups trying to understand the Fracture. Scholars. Fighters. The Awakened.
He wasn't one of them.
He was just surviving.
But lately, things had shifted.
He could feel it—like static under his skin. Sometimes objects near him trembled. Lights flickered when he stepped into a room. Dreams bled into waking life.
And that morning, he'd woken with something in his pocket he hadn't put there.
A disk.
Smooth. Black. Warm to the touch.
No writing. No markings. But when he held it, it pulsed with energy, like it knew him.
And that scared him more than anything.
Because it meant something had found him.
As the sun began to set, casting blood-orange light over the shattered horizon, Nuel reached the edge of a forest that hadn't been there before the Fracture. The trees were wrong—too tall, bark too dark, branches curling like claws.
But something pulled him toward it.
A whisper on the wind.
"Nuel…"
He froze.
No one had said his name in months.
He looked around.
Nothing.
Only wind. Trees. And the sky above, humming with the faint thrum of broken reality.
His grip tightened on the disk.
For the first time since the world fell apart, Nuel didn't feel alone.
And that terrified him.
But it also gave him something he hadn't felt in a long time.
Purpose.