Lena woke gasping, her lungs clawing for air as though she'd been drowning. She lay sprawled on cold, wet ground, her knife still clutched in her trembling hand. For a moment, she couldn't move. The world around her was wrong—silent yet buzzing, real yet unreal.
The forest was gone. The bunker was gone. Instead, she found herself in a vast, endless plain of shifting black glass. It reflected fragments of the sky above, where stars pulsed and warped, bending in impossible arcs. The air was heavy with static, every breath thick with metallic tang.
"Caleb?" she whispered, her voice cracking in the alien stillness.
No answer.
She staggered to her feet, her legs shaky. Panic surged through her veins as she spun in circles, scanning the glass plain. No Caleb. No bunker. Nothing but her and the vast horizon of shimmering black.
Then, the hum returned.
It started faintly, vibrating beneath her feet, then swelled until the entire world seemed alive with resonance. Lena dropped to her knees, clutching her head as the sound drilled into her skull. The plain cracked in front of her, a jagged fissure spreading outward like a wound in the earth. From its depths, a light pulsed—violet, cold, infinite.
And from that light, something rose.
It wasn't a creature, not in any way she could understand. It had form and yet no form, a shifting mass of tendrils and shapes, each one folding into another like smoke caught in a storm. Its presence was suffocating, not because it attacked, but because it existed. Just looking at it filled Lena with the overwhelming certainty that humanity was small, fragile, and temporary.
The voice returned, vibrating through the void.
"This world cracks because it was never yours. You are shadows born in dust, pretending at permanence."
Lena staggered back, her knife trembling in her hand though she knew it was useless. "What… what do you want from us?"
The thing pulsed, its void-like eyes—or were they mouths?—shifting toward her.
"We are hunger. We are truth. The fabric you cling to was stitched poorly, and now it unravels."
Her pulse thundered. "Then why me? Why show me this?"
There was silence, then a resonance so deep it rattled her bones.
"Because you still resist. Because you still hope. And hope is a thread we must cut."
The ground fractured beneath her, shards of glass rising into the air like broken mirrors. In their reflections, she saw flashes of her past: her father teaching her to fish, her mother laughing by a fire, her younger brother's hand slipping from hers the day the riftspawn came to their town. Each image cracked, splintered, and dissolved into darkness.
"No…" Lena whispered, reaching toward the shards as they dissolved into nothingness. "No, you can't take that from me."
"All things are taken. All things end."
The creature surged forward, its tendrils of light and shadow curling around her. Lena screamed, stabbing wildly with her knife. To her shock, the blade struck something solid, and for a brief instant, the creature recoiled, its form unraveling at the edges.
The plain shattered.
She fell.
And then—
Lena jerked awake.
The bunker ceiling loomed above her, the single bulb flickering weakly. Caleb was beside her, shaking her shoulder, his face drawn and pale.
"You stopped breathing," he said hoarsely. "I thought—God, I thought you were gone."
She sat up, gasping, her body drenched in sweat. The door to the bunker was whole again, no sign of the warping light, no alien voices. Had it been real? A vision? Or worse—a warning?
Caleb's eyes searched hers. "What did you see?"
Lena's lips trembled as she whispered the only truth she could cling to.
"They don't just want our world. They want what keeps us fighting."
Caleb frowned. "What do you mean?"
"They want our hope."