When the living Breaking
The veil was gone.
Torn.
Not lifted ripped open like old flesh. And now, the waking world began to remember the things it had buried. The unraveling didn't begin with screams.
It began with whispers.
In kitchens. In alleyways. In schools.
Children began humming songs they'd never learned.
Elderly men wept when they looked in mirrors recognizing long dead sons in the reflection behind them.
Streetlamps flickered at midnight, not from faulty wiring but from cold fingers brushing the glass.
Photographs moved when no one looked.
Graves pulsed like hearts. And breath fogged the air even in the heat.
The First Collapse
The town of Avenswell was the first to break..No one noticed the signs at first just little things.
Birds flying in spirals. Clocks melting at the edges. names erased from gravestones overnight. But then came the Day of Sinking.
At 3:06 PM, a school bus vanished mid-turn. No crash. No debris. Just gone. Replaced by a single rusted key with a tag that read.
Return what you have taken
That night, parents saw shadows under their children's beds whispering in familiar voices. Not monsters.
Not strangers.
Family.
But they weren't right.
Across the Sea
In a chapel in France, a priest screamed mid-sermon because every crucifix in the church opened its eyes.
In Moscow, a subway train emerged from a tunnel empty, except for a girl wearing a burial gown and humming the national anthem from 1917.
In Lagos, children in an orphanage began speaking in the voice of a soldier who died in a war that never officially existed.
Lucy's Orphanage: The Eye of the Storm Lucy hadn't slept.
Not in days.
The crown burned colder now.
Not on her head, but in her chest.
A part of her heart had turned to iron and with each spirit's breath, it beat harder, louder, heavier.
Miss Halley no longer left her room.
She sat at the window, scratching names into the glass with her fingernails. Names of children who had never been at the orphanage. Or had been a century ago. The other kids had stopped speaking.
They just stared at Lucy, Even Jessa. Like they knew something now.
Like they were waiting for something worse.
One morning, Lucy stepped outside. The sky was wrong. It had folded in on itself .like a sheet tucked too tightly. Clouds spun counterclockwise. Birds flew in reverse. The sun blinked. A man was kneeling in the street, screaming:
My father died at the se..he is knocking at the basement door.
A woman nearby whispered..My daughter died in the fire..but now she's in my photograph.
And then came the Tolling.
It wasn't a church bell.
It was the earth.
It rang out like a chime deep, low, impossible.
The sound made windows bleed.
Made skin crawl.
Made the trees weep ash.
It was a warning.
A countdow t
The Returners
By nightfall, the Returners came.
Not ghosts. Not illusions.
Corpses re-shaped by memory.
Some were kind. Most were not.
They walked through the towns they had once loved.
Whispered to old lovers.
Called out to their murderers.
Demanded justice.
Demanded names.
Demanded breath.
But they were not made for this world anymore.
Their presence cracked reality.
Dogs barked at empty air until their lungs burst. children were born with teeth and old souls.
And those who touched a Returner forgot who they were. Lucy stood at the heart of it all.
Her hands glowing faintly.
Her eyes slowly dimming.
The cost of her crown was rising.
And now... she felt something older stirring.
Not a spirit.
Not a Returner.
But something that hated the noise.
Something that wanted silence restored.
Its name came in peace
Throsk
The First silence
The warden below
It did not walk.
It slithered through grief.
And it was coming.
For Lucy
For the Returners.
For all memory that dared not stay buried.
Burn the Silence
The unraveling did not slow.
It multiplied.
Every hour, the boundary thinned not like a sheet being torn, but like skin blistering open from beneath.
Spirits were no longer just appearing.
They were speaking.
Loudly. Clearly. Sharply.
Some whispered names into people's ears until they forgot their own.
Others screamed old war cries in the streets invisible voices rallying armies that had died a hundred years ago.
One spirit stood in the middle of the town square, naked and eyeless, shouting
Where is my mother, Where is my name? WHERE IS MY GRAVE?
No one could silence him.
No one dared approach.
And those who heard him wept without knowing why as if remembering their own deaths
The Haunted Ones
The living began to change.
A baker in Lucy's town gouged flour into his arms, saying, I must bake for them again. I must finish what I failed.
A nurse fed pills to a grave.
Children drew chalk outlines around themselves and refused to move, whispering, This is where I died. This is where I sleep.
Lucy Bruised, Burned, Branded
At the center of it all Lucy
She hadn't eaten.
She couldn't sleep.
She bled from her nose every night at midnight, the exact moment the first spirit crossed into the world
Her back now bore sigils carved in sleep by hands not her own.
Words in dead languages.
A contract inked in pain.
The crown was no longer just inside her.
It had begun to appear, faint and white-hot, floating above her head like an unseen halo only the dead could see.
And they followed her.
Always.
One night, Lucy found herself walking in her sleep, barefoot, bleeding from her soles, into the forest.
There, around her. they gathered.
Hundreds.
All dead.
Not speaking.
Just staring.
And when she looked into their faces, she didn't see strangers.
She saw herself.
Versions of Lucy, older, younger, twisted, burned, drowned, starved.
Futures that never were.
They opened their mouths and spoke at once:
You called us. Now carry us.
Lucy fell to her knees, screaming.
And they just kept watching.
Chartered
Her body was no longer hers.
Her voice echoed when she cried.
Her veins turned grey when she grew afraid.
And whenever she closed her eyes
She dreamed other people's deaths.
A girl in chains, thrown in a river.
A boy lost in fire, searching for his name.
A mother hugging her baby as wolves closed in.
She felt them all.
Like they were hers.
Like she'd lived a thousand lives that all ended wrong.
The World Frays
Old clocks began ticking backward.
Graveyards hummed like beehives.
Schools closed after children reported that, the walls were talking.
A reporter died on air while reading a list of recently awakened dead.
Hospitals filled with people who hadn't died but should have.
And all around them, the Returners began to fracture.
Some grew jealous.
Some grew violent.
Some wanted Lucy dead, believing her to be the cause of their confusion, their pain, their inability to rest.
A spirit cornered her in the hallway of the orphanage.
It had no mouth, but its words echoed from its stomach.
You stitched us to the living. You broke the pact.
Lucy shook her head, crying.
I just wanted the forgotten to be seen.
And now we can't un-see them.
It reached for her.
Its touch burned not fire, but regret.
The Burn in the Earth
And beneath everything, Throsk stirred.
It did not speak in words.
It spoke in forgetting.
People who knew Lucy one moment would blink, and forget she existed.
Street signs vanished.
Memories rewound and erased.
A whole town near the coast forgot its own name.
The past was unraveling, eaten by a god that had never wanted the dead to speak.
The Breaking Moment
Lucy lay in the attic, shaking.
Her skin cracked like glass under pressure.
Her breath came in shards.
Around her, the walls pulsed.
The spirits gathered, not angry now, but lost.
They didn't know what they were anymore.
They weren't alive.
But they weren't dead either.
They looked at Lucy like she was the last door between worlds.
And some of them whispered:
Close it.
While others begged:
Keep it open. Let us breathe.
And Lucy?
She couldn't decide.
Because a voice, deep, warm, familiar, whispered in her ear.
Her mother's voice, long dead:
Sleep now, child. I'll carry the crown
But Lucy knew it wasn't her mother.
It was Throsk.
Wearing the memory like a mask.
Coming to claim her choice.
To bury her under the weight of the dead.