August 12, 2027
Humanity took its last breath.
At 8:47 AM GMT, the first nuclear mushrooms bloomed over the cities, their fiery caps unfurling in the predawn sky like monstrous flowers of the apocalypse. Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris—one after another, they ignited in blinding flashes, momentarily eclipsing the sun. The final explosions thundered exactly three years later, to the day, marking a bloody full stop in the history of the old world.
Three years of darkness. Three winters without sunlight, where snow fell black with ash and temperatures rarely rose above minus twenty. Three eternities in hell, where time lost all meaning, where days blurred into one endless today, where tomorrow might never come.
We thought we knew fear. We had watched wars on TV, read about disasters in newspapers, seen apocalyptic movies. How wrong we were. True fear is when the first acid rain sears your skin, turning faces into bloody masks. When you watch your child's flesh dissolve before your eyes, powerless to help. When metal crumbles like dust in your hands, and even weapons offer no protection. When you find a child's skeleton by a dried-up river, gnawed clean by starving neighbors, and realize—tomorrow, it could be you.
God was dead. Or maybe He never existed. We crawled through the ruins of cathedrals and mosques, clawing at stones with bloody stumps, praying without words because words had lost their meaning. But there was no answer. Only the radioactive wind howling through the hollow eyes of shattered altars, only the echoes of our voices bouncing back from the dark chasms of church crypts.
Then They came.
At first, we thought they were just mutants—victims of radiation. The first encounters were accidental, in the ruins of cities, in poisoned fields. Creatures that looked human… but weren't. Some walked on air as if gravity were a cruel joke, their feet barely touching the ground, leaving faint traces in the dust. Others stretched their limbs like rubber, arms and legs elongating dozens of meters, letting them climb rubble like spiders. Some lifted entire buildings with a touch, their fingers grazing concrete as multi-ton slabs floated upward like feathers.
Genomes. That's what we called them.
In their chests, between the third and fourth ribs, throbbed blood-red crystals—scarlet, almost black in certain light, the size of a child's fist. The first desperate souls, those with nothing left to lose, discovered that if you cut out a crystal and touched it, you could see the world through their eyes. But to do that, you had to kill.
And kill we did. First out of fear, when the first Genomes attacked our settlements. Then out of curiosity—What do they see? How does the world look to them? And finally, because the crystals became currency in this mad new world, harder than rotting banknotes or rusted coins.
There were others, too—those who kept their sanity but paid a different price. Those who controlled blood went blind. Those who read minds lost their voices. Those who healed aged before our eyes, their skin wrinkling, hair whitening and falling out in days. Minors, we called them. They sold their bodies, their souls, because in this new world, even madness was a privilege, reserved for those who could pay.
Ten years passed. Ten long years of hell. We stopped praying. We carved crystals from the living, traded organs for abilities, ate the flesh of those who once called us friends. We became worse than beasts—because beasts kill to survive, but we killed to feel, to remember, to feel anything in this dead world.
And then… we forgot.
It happened slowly. First, the details faded—dates, names, faces. Then entire events vanished. The war, the explosions, the ashen sky—all erased, as if someone had torn pages from the book of history. We couldn't remember who started the war. Who survived. Who lost. Only ruins remained. And us.
But we didn't surrender.
We built a new world from the wreckage of the old—homes from rusted cars, tools from bones, clothes from shredded billboards. We studied the crystals, found ways to use them without killing (though the price was steep). We tamed mutations, tried to understand their nature. We crafted our own truth because the old one no longer worked.
We wrote. On whatever we could—scraps of paper, chunks of plaster, our own skin. To remember. To prevent it from happening again. To let those who come after know what we endured.
Because the world didn't end. It simply began again, with new rules, new morals, a new truth.
May 4, 2040. That date stayed in our minds, though no one knew why. The day we forgot the apocalypse. The day our survival truly began.
But the worst was yet to come. Because when you forget the mistakes of the past, you are doomed to repeat them. When you erase the line between man and monster, you risk becoming what you fought. And when a new world is built on the bones of the old, there's always a chance those bones will rise again.
This is our story. Of those who survived. Of those who changed. Of those who became something more… or less than human.
This is the story of an end that became a beginning.
And a beginning that could become the end.
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The image for the chapter (just poke and there will be a comment from me with the attached image)
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