Ten years ago, something forced its way into our world.
Vast and silent, a blade of white energy descended, cleaving the heavens in its path. Its brilliance swelled with every passing second, and the air around it shimmered, bending the sky as if reality itself had yielded in quiet surrender. Below, the distant sun dipped peacefully beneath the curve of an orange horizon, oblivious to the spectacle above.
On the busy city streets, amid buildings, billboards, and bustling vendors, hearts pounded against bodies frozen in place. From their perspective, it was far away, yet unmistakable,a comet falling in perfect silence, a ribbon of light unfurling across the sky, humming in a key no human ear could ever perceive.
Then came its detonation of light: not a flash, but a pulse that tasted of molten honey and metallic ozone, rippling across the planet, tearing through clouds and atmosphere alike.
Fishermen hovered above Pacific swells.
Shepherds froze mid-step across vast grasslands, staffs half-raised as flocks stood silent around them. Wild animals paused on sunlit savannas. Scientists remained motionless in Antarctic outposts, eyes wide behind fogged visors, caught in the same blinding instant.
From pole to equator, across oceans and mountains, through cities and deserts, no place was untouched by the Fragments—iridescent shards that whispered as they fell after the ripple, like luminous snow, each one glowing softly from within.
The world ignited with colors no language had ever named: violets bleeding into crimson wounds, molten golds rippling like living auroras, the very air itself humming in a tone older than memory.
I was a child then, hands dusty from playground gravel, laughter still on my lips, staring up, witnessing the impossible.
When the Fragments touched me, I stared at my hands as they settled into my skin, dissolving seamlessly.
The sensation was pure warmth without heat, weight without pressure, sound without noise. Without words, it sang a lullaby older than memory, woven from dreams never spoken, yet somehow always remembered.
No place escaped the mark.
They touched everything.
Everyone—without exception.
It chose us. Or perhaps we chose it. Either way, nothing would ever be the same.
From where I stood, the world hung alone—small, fragile, blue, exposed. Clouds froze mid-curl, oceans turned to sheets of glass, and every ripple of motion ceased.
Continents lay bare, their scars etched quietly across the living sphere, each city a faint constellation beneath unblinking skies.
A suspended silence wrapped the planet itself—time holding its breath, as though the earth were trying to remember the memory of that light.
It was no longer a home only a delicate mote drifting through endless dark, briefly illuminated, briefly noticed.
In the weeks that followed, when life had returned to a semblance of normal, yet the occurrence still haunted memory, some awoke… changed.
Powers stirred within them—forces that shattered the old limits of what it meant to be human.
Most were twisted by unchecked desire: some burned others' property just to watch it fall, others enslaved the innocent for amusement, and a few sought power so great it could bend the world to their whim.
Darkness didn't arrive; it was invited.
And the world cracked under its own weight.
And my parents… I lost them to that chaos when I was fifteen. Their deaths left a wound I could never heal.
I could not bear to watch the world crumble—innocent lives crushed beneath powers they never asked for.
The moment I gained my own, fear and anger flared—sharp, bright, impossible to ignore. But I did not let them take control. I steadied them, shaping the energy into purpose, channeling it toward the world that needed me.
I stood. Because doing nothing was no longer an option. I became a hero.
I threw myself into the fight, again and again, striking down those who twisted their powers into instruments of cruelty.
Each battle left scars—on the world, on others, on me—but I told myself the cost was worth it.
I fought so that the wounds they inflicted might one day heal, so that fear could be replaced by safety, so that trust might return where it had been shattered, and compassion could rise from the ashes of terror.
Every strike, every sacrifice, was for a world that could still remember what it meant to be human.
But no matter how many tyrants I fell, no matter how many lives I saved, nothing truly changed.
The blight never left.
Doubt became my constant companion. Was I righteous—or merely postponing the end?
I dreamed of a world reborn, where power bowed only to kindness, where no shadow could claim another's life, where joy remained untouchable by suffering, and every soul—fragile or strong—was treasured as if the stars themselves had woven it into being.
In the silence that followed that dream, one question remained:
Does such a world even exist?
I still didn't know.
But I was willing to burn this world—if that was the price of discovering whether a better one could exist.
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