The world ended on a Tuesday, which seemed somehow insufficient.
Marcus Hayes had always imagined apocalypse would arrive with fanfare—nuclear sirens, government announcements, the kind of warning that let you prepare for oblivion. Instead, it arrived as a sound that wasn't quite sound. A tearing. A ripping open of the sky itself, as if reality had finally admitted defeat and simply given up pretending to be solid.
But that came later.
First came the pills.
He'd spent forty minutes selecting them, which seemed absurd in retrospect. Yellow oval ones from the bottle in the bathroom cabinet—the ones prescribed after the last deployment, after the flashbacks started, after Jessica had suggested (not unkindly) that perhaps he should seek "professional help" while somehow managing not to look at him when she said it. They'd been sitting there for three years, barely touched, a monument to his half-hearted attempts at wellness.
Marcus sat on the bathroom floor with his back against the tub, legs stretched out in front of him. The tile was cold. That detail mattered more than it should have. The coldness. The certainty of it. The one thing he could control.
He'd arranged the pills in the sink first—counted them twice—before realizing how clichéd that was. A movie moment. So he'd simply put them in a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and sat down to wait for chemical oblivion.
The thing about suicide, Marcus had learned through hours of research he'd hidden from Jessica, was that most people fucked it up. Took wrong doses, called for help at the last moment, experienced some survival instinct that punched through the despair and made them vomit up the pills. Miracles. He hated the word. The universe wasn't miraculous; it was just incompetent. Most people survived their own attempts at ending themselves because death was harder to accomplish than anyone wanted to admit.
Marcus intended to be thorough.
He'd downed the pills in a handful, chased them with a water bottle. Forty-seven pills. More than the research recommended, but he wanted margin for error in the other direction. He wanted to be the exception. He wanted to succeed at the one thing he could control when everything else in his life was chaos.
It took twenty minutes for the room to start spinning.
Twenty minutes to realize he was lying on the bathroom floor without remembering the decision to lie down. The ceiling tiles above him began to shift, patterns rearranging themselves into something almost meaningful. His heart was beating too fast, which was wrong. Pills this strong were supposed to slow everything down. They were supposed to be gentle. They were supposed to feel like falling asleep.
Instead, his chest felt like something was pulling at it from the inside.
He tried to focus on the cold tile again, to anchor himself to something physical and real, but the bathroom was already fading. Good. That was the point. Fade. Disappear. Stop being the broken man who'd come back from war unable to sleep, unable to stop waiting for explosions, unable to look at his wife without seeing the guilt in her eyes when she thought he wasn't watching.
Unable to stop knowing that David fucking Santos had his hands on—
Don't think about that. Let it go. Let everything go.
The last coherent thought Marcus had before the world actually started collapsing was that he was finally—*finally*—getting something right.
Then the sky tore open.
It wasn't metaphorical. The sky didn't gradually lighten or fade. It didn't transition into something new like a sunset into evening. The sky simply *broke*, as if the blue had always been fragile and had finally reached its stress fracture point.
Marcus didn't see it directly—his body was still on the bathroom floor, already numb, already fading—but he felt it. Not physically. Something deeper. Something that recognized wrongness on a cellular level.
The sound was what would stay with him the longest, if he survived to remember. Not a boom or a roar. A tearing. A ripping. The noise of reality abandoning its pretense of coherence.
Later—though "later" was a difficult concept for someone suspended between living and dying—Marcus would learn that there were five tears. Five ruptures occurring simultaneously across the planet. New York. London. Tokyo. Lagos. São Paulo. Five places where the barrier between worlds gave way. Five points where two realities collided violently, like two waves crashing together with nowhere else to go.
He wouldn't learn this through news broadcasts. Civilization was too busy ending to update the media.
He experienced it from outside of time.
That was the only way to describe it. While his body remained on the bathroom floor, toxins flooding his system, shutting down his organs one system at a time, something else—*he*—existed in a space that wasn't quite consciousness and wasn't quite unconsciousness. A liminal place. A void.
And in that void, he watched.
He watched New York's towers twist and crack as something emerged from the sky that had no name in human language. The buildings didn't collapse cleanly. They warped, bent at angles that should have been impossible, merged with structures that suddenly existed and had always existed simultaneously. Millions of people experiencing the worst seconds of their lives before the impact wave killed them outright. Mercy, in its own fashion.
He watched London's organized grid descend into chaos as creatures—actual impossible creatures with too many limbs and eyes that shouldn't have existed—came pouring through the rupture like water through a breached dam. They didn't understand the city. They simply consumed it. Buildings fell. People ran. The running never mattered. You couldn't outpace the end of the world.
He watched Tokyo's technology and organization prove utterly worthless in the face of physics that no longer obeyed the laws anyone had agreed upon. Gravity failed in isolated zones. Water flowed upward. The ground itself buckled and merged with crystalline formations that belonged to no earthly geology. Three million people experiencing the end of everything they'd built or believed in, condensed into screaming seconds.
He watched Lagos and São Paulo with the same horrified clarity, watching civilization die in real-time from outside of time.
And through all of it—through the tearing sky and the impossible creatures and the end of everything—Marcus heard a voice.
Not heard. That wasn't the right word either. Perceived. Felt. Recognized as something ancient and utterly certain.
It spoke without words:
*Not yet, little soldier. Not yet.*
The voice was female and not-female. It was young and ancient. It was kind and absolutely indifferent to human suffering. It was the voice of something that had been waiting on the other side of reality for reasons that had nothing to do with mercy.
*I have other plans for you.*
The void stretched thin.
One moment, Marcus was suspended in nothing, watching reality fracture. The next moment, his body existed again—painfully, desperately, wrongly existing—and was burning.
Every nerve ending was screaming. His organs were failing. His heart was in arrhythmia. The pills had done their job thoroughly. Death was coming, inevitable and unstoppable.
But it wasn't coming fast enough.
Something was pulling him back. Something vast and ancient and utterly inhuman was grasping at the edges of him—at the fading spark that was Marcus Hayes consciousness—and dragging him away from the peaceful black he'd been falling into.
No, he tried to say. Let me go. Let me have this.
But the voice—*her* voice—was already reshaping the rules of what was possible.
*You will survive, little soldier. You will survive because I have need of you. You will survive because the Cycle demands it. And you will discover that some mercies are worse than any cruelty.*
The burning intensified. Not in a metaphorical sense. Every cell in Marcus's body was being forcefully reconstructed, the damage from the pills being reversed at a cellular level. Healing magic—though he wouldn't have known to call it that yet—was tearing through his system, killing the poison, restarting the organ systems that had begun their final shutdown.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't merciful. It was violent reconstruction that made the pills' damage seem like a gentle lullaby.
When Marcus Hayes's eyes snapped open on the floor of his bathroom, his first sensation was regret.
His second sensation was the sound of the sky still tearing.
**Time: 14:47 UTC, December 15, 2024**
The Great Stitching had begun.
Marcus staggered to his feet, his body not entirely his own yet, and stumbled toward the bathroom window. Through it, he could see the sky of his Denver suburb—perfectly ordinary Tuesday sky, bright blue and cloudless—beginning to fracture.
It was the only thing that stopped the rage that was flooding back into him now that his nervous system was working again. The rage, the betrayal, the despair—all of it was trying to rebuild itself inside him. But instead, his brain registered *wrongness* on such a fundamental level that survival instinct suddenly, violently overrode everything else.
The sky was tearing open.
Not some metaphorical apocalypse. The actual fabric of reality was being ripped apart above his suburban home, and something was coming through.
Marcus's hand went to the bathroom sink to stabilize himself. His hand was shaking. Everything was shaking. The house, the ground, the entire world convulsing like something living and wounded.
For a moment—just a moment—he wanted to laugh at the cosmic absurdity of it. He'd finally decided to die, and the universe had decided to end at exactly the same moment. Some kind of dark joke. Some kind of—
The window exploded inward.
Not from impact. From pressure. Reality itself was pressurizing, flexing, buckling. Glass shattered into fragments that hung in the air for impossible seconds before gravity remembered it was supposed to work.
Marcus threw his arm up instinctively. Glass cut his skin. Blood ran down his arm, and he felt it with strange clarity—the sharp sting of the cuts, the warmth of the blood, the evidence that he was still alive when he was supposed to be dead.
Outside the window, something impossible was visible in the sky above his street.
Geometry that shouldn't exist. Colors that human eyes shouldn't be able to perceive, creating that strange sensation of looking at something that his brain refused to process as real. And shapes—*things*—moving through the impossible geometry with purpose and hunger.
One of them turned its attention toward his house.
Marcus watched its face—if what he was seeing could be called a face—begin to focus on his position.
He had perhaps three seconds to decide if he was going to face the end of the world or continue his previous plan of non-existence.
To his profound surprise, survival instinct won.
He turned and ran from the bathroom, away from the window, deeper into the house. Behind him, the sound of the ceiling beginning to collapse. Above him, the sound of something that had no name in human language entering the Earth through a hole in reality that had been sealed since before human civilization began.
The smell came next—ozone and copper and something like burning electrical wire mixed with rotting meat. The smell of two worlds colliding. The smell of the end of everything.
Marcus ran.