One Year Before the Apocalypse
The river carried the dying sunlight like molten gold, its surface trembling as if the water itself were shivering.
Alex sat on the grassy embankment, his fingers digging into the soil. It was too soft. Too real. The scent of damp earth and blooming clover was a physical assault on his senses. In the world he had just left, the only smell was ozone and rotting meat.
"Oi."
A nudge. A casual, living flick of a foot against his side. Alex's heart nearly stopped. He turned his head with the slow, mechanical dread of a man expecting to see a ghost.
James Hart.
James sat there, kicking his feet idly in the water. He was eighteen. His eyes were bright, untainted by the sight of a sky falling. He was alive.
"You look like you're about to confess your love to the river," James joked, flashing a grin that Alex hadn't seen in a century.
Alex didn't laugh. He looked at James's chest—the spot where, in another life, a demonic spear had blossomed like a red flower.
"James," Alex said, his voice carrying a gravity that made the boy's smile falter. "In exactly three hundred and sixty-five days, the sky is going to break."
James blinked. "Bro, you're acting weird. What, did you have a prophetic nightmare?"
"A Tutorial. Ten stages of hell. If you fail, you die," Alex continued. "When the weapon selection appears, you pick the Shield. Do you hear me? Not the sword. The Shield."
Alex looked up. The sky was blue—perfectly, agonizingly blue. But in the corner of his eye, he saw it. A flicker. A glitch in the horizon. The regression wasn't a miracle. It was a rupture. And the universe was already beginning to bleed.