Ashfall

Chapter 1

Hope. And belief. The two best things you could possibly have in this world. At least that’s what I had thought until it happened. Until the night sky dimmed. Then it creased. Then it cracked, fracturing into jagged veins of light that whispered death, and something far older than humanity. The sky never healed after it broke, leaving a violet tear that stains every sunset, and I stopped believing in hope the night I nearly died in an abandoned house with someone I couldn’t afford to lose.

The house had already been tilting sideways by the time we were halfway done exploring the place. Opening the creaking closet of the downstairs bedroom, Lila gasped as she looked at the floor, kneeling to observe a crack. “There-” She paused, tracing her fingers across the dusty flooring. “There’s a trapdoor here.” She pressed her ear against the floor, gently tapping the ground, resulting in a soft thud each time. Cautious to not make any noise, she dropped her fingernails into the crack, attempting to pull it up. “Lila,” I said in a hushed shout, quickly checking the time with the clean steel watch on my wrist. “We don’t have time for this. My Mom and Dad will be worried if we aren’t back by midnight. We have about 4 hours to get home, and walking all the way over isn’t a piece of cake when you’re complaining the whole time.”

Lila didn’t move when I said that, which meant she had already decided she wasn’t listening, and that stubborn stillness of hers, the kind that made her impossible to argue with once she locked onto something, settled into her shoulders as she wedged her fingers deeper into the seam of the wood and pulled until the brittle edge splintered slightly beneath her nails. “Just a second,” she whispered, not looking at me, her voice tight with the kind of excitement that only came when she thought she had discovered something untouched, something from before the world started feeling thin and wrong. “Nobody’s been down here in years. Do you hear how hollow it sounds?”

I stepped closer to the spot, curious despite myself, crouching beside her and pressing my palm flat against the floorboards, feeling the faint vibration of the house settling into its uneven foundation, the old beams shifting as if they were tired of holding themselves upright. She was right. Beneath the soft layer of dust and warped wood, there was emptiness, a pocket of space hidden under the bedroom like a secret someone had meant to come back for.

“Lila, we can come back tomorr-“ I started to say, before getting before an unnatural groan cut me off. It was something deeper, something that seemed to vibrate the ground beneath us. The sound came again, not from the side of us or the ground itself. We froze, turning around to look out the broken window. A distant pressure building against the world itself, as if the sky had inhaled and forgotten to exhale. The remaining sunlight seemed to dim without any clouds crossing over. Just a faint line appeared in my vision, thin and pale at first, so delicate it could have been mistaken for a flaw in my vision.

Then it expanded.

Not suddenly, not like a storm, but like glass shattering as it hit the floor, the crack splitting into dozens of branching fractures that contrasted the scene of the setting sun, each branch having its own color that neither of us could name. “What is that..?” Lila said hesitantly, and I had only then realized that during that time she had stood up and walked to the window as well. I didn’t respond, drawn to the spectacle like a moth to a flame. The sound came not two heartbeats later. It wasn’t thunder. Thunder rolls and fades and leaves space afterward. This one… This one didn’t fade. It was ripping, a tearing noise so vast and so close that it felt like my skull would have been torn apart with it. The ground beneath us vibrated violently, shaking the house, shattering the windows, and weakening the pillars. Somewhere down the street a car alarm went off, then another, their high-pitched wails overlapping in chaotic rhythm.

Outside the house rose hundreds of screams. But these weren’t regular screams of fear, these screams were the kind that meant that something irreversible had just happened. And amidst the chaos, where nobody was looking, the jagged tear in the sky shot out a blanket of gray haze. But it didn’t fall like rain, it unfurled.

It poured outward from the wound in the sky in slow, deliberate sheets, rolling across rooftops and streets and power lines as if the world were being submerged in something neither liquid nor air, but a third thing entirely, something that swallowed distance and sound and color until the neighborhood we had known since childhood looked like a charcoal sketch rubbed half away by an impatient hand. For a single moment, everything went quiet. The muffled screams, the creaking of the houses, and the faint breeze. The only sound left that I could hear was her soft breathing beside me. Eventually though, that was muffled out as well as the haze pushed through the broken windows and filled the house completely. The haze burned my throat, but not in a boiling way, it felt more like I was inhaling miniature sharp metal scraps. “Ow…” I muttered, blinking rapidly as my eyes began to sting. “We… we should get going.” I continued, yet not knowing where.

With our hands clasped together, we staggered through the fog-filled house, using the walls to guide us towards the front door. When we burst through it, we saw that outside was no better. Maybe worse than it had been inside. “Hello?” I called out, but the sound was almost immediately lost in the fog, sucked down into whatever had spilled out of the sky. There were figures in front of us, congregating in the middle of a block. Mostly driven by instinct rather than reason, I’d say.

It began with no more than the faintest whistle, a faint tea kettle in a crowded area of people talking. I looked up out of habit, but the thick mist obscured my vision. For a moment, I saw nothing. Then it appeared, a flat slice of crystal the size of a door, thin and translucent, as if it were forcing the mist aside like an unstoppable projectile hurtling towards us. The light danced along the edges of it, reflecting that light and casting it back in a brilliant display of prismatic colors. It landed directly in the middle of the crowd, missing everyone, but sending a ripple through the street beneath our feet. We were all frozen in place. Not a single person dared to breathe. But then came another, this one as sharp as a knife and roughly the same size, falling at an angle towards a small family.

“Move!” I shouted, gasping as the fog touched the back of my throat, but my voice was pointless in the mist.

The nearby family looked up, frozen in place, mesmerized by the impossible angles of the shard. The father didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. The shard came crashing down, slicing through the arm of the father before lodging itself in the ground. This time, the crowd awoke, screaming, running around in all directions, bumping into each other as more shards rained down from the sky.

“Christopher,” she whispered, her grip on my hand so tight it was painful. “I-“

But before she could finish her sentence, I had already begun dragging her body across the street. “We can’t stay in one place, let’s go!”

We ran without direction, our shoes slamming against the cracked pavement that felt unfamiliar beneath us, as if the street had changed formation while we were watching the man get dismembered. I gasped for air as the haze compressed my lungs, so much that it managed to mess with my perception of distance. I took another deep breath, deep and trembling, and for a moment, the panic that had coiled in my chest loosened, and a dizzy warm feeling flooded my head, a giddy, weightless lightness that made it feel almost wrong to remember fear at all. I shook my head, snapping my mind back into place. I held onto her hand because it was there, because it was warm, because letting go felt wrong in a way I didn’t have words for, and every time she responded with a gentle squeeze that grounded me for a heartbeat longer, reminding me that I wasn’t alone even if the world had started to forget what that meant. My chest started to burn as we slowed from our sprint. Ducking beneath a storefront, I turned my head back to check if we could still see the group of people. Nope, not even the silhouettes were visible, just the soft sounds of car alarms remained. I looked back up at her, gasping and stepping back as her face was impossibly close to mine. Her face was impossibly familiar, yet when I blinked it seemed just beyond reach, the edges smudged, like a photo left too long in the sun.

“Chris,” she said, voice soft and steady, though her fingers quivered as she squeezed mine, “look at me.” I did, forcing my eyes to stay on hers, and the air around me hummed, a strange lightness making it easier to let go of thoughts I’d held onto for years.

I tried to remember why she mattered. My chest tightened and my stomach twisted. My lips formed the shape of a word out of habit, muscle memory, not thought. “Lila…” I whispered, hesitantly. My fingers clutched hers desperately, and when I tilted my head, confusion cracking my chest, my voice dropped to a trembling half-whisper:

“Who… is that?”