The Sky Burns RedThe sky tore itself open that day.
Red—not sunset red, but infected-wound red—split the heavens like rotting fabric. Light bent wrong. Clouds shredded into cotton-wound strips, hanging in the air like gore from a carcass. We didn't understand. We didn't need to.
Death had an appointment, and we were all invited.
The crimson curtain peeled back. Something pressed through—a shadow that shouldn't exist in our reality, a geometry that made the mind flinch. My breath caught. Held. Refused to release. Around me, a thousand hearts stopped beating in the same instant.
Despair didn't creep—it crashed over us like a flash flood, filling lungs, drowning synapses. My legs forgot how to move. My arms turned to lead. The crowd became a forest of statues, every face tilted skyward, every mouth slack.
Then it emerged fully.
God help us, it was beautiful.
A mountain of iron and stone, jagged as a scream, its surface scarred by millennia of cosmic violence. It shattered the sound barrier—we could see the shockwave rippling outward like rings in disturbed water. Behind it, smoke trails hung frozen, a photograph of apocalypse rendered in charcoal and ash.
Something hot traced down my cheek. A tear. It fell from my chin without sound.
The city held its breath. Orange light baptized everything—buildings, faces, cars—painting our tomb in shades of dying fire. A thousand eyes tracked the meteor's descent. A thousand minds calculated the same mathematics of extinction. Eastern shore. Three seconds. Maybe four.
Then: nothing left.
Rumbling. Low. Felt in the bones before the ears.
The air moved—a predator's breath, hot and dust-dry. I swallowed sand. Tasted copper. My muscles locked, bracing for the wall of fire that would peel flesh from bone, that would vaporize blood before it could spill.
Silence. Pure. Sacred. The silence of lambs before slaughter.
No screams. No prayers. No running—where would we run? We were insects watching the descending heel of God.
LOUDER.
The earth shrieked—a sound like continents grinding together, like the planet's core splitting open. Rock thunder. Metal screaming. The symphony of a world eating itself alive.
My eyes found it. The wave. A wall of annihilation racing across the island—dirt, fire, shattered earth—hungry and endless and fast.
The shockwave hit.
Glass exploded—every window, every door, every fragile thing detonating inward in a glittering supernova of edges. The pressure slammed into my chest. Cars tumbled like children's toys. Trees became missiles. Motorcycles, concrete columns, storefronts—all of it lifted, twisted, shredded.
And the people. Oh Christ, the people.
Bodies ragdolled through the air, limbs at impossible angles, mouths open in screams I couldn't hear, tumbling through the chaos like leaves in a hurricane made of knives and—
Black.
Nothing.
Only the ringing. High. Thin. Eternal.
The sound of silence after the world ends.