They called it Heaven.
A joke, maybe. Or a warning, too late to matter.
No one remembered who gave it that name. Not anymore. The ones who might have known were long dead, insane, or worse—twisted into things that walked and spoke, but were no longer human.
But everyone still breathing remembered the day it began. The day the sky tore open and the stars bled black.
Something fell through. Not machines. Not aliens.
Things.
They defied anatomy and mocked evolution—thin-limbed, bone-pale horrors stitched together by some cruel, higher logic. Some had too many mouths. Some had none at all. Their eyes were voids. Their skin shimmered like wet glass, phasing between here and somewhere else. Somewhere worse.
They sang lullabies to children. They whispered into the bones of the dead. They fed on hope.
And they never stopped coming.
Back then, humans still believed in progress. The Fluxtron reactors were the final miracle—machines that pulled power from the sub-quantum mesh, the energy in the empty space between particles. Clean, endless power. Cities boomed. Skyscrapers stabbed the clouds. Orbital platforms cradled entire nations above the storms.
No one asked what the energy cost.
They didn't know about the Veil—the membrane between worlds. The pressure layer that separated here from there. The Fluxtron engines pierced it. Cracked it.
And through those cracks came the rifts.
Hairline tears at first. Floating anomalies. Then wider. Then open wounds in the sky. And through them came the Heaven-born.
Now, Earth was ash.
Nations vanished in hours. Oceans boiled into poison. The skies dimmed, blinking like the eye of a dying star. Human civilization collapsed inward. One city after another went dark, screaming into silence.
The only places that remained were the Hive Cities—titanic vertical slums bolted around reactor cores. Machines still hummed beneath them, drawing from the same cursed energy. They couldn't stop. The world above was gone.
The Wastes stretched in every direction—black sand, cursed winds, rift-storms that shattered matter and erased memory. But the Hive endured. Barely.
They said it was safe.
They lied.
Sliver was seventeen.
He had already outlived most of the kids he'd grown up with.
He had never seen the sky. Not the real one. Just the soot-filtered haze leaking through vents and cracked maintenance shafts. He'd never tasted meat that hadn't come from recycled protein farms. Never heard music that wasn't warped by static or echoing through a broken wall speaker.
His world was concrete, rust, and flickering halogen light.
He lived in Sector Nine of Hive Nine. Locals called it the Gutter.
The lowest level.
Where things leaked. Where lights flickered. Where broken drones came to die and people came to disappear. Everything flowed downward into the Gutter—trash, radiation, infection, guilt.
Sliver was born into it. Molded by it.
By ten, he could hotwire a coolant relay. By twelve, he was selling oxygen doses to addicts twice his age. By thirteen, he was fighting grown men for a ration bar.
He watched his parents burn alive in a tank fire at eight. Buried his sister behind a corroded exhaust grid at ten. No coffin. Just cloth and silence.
After that, survival wasn't living. It was counting.
Counting hours. Counting meals. Counting how many days he could keep the same gloves before they fell apart. How many times he could dodge a purge squad before they dragged him in for "cleansing."
Then the Citywatch vanished.
No warning. No broadcast. No explanation.
One night, they were stomping through alleys, rifles in hand, drones hissing overhead. The next morning, nothing.
No boots. No guards. No shipments. No law.
The elite sectors sealed their bulkheads. Credits vanished from accounts. The Hive's automated systems froze.
Everything above had abandoned everything below.
Sliver saw it happen.
He was scavenging wiring in a maintenance shaft when he caught sight of the hovertrains—dozens of them—leaving the platforms without sirens or announcements. The last trains. Quiet.
That night, the Hive turned on itself.
No more food. No more water. No consequences.
The screams came first.
Then the fires.
Then the smell.
Sliver didn't fight it. Didn't try to help. He knew better. He'd seen what people became when their stomachs screamed louder than their hearts. He'd seen what a mother would do with a sharpened spoon if it meant her kid got a drink.
He waited until the worst passed.
Then he left.
Nobody tried to stop him.
They were too busy dying.
He packed what little he had: a cracked pair of goggles, his father's rusted utility knife, and a data chip his mother once called the key to somewhere better.
She was wrong.
There was no better.
Just farther.
Sliver climbed through the broken scaffolding, past the security fences and into open air. His lungs burned in the wind. The light stung his eyes. He coughed blood and walked.
The Wastes were not silent.
They hummed—like the world was still remembering pain. The ground trembled as if something stirred beneath it. The sky flickered between ash-gray and deep violet. Forests far off pulsed like they were breathing.
He saw no people.
Only remains.
A blackened body hanging from a tilted light tower. A melted crawler rig. A helmet still playing the last words of a soldier: "This is Private Halren of Watchpoint Theta. We didn't know. Tell my daughter I—"Then static.
On the fourth day, he found a pool of thick green fluid glowing faintly. Shapes moved beneath the surface, slow and formless. He didn't drink.
On the fifth, the storm came.
An inverted spiral of cloud, moving too fast. Lightning bloomed violet and blue, striking in all directions. Sliver crawled under a derailed transport and waited.
He didn't pray. Not really.
There was nothing to pray to.
On the sixth day, he collapsed.
His skin was blistered. His mouth dry. Muscles cramping with every step. He lay beneath a cracked hull and stared at the sky—those broken stars through the shifting veil.
He wanted to die.
But nothing answered.
And yet, in the morning, he was still alive.
Ash in his mouth. Dried blood on his lips.
Still breathing.
Still human.
He didn't feel stronger. Just… different. Like something had been taken. Or something had been planted.
He sat up slowly. His skin itched. His eyes burned. His shadow stretched oddly under the sun.
But he stood.
And he walked.
Because that's all there was left to do.