A deceptive peace followed their escape from the forest of whispers. They moved across a plain of earth so cracked and dry it looked like the skin of a vast, dead thing. The quiet was a relief, but Lio knew it was a loaded silence, the pause a predator takes before it strikes.
He found himself cataloging the world's horrors—the sinking land, the shifting maps, the memory eating monsters, the living houses, the sentient fog. It was all so relentlessly grim that his mind, in a desperate act of self preservation, offered up a shard of dark, brittle humor. At least, he thought with a dry internal chuckle that felt like swallowing dust, we don't have to worry about property taxes anymore.
The thought had barely faded when the world ended.
There was no hum, no tremor to announce this Pulse. It began with a change in the light, which grew thin and polarized, making the air shimmer. Then came the lurch. It was a nauseating, twisting sensation, as if the ground were a carpet being ripped out from under them. Gravity didn't vanish; it rebelled.
With a great, groaning peel, the world began to turn itself inside out. The horizon tilted, steepened, and then fell away entirely. The cracked plain became a ceiling above them, and the grey sky became a bottomless chasm below. For one horrifying, eternal second, they were hanging upside down, falling upwards into a sea of cloud.
Lio reacted on pure instinct, his hands grabbing a jagged lip of rock that now jutted downwards from the "ceiling." The strain on his arms was immense. Loose pebbles and dust from the plain now "fell" past him into the abyss below. He risked a look down, past his own dangling feet, into the transformed sky.
It was an ocean of blood. As far as the eye could see, the space below was filled with a roiling, liquid sea of deep, visceral crimson. It was not the poetic red of a sunset; it was the thick, living color of an open wound. Great, slow currents moved within it, and vast, dark shapes shifted in its depths. And there, floating in the center of this artery ocean, was the moon. It was stark white, impossibly huge, and it was weeping. Immense, slow motion tears of silvery, translucent liquid welled up on its surface and slid off, carving shining, sorrowful trails through the sea of blood before dissolving into mist.
Then the stars gave way. In a slow, silent, terrible cascade, they untethered themselves from the fabric of the cosmos and began to fall. They drifted down like luminous snowflakes, like cold, white embers from a divine fire. They weren't burning, just… falling. One drifted close to Lio, and in its cold, otherworldly glow, he saw it wasn't a star at all, but a complex, spinning crystal of light and bone, humming with a low, mournful energy. It passed him and continued its long, silent plunge into the bloody sea below.
This was it. The breaking of everything. The final, grand collapse. Lio clung to his rock, suspended between a world turned upside down and a sky turned to blood, a spectator at the funeral of physics.
He chanced a look at his family. Sera was clinging desperately to another rock outcropping, her face a mask of primal terror, her body shielding Mina from the impossible sight. Her mouth was open in a scream that was lost in the silent, cosmic roar. Ira, however, was staring at the vista below not with terror, but with the rapt, analytical focus of a scholar witnessing a once in a lifetime celestial event. His mapmaker's mind, having completely failed to process any emotional trauma, had found a problem it could understand.
"Well," Ira muttered to himself, his voice a dry, academic rasp that cut through the sublime horror. "This is going to make celestial navigation… difficult."
The sheer, lunatic understatement of the comment, the idea of worrying about a sextant while the stars themselves were falling, was the last sane thought Lio had before the world slammed back into place. With a violent, bone jarring whiplash, gravity reasserted itself. The family fell the few feet back to the hard earth, collapsing in a tangled heap of limbs.
For a moment, there was only the ringing in Lio's ears and the smell of ozone. He pushed himself up, his body screaming in protest. "Is everyone…" he coughed, the dust thick in his throat. "Is everyone okay?"
He saw his father, already fumbling in his satchel for his broken maps, the cosmic event already forgotten. He saw his mother pushing herself to her knees, her face pale, her eyes wide with shock but otherwise unharmed. A wave of relief washed over him. They were alive. They had survived.
Then he realized. The space beside his mother was empty.
"Mina?" His voice was a panicked squeak. He looked around wildly. The plain was flat and empty for miles in every direction. There was nowhere to hide. "Mina!"
Sera's head whipped around, her eyes following Lio's frantic gaze. She looked at the space beside her, then at her own empty hand, the one that had been holding Mina's just moments before. A look of dawning, animal confusion crossed her face.
And then Lio saw it. Lying on the cracked, dark earth, stark and achingly small, was a single, red woolen mitten.
Sera saw it too. The confusion on her face curdled, collapsing into a truth too terrible to bear. The frantic, terrified sobs caught in her throat, and her mouth opened. A sound tore from her unlike any she had ever made before—a single, rising shriek of pure, soul shattering agony, the sound of a universe being ripped in half. It was the only sound in the dead, silent world, under a bruised and starless sky.