Rickon stood panting, his bleeding fist trembling as he stared at the shattered television screen.
The sharp pain in his knuckles was a welcome distraction, a steady point amid the chaos of failure and grief.
He was alone. The silence of the dead world pressed in on him, a weight that made it hard to breathe.
The image of Yara's terrified face, her mouth open in a silent scream, was branded onto the inside of his eyelids.
Over the next few months, that image became both his tormentor and his fuel. A flicker of hope, desperate and irrational, refused to die out.
Yara was gone, taken through a portal to a place he couldn't imagine. But his parents? They had been out in the world when it ended.
They were strong, practical people. Maybe, just maybe, they had found a way to survive.
This fragile hope propelled him through the ruins of their quiet suburban town.
He started with his father's workshop, 'Michael's Mechanics.'
The big roll-up door was bent and twisted, ripped halfway from its track. Inside, the scene was one of frozen chaos.
A half-repaired sedan was crushed under a collapsed section of the roof.
Tools were scattered across the concrete floor, lying exactly where they had been dropped when the world began to shake.
He searched the small office, kicking through debris and filth, but found nothing. No note. No body.
Just the heavy silence of a place abandoned in a moment of absolute terror.
His search then led him to the city hospital where his mother worked.
The journey on foot was a tour through hell.
The further he went, the worse the destruction became. The suburbs had been annihilated, but the city center was a graveyard.
The ruined skyscrapers reached skyward, their empty windows like hollow eyes.
The stench of decay clung to the air, a constant, sickening presence.
The hospital was a monument to the massacre.
The "Mercy General Hospital" sign was covered in scorch marks and claw scratches.
Inside, the white-tiled hallways were painted with streaks of dried, brown blood.
Overturned gurneys and medical carts blocked the corridors.
Rickon moved through the silent wards like a ghost, his footsteps resonating in the oppressive quiet.
He checked the staff records office, but the files had been ransacked, papers strewn everywhere, offering no clues.
He found no survivors, only more evidence of the swift, brutal slaughter.
After days of searching the vast complex, a cold, heavy certainty sank in his stomach.
He was an orphan. The hope he had clung to dissolved, leaving him completely lost in the wreckage of his world.
Two years passed. The world, or what was left of it, began to settle into a new, twisted kind of order.
The initial chaos of the invasion gave way to a brutal form of society. The human population had been decimated, reduced to scattered pockets of survivors.
A new hierarchy had formed, primitive and cruel.
Farmers, those who controlled the precious resource of food, became the new nobility.
They fortified their lands, hoarding their harvests and ruling over the starving masses with an iron fist.
And the monsters… they hadn't all left. A number of them remained, establishing themselves as cruel overlords.
They weren't the brutish, insect-like creatures he had also seen. These ones looked almost like twisted imitations of humanity, with skin the colour of old bruises, and short, curly horns protruding from their brows.
They carried strange weapons and walked through the human settlements with an air of absolute authority, their very presence a constant reminder of who was now in charge.
Rickon, no longer a boy but a thin, hardened young man of twenty, was starving.
The last of the canned goods he'd scavenged had run out months ago.
Hunger bit at his stomach, sharp and unrelenting, dulling even the weight of his grief.
It was this primal need that finally broke him, forcing him to seek servitude.
He found it on a sprawling farm owned by a man named Jedediah.
Jedediah was a large, piggish man with a cruel mouth and small, mean eyes.
Before the invasion, he had been nothing, but now, with his tall fences and well-guarded fields of corn and potatoes, he was a king.
Rickon was given a small, dirty cot in a communal barn with a dozen other miserable souls and was put to work from sunup to sundown.
The lazy boy who had once slept on a couch all day found a miserable rebirth in the dirt of Jedediah's fields. But old habits died hard.
His mind would drift, his body would ache, and his pace would slacken.
The consequences were no longer the sharp words of his mother, but the sharp crack of Jedediah's leather whip across his back.
"You think these potatoes are gonna pick themselves, you worthless pig?" Jedediah would roar, his spit flying.
"You eat my food, you live on my land, you work! Or you starve! It's that simple."
One afternoon, after a particularly vicious lashing for dropping a basket of corn, Rickon limped back to the barn, his back burned like a grid of fire.
An older, wiry farmhand named Silas, who was missing three fingers on his left hand, watched him collapse onto his cot.
Silas took a long drag from a hand-rolled cigarette made of dried leaves and chuckled without a trace of humour.
"Don't take it personally, kid. He's an equal opportunity bastard." He blew out a puff of foul-smelling smoke.
"At least the beatings are regular. Adds a bit of structure to the day."
Rickon just groaned, the dark humour doing little to soothe the agony in his back.
This was his life now: pain, hunger, and endless, back-breaking labour.
The memories of his family, of his promise to Yara, were buried under a thick layer of exhaustion and despair.
It was just after the two-year anniversary of the invasion that the horned overlords decided to make an example.
A public execution was announced. Five humans, accused of various crimes from hoarding food to insubordination, were to be killed in the main square of the nearest settlement.
Attendance was mandatory for all humans across the globe, requiring many to travel overseas to be present.
Rickon was herded into the square along with the other farmhands. The air was thick with fear.
The crowd was massive, a sea of thin faces and hollow eyes, all watched over by the horned monsters who stood on the rooftops, their alien rifles held at the ready.
A wooden platform had been erected in the center of the square.
Rickon stood numbly in the crowd, simply waiting for the grisly spectacle to be over.
The prisoners were dragged out, chained and cloaked in dirty rags. They were forced onto their knees on the platform.
One of the monster leaders, its horns longer and more ornate than the others, began to read out their crimes in a surprisingly clear, deep voice that sent a shiver down Rickon's spine.
He wasn't really listening, his gaze drifting over the condemned.
Then, one of the prisoners lifted his head, shaking the matted hair from his face. Rickon's heart stopped.
The man was thin, his face bruised and hollow, but there was no mistaking him. The neatly trimmed moustache was now unkempt.
The distinctive patch of white, now dirty and grey, in his beard. The defiant set of his jaw.
"Dad?" The word was a choked whisper, lost in the hum of the crowd.
It was Michael.
A wave of emotions, disbelief, horror, a sudden, violent rage, crashed over Rickon.
He started to shove forward, his mind blanking on everything but the man on the platform.
"Dad!" he screamed, his voice cracking.
"DAD!"
He pushed against the people in front of him, but the crowd was packed too tightly. They were a wall of bodies, too terrified to move.
He was trapped, a hundred feet away, helpless.
The monster finished its speech and drew a long, cruelly curved sword.
Rickon watched in pure agony as his father was forced to lay his head on a wooden block.
For a moment, Michael's eyes scanned the crowd, a flicker of desperation in them. But they never found his son.
The sword rose, catching the harsh light of the afternoon sun. It fell in a swift, merciless arc.
The crowd gasped in unison.
Rickon's world dissolved into a vortex of noise and unbearable pain.
His legs gave out, and he fell to his knees, a raw scream ripping from his throat.
As his vision swam with tears of grief, his eyes darted wildly across the chaotic scene. And then he saw her.
On the far side of the platform, being held firmly by the arm by a horned guard, was a woman.
She was being pushed back, away from the scene, but she had turned her head, her eyes wide with horror.
Her face was thinner, etched with lines of terror and sorrow he'd never seen before, but it was unmistakably her. Linda. His mother.
Their eyes locked across the square.
For five eternal seconds, the world stopped. In that single, shared glance, two years of pain and loss were communicated.
He saw the shock in her eyes, the agony of witnessing her husband's murder, and the desperate, loving sorrow of finding her son, only to face this nightmare.
Her mouth formed his name, a silent, heartbroken "Rickon."
The connection was shattered as the monster guard gave her a vicious shove, forcing her to turn and move with a group of other captives.
She stumbled, disappeared into the crowd, and was gone.
Rickon remained on his knees, the cheers of the monsters and the terrified whispers of the crowd fading into a distant roar.
His father was dead. The final, brutal image of the execution was burned into his mind.
But it was overshadowed by another image, one that lit a fire in the frozen wasteland of his soul.
His mother was alive. And she was a slave.
The despair that had weighed on him for two years vanished, replaced by a new, terrifying, unshakable purpose.