2065 — Four years into the Silence
Zach Kreaks had learned one universal truth about the apocalypse:
It doesn't happen all at once.
No big explosion. No alien mothership. No plague crawling through airports in the shadows.
It comes slowly.
Cruelly.
Like a disease that forgets to kill you and decides to watch you rot instead.
The world didn't end in a bang.
It expired.
It gasped and bled in slow motion.
One power grid at a time.
One country at a time.
One scream at a time.
He remembered those early months like scars pressed into his bones.
The strong killed the desperate.
The desperate killed the weak.
And then, the killing… it stopped.
Not because anyone got better.
But because they were too tired.
Too hungry.
Too scared of what they saw moving in the dust outside their shelters.
Too afraid of the new laws that had nothing to do with governments.
The sun had changed the rules.
And nothing human remained in charge.
It was an evening painted in burnt orange and silence.
Zach had been on a supply run. Not the desperate kind — he planned better than that — but calculated, methodical, like everything he did. The medical facility outside old Denver had collapsed during the first-year riots, but its underground supply vault might have remained untouched.
Might have.
His boots crunched over broken glass and rusted IV stands. Blood still stained the walls like someone had finger-painted in terror. There was a silence in places like this — not peaceful, not even tragic — but suspicious, like the building itself was waiting for you to die.
He was reaching for an unopened iodine pack when he heard it.
A low, dragging breath. Not human. Not entirely.
He turned.
The thing was crouched near a shattered window frame. No shoes. No sanity. Skin blistered and bubbled like melting candle wax. Black veins pulsed under the surface like roots feeding into something rotten.
But the eyes…
Zach's heart stuttered. His hand didn't move.
They were burning — not metaphorically. Literally burning. Two wildfires dancing in skull sockets, alive with something wrong.
It wasn't just hunger in those eyes.
It was memory.
Recognition.
And rage.
The creature snapped its neck toward him.
Then it screamed — a sound Zach would never forget. Like metal scraping against bone.
He drew his sidearm — an unstable plasma pistol powered by a canister of diluted Solaris Essence.
He fired.
The shot lit the hallway in white. It hit the thing square in the chest. Zach felt the heat roll back over him in a wave. Flesh tore. Smoke rose.
But it kept coming.
It slammed into him, hands clawing, mouth snapping. Its body was heavier than it should've been — stronger, wilder. It smelled like sunburnt skin, blood, and static. His back hit the floor with a grunt.
He reached, blindly, painfully — fingers wrapped around the flare grenade clipped to his belt.
He jammed it against the side of the creature's skull.
FWOOOOM.
A burst of white.
The beast recoiled, howling, clawing at its face as molten light engulfed it.
Then silence.
Zach lay there for minutes. Coughing. Vision blurred. Arm broken.
But he wasn't dead.
And as he rolled to his side, staring at the smoking husk of the thing that attacked him, he felt it in his gut:
"They're evolving," he whispered, voice hoarse. "They're... learning."
In the years that followed, Zach became something between a scientist and a monk.
He catalogued them. Observed from a distance. Risked his life again and again just to understand. Others brought him rumors — wanderers, scavengers, survivors.
And slowly, a horrifying truth emerged.
The Black Flares weren't all the same.
They were… stratified. Evolving. Adapting.
It started simple:
* Normal Flares — sluggish, starved, erratic. Dangerous only in numbers.
* Savage Flares — fast, precise. They tracked scent and sound like bloodhounds.
* Devil Flares — horrifying. They mimicked speech. Lured survivors with the voices of loved ones. Some could open doors.
* Beast Flares — freakishly mutated. Hulking forms with beastly limbs.
* Hulk Flares — walking mountains. Some had natural armor. One allegedly survived a missile blast.
* Dominion Flares — rare. Silent. Calculated. Strategic. They didn't feed. They watched.
Zach realized, horrified, that the infection didn't just change the body. It rewrote instinct.
It created a new order — not just of monsters, but of roles.
A food chain.
One that ended with humanity at the bottom.
Zach never wanted to be a leader.
He wanted to understand.
But understanding alone wasn't enough when people were dying in the thousands — when entire towns vanished in a night.
So he built.
Using fragments of salvaged tech and Solaris Essence, he activated a Terraform Core. It emitted a containment pulse that could repel Flare DNA — at least temporarily. He embedded it into an abandoned city.
He called it Aegis One.
And then he built four more.
Aegis Two: Atop a frozen sea platform.
Aegis Three: Deep inside the Rockies.
Aegis Four: Buried under desert rock, sunless and safe.
Aegis Five: The hidden one. No one but Zach knew its location.
Each citadel was a miracle. Each powered by Solaris Essence — a source of light in a world that no longer trusted the sun.
People came. Broken people. Scared people. People with nothing left but the dirt on their faces and the nightmares in their heads.
And Zach gave them walls.
He gave them hope.
They gave him names.
"Warden of the Light."
"The Dawnwalker."
"The man who tamed the sun."
But Zach didn't feel like a savior.
He didn't sleep much.
He didn't smile.
Because every time he looked into the flames of Solaris Essence, he saw something staring back.
Not a future.
But a warning.
October 8, 2069
Aegis One Citadel – Upper Ramparts
The sky didn't look like it used to.
It was bruised — shades of gray, violet, burnt red. Winds howled above the cloud barrier like ghosts arguing with the heavens.
Zach stood alone, his coat flapping against the wind. Solaris Essence hummed beneath the armored gloves on his hands, casting a dim blue light across the balcony.
Behind him, the lights of Aegis One flickered gently.
He could hear laughter in the distance. Children. It was rare. A sound like old memories.
A small boy, no older than ten, stepped beside him.
Eyes wide. Hair matted.
He tugged on Zach's coat gently and asked, in a whisper that felt older than his age:
"Mister Zach… will the sun ever come back?"
Zach looked at him.
The boy's face was honest. He wasn't asking about weather. He was asking about hope.
Zach didn't answer right away.
He looked at the sky.
At the churning clouds.
At the pulsing light hidden behind a veil of ash and time.
The sun hadn't died.
Not physically.
But to the world below…
It was lost.
"It never left," Zach said quietly.
"We just stopped deserving it."
The boy didn't understand. But he nodded anyway. Sometimes children accept pain faster than adults do.
And in the distance… beyond the citadel gates… a new sound emerged.
Low.
Rumbling.
Ancient.
Not a Flare.
Something else.
Zach narrowed his eyes.
The ground… was shifting.