It began not with fire, but with light.
On a hot and humid June night, the stars above Mumbai started to flicker. It was a subtle thing at first, a barely-there stutter in the fabric of the night sky that only a handful of people noticed. The city's light pollution had long since drowned out the cosmos, turning the firmament into a dull, yellowish-brown haze. But then, the stutter became a tremor. Whole constellations seemed to sway, bending and warping as if the heavens were a vast, rippling curtain.
The city, always alive, began to stir. People spilled out onto balconies and rooftops, pointing phones skyward, their faces bathed in the ghostly glow of a spectacle no one could explain. The air filled with a chorus of excited chatter and the rapid-fire clicks of cameras. On every social media platform, live streams popped up, their titles growing more frantic by the second.
#Skyfall
#OnceInALifetime
#WorldsEnd – posted by some teenager who probably thought it was a joke, a hashtag for a movie they'd watched a hundred times.
For the first few minutes, it was beautiful. Too beautiful. A kind of ethereal, impossible beauty that disarms you, makes you forget that the universe has no reason to be kind, no obligation to be anything but vast and indifferent.
Then the first meteor broke the illusion.
It wasn't a shooting star. It was a spear of incandescent fire, a screaming white-hot lance that tore the air open above the Arabian Sea. The sheer force of its descent left a trail of broken light, painting the clouds in molten streaks of orange and red. The sound came a moment later: a deafening boom that shook the very foundation of the city. The impact was a silent explosion, a column of white-hot steam surging from the water and merging with the night sky, hissing like a city-sized kettle.
A moment of stunned silence fell over the city. Then, the alarm systems began to wail, a dissonant choir of fear and confusion. Car alarms, building fire alarms, and an endless barking of dogs filled the air. A wave, born not of water but of displaced air and energy, slammed into the docks, sending shipping containers tumbling like children's blocks and splintering the wooden piers.
Five minutes later, the second one struck. This time, it hit the city's outskirts. The ground jumped. It wasn't a quake, it was a single, violent lurch that threw people to their knees. Windows across an entire district blew inward, raining jagged glass onto the streets. A power station crumpled like a paper model, plunging a large part of the city into darkness. For a fleeting second, somewhere in the chaos, a child laughed, thinking it was all part of the show — until the screaming began.
By dawn, the meteors had fallen in thirty-seven locations worldwide. They hadn't hit in some random, scattered pattern. They had landed in places of power, of commerce, of population. New York, Tokyo, Moscow, London. And Mumbai.
That's when the holes appeared.
They weren't craters. They were holes.
Perfectly black, their edges shimmering with an otherworldly light, like heat rising from asphalt on a blistering summer day. They hung in the air, sometimes horizontal, sometimes tilted, sometimes vertical like standing mirrors with their glass torn out. Looking into them made your eyes water, your stomach churn, as if they weren't just dark, but profoundly, fundamentally wrong. They were a violation of the laws of physics, a wound in reality itself.
Global Emergency Broadcast System — "This is not a drill. Remain indoors. Avoid open skies. Military and emergency responders are en route to all major urban centers. Do not attempt to—" [Bzzt–]
And from the holes came… things.
They had no single shape. Some crawled, some drifted, some seemed to swim through the air as if it were a viscous fluid. Their edges blurred, light bending unnaturally around them, making it impossible to get a clear focus. Cameras struggled to capture them, as if the lens itself didn't want to remember what it was seeing.
Guns worked. Sometimes.
But every time a monster was killed, the breaches became stranger. Their edges widened, multiplied, and pulsed with a sick, oily luminescence. It was as if the holes themselves were alive, growing stronger with every life taken, human or otherwise.
Survivor Report — "By the third day, the police stopped showing up. We thought the army would hold the line, but half of them were gone by morning. I saw an entire block vanish into one of those… rifts. No sound, just gone. Like a bad edit in real life. I saw a man, a big man, just… crumple. His bones turned to powder in front of my eyes. He screamed. I'll never forget the sound."
The governments fell in pieces, like glass under a slow hammer.
India declared martial law within seventy-two hours, but by the end of the week, communications between central and many of the state government had collapsed. Most of the state government stopped taking orders from Delhi. In some regions, ministers became the only authority left; in others, local crime lords declared themselves "protectors" and built militias from the desperate.
The U.S. federal network went dark for three days before returning with the "Continuity Mandate," a coalition of governors, generals, and corporate executives who claimed to represent a united government. Europe fractured overnight; old rivalries reignited under the pressure of survival.
Some nations burned. Others simply… went silent.
In the chaos, new rumors spread — of meteorite fragments that hadn't corrupted, shards still pure. They said these fragments could be used. That in the right hands, they could grant impossible power. The fragments were dubbed "Astral Shards."
Recovered Pirate Broadcast — "They're fighting over the wrong thing. It's not the monsters that'll end us. It's the people who want to own the sky. They're already calling themselves Hunters. And they're building armies."
Three months later, the war wasn't just humans versus the invaders — it was humans versus each other.
Factions rose from the ashes:
The Wardens: A group that hunted corrupted fragments and destroyed them, believing them to be the source of the breaches and the monsters.
The Guild: A global consortium that collected any shard, pure or otherwise, claiming they could build "a weapon to end the breaches." Their true motives were shrouded in secrecy.
The Riftborn: A terrifying and mysterious faction. No one knew what they wanted. Only that they wore meteorite dust on their skin and spoke in voices that didn't sound entirely human. They seemed to have an unnatural connection to the breaches themselves.
And somewhere, a primordial cosmic being stirred, its network of minions already infiltrating the human factions, its gaze fixed on the fractured Earth.
Under a collapsed flyover on Mumbai's east side, a man in an oil-stained engineer's jacket knelt beside a tarp-wrapped body. The city burned in the distance, a symphony of sirens and distant screams. Ash, fine and black, fell like black snow.
He didn't look up when the sirens wailed. Not when the ground rumbled.
He didn't look up until the sky flashed again. The flash was not from a falling star, but from the breach itself, which had finally torn open and now showed the monsters in full view.
Somewhere beyond the breaches, something stirred. Something old. Something that had been waiting. Something that had finally found the last meteorite it was looking for.