The office felt like a hollow monument at this hour, all steel bones and glass skin holding its breath against the night.
Reynolds sat alone in his corner office, his head perched above a single fist that leaned on the table as support.
The only glow in the entire floor spilling from the lamp on his desk… a cold, lonely pool of light in an ever-expanding expanse of darkness which only grew larger as the night continued on.
The rest of the space was silent, but not the kind of silence that soothed. It was the uneasy sort, broken only by the things a busy building makes when no one is around to hear it.
A distant elevator humming as it went between floors.
The soft, mechanical throat-clearing of air ducts switching cycles.
The faint rattle of a loose vent cover responding to the bellows of the late-night winds nudging against the windows.
Reynolds sat still in his chair, hands resting loosely on the arms, eyes fixed somewhere past the papers in front of him.
The numbers, the charts, the papers, and proposals that he approved of were starting to blur, vanishing into the icy blurs cast by the lamp.
He wasn't tired, not truly. But something seemed to want to tip his mind into a long, deep slumber. One if he were ever to fall into he might never awaken from.
Outside the glass wall behind him, the city stretched into a wide black scape, broken by threads of headlights drawing bright lines and patterns along the highways.
Farther out, tower blocks blinked with scattered yellow windows, late workers, or people pretending they still had somewhere to be.
The sky hung heavy over all of it, wrapped in a low, thin fog that swallowed the stars, almost like a veil that muffled, silencing the horizon.
Inside his office, the only movement came from the loose papers on his desk, quivering every time the air-conditioning unit clicked on.
He leaned back, letting the leather creak under him. One of the few familiar sounds left in the place. His suit jacket pulled across his shoulders as he stretched his neck..
The clock on the wall ticked.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Every second.
That was the loudest thing in the room.
Funny, right? That the most ordinary noise could start to feel intrusive once the whole world went quiet.
Reynolds let his gaze drift to the floor-to-ceiling windows. The faint reflection of the room stared back at him, a stiff figure outlined in cold lamplight, and moonlight floating in a dark pane of glass.
He reached for his pen out of habit, letting the cool metal sit between his fingers, tapping it lightly against the desk.
Tap…
Tap…
Tap… The sound felt too loud in the quiet, so he stopped.
The hollow feeling in his chest wasn't new, but it was getting harder to ignore. Success had weight to it, strange, heavy weight that didn't feel like achievement so much as accumulation.
Meetings, decisions, responsibilities, brick after brick stacked until he couldn't see over the wall he had built.
Funny how a man could look like he had everything and still feel like nothing around him truly belonged.
The building shifted again, a gentle sigh that rippled through the structural beams.
Reynolds lifted his eyes. Something felt…
Off.
The air had changed. There was a brief, strange stillness, as if all the sounds of the world had paused at once for just that fleeting moment.
The clock stopped ticking.
Just stopped.
The lamp flickered, not a soft flicker but a sharp stutter of light, like electricity had gone out for a brief second.
The shadows on the walls stretched.
Then stilled.
Reynolds sat forward slowly, tension tightening the back of his neck. He glanced at the lamp. At the ceiling. At the doorway, left cracked open to the silent hallway.
Nothing moved.
Nothing hissed.
Nothing.
Reynolds stood, pushing his chair back as quietly as he could, though the wheels still whispered across the polished floor.
He stepped toward the window, each footstep soft but echoing just enough to remind him he wasn't the only living soul here.
He turned his head, looking to the desk that sat outside his office, where a young woman lay, her head on her arms, which acted like a pillow.
His secretary was who she was.
The fog outside had thickened. What had been a faint veil earlier was now a heavy sheet swallowing the streets below. The lights of the city warped through it, bending unnaturally, like warm colors underwater.
He pressed a hand against the glass.
Cold. Much colder than it should've been.
Far below, the headlights on the road blurred into red and white streaks before fading entirely. The city seemed to dim, swallowed one block at a time. Not just fog, darkness. Thickening. Crawling upward.
The lamp on his desk blinked again.
Once.
Twice.
The bulb popped with a soft crack, plunging the room into near-black except for the dying glow of the skyline.
Reynolds inhaled sharply.
The hum of the ventilation cut out.
The faint electrical buzz of the building faded.
The world fell into such complete silence that he felt his heartbeat in his teeth.
Then something else filled the room, not noise, not exactly. More like the absence of noise bending into a shape. The darkness itself seemed to thicken, gathering at the edges of his vision. A low vibration trembled through the floor under his feet, almost too subtle to trust.
Reynolds stepped back from the window.
Darkness, pure icy darkness.
The air turned cold enough that he could feel it through his shirt, sinking into his bones.
A faint sound rose through the silence, not a word, not a whisper. More like breath. Like the room inhaling.
Then…
The floor tilted beneath him, but not physically. His vision warped, the edges of the office bending inward, stretching like molten glass being pulled into strange angles. His balance slipped. The ground seemed to dip, then ripple, like water under thin ice.
The darkness surged.
Not violently.
Not fast.
Just inevitable.
It curled around his ankles like smoke, cold and thin, then climbed steadily, slipping beneath his clothes, pressing against his skin. Reynolds reached for the desk on instinct, but his hand passed through the shape of it, through the surface as if it wasn't solid anymore.
His breath stuttered.
His hand tipped a vase on his desk over, the glass rolled along the edge… And fell…
Clank—
Then it shattered.
The floor vanished.
The world inverted.
And the quiet office, the city, the night, everything, shattered into darkness.