The world did not end with a scream, or a crash, or a cataclysm seen from miles away.
It ended with a sound I could feel in my teeth.
A low, resonant hum, like a dying power line, vibrated through the floorboards, through the frame of my bed, and into my very bones. I was ten years old, and I woke from a deep sleep into a nightmare that was utterly, terrifyingly silent aside from that hum.
The first thing I saw was the color. Or the lack of it.
The friendly blue of my bedroom walls was gone. The warm yellow glow of the streetlamp that always spilled through my window had been snuffed out. Everything was cast in a sickly, greenish-gray monochrome, as if the world had been dipped in stagnant water and forgotten.
I sat up, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. The digital clock on my nightstand was dark. My eyes shot to the old analog clock on the wall, the one with the smiling sun face that my mom had bought me.
Its hands were frozen, pointing straight up to the moon.
Midnight, a midnight that refused to end.
This was my first encounter with the Dark Hour. Though I had no name for it then. To me, it was simply the Stillness.
I pushed my covers back, the fabric rustling unnaturally loud in the absolute quiet. My bare feet touched the cold wooden floor. I crept to the window, each step feeling like a trespass in this dead world.
Looking out was the worst part. The city of Iwatodai was still there, its buildings silhouetted against the eerie sky. But there were no lights in any window. No moving headlights on the streets below. The entire city was a lifeless diorama, a photograph of a place that no longer existed.
A thick, green liquid dripped slowly from the sky. It wasn't rain. It was thicker and more viscous, and it left glistening trails on my windowpane. I watched a single drop form, swell, and fall, its journey the only movement I could see.
The silence was a physical pressure. It was in my ears, my head, and my lungs.
I found myself holding my breath, afraid that even the sound of my own breathing would be too much, that it would attract... something.
I didn't know what. I just knew, with the primal instinct of a child, that I was not supposed to be awake. I was not supposed to be witnessing this.
I don't know how long I stood there, trapped in that green-hued limbo. It could have been seconds or hours. Time had no meaning here.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.
The green tint vanished. The world snapped back into vibrant color—the blue walls, the yellow streetlamp glow. The clock on the wall gave a soft tick, and the minute hand jumped to 12:01.
The familiar, distant hum of the city returned, a sound I had never appreciated until that moment.
I stumbled back to my bed, my legs weak. I curled into a ball, pulling the covers over my head, shaking uncontrollably. I was alive. The world was back. But nothing would ever be the same again.
That was the first time. It would not be the last.
The Dark Hour became a terrible, secret ritual of my life. I learned its schedule. I felt it coming a few seconds before the clock struck twelve, a strange static charge in the air.
I became an expert at pretending. I would make sure I was always in my room, in bed, before midnight.
In the morning, I learned to hide the lingering fear in my eyes and the slight tremor in my hands behind a carefully constructed mask of normalcy.
I was a ghost living among the living, carrying a burden no one else could see or understand.
Years bled by. The fear never left, but it became a familiar companion, a constant, low-grade anxiety that hummed beneath the surface of my everyday life.
I was fourteen now, a student at Gekkoukan High School. On the surface, I was just another student. But inside, I was a veteran of a secret war no one knew we were fighting.
And that was when I became aware of her.
Mitsuru Kirijo.
Even among the other students, she was in a class of her own. A year ahead of me, she was the heir to the Kirijo Group, a name that carried immense weight in this city.
She was brilliance personified, with a sharp intellect and a beauty that was as cold and perfect as a diamond. She moved through the hallways with an untouchable grace, a queen among commoners. Our paths never directly crossed. We existed in different stratospheres.
But our worlds were connected by an invisible thread. My father worked for the Kirijo Group. He wasn't a high-level executive, but he worked in a department so secretive he would clam up and change the subject whenever I asked.
This connection meant that on rare occasions, at formal company gatherings I was forced to attend, I would see her.
I saw her from a distance, a streak of crimson hair in a sea of suits and dresses. She was always composed, always observing. Her gaze, when it passed over me, was analytical, dissecting. It wasn't unfriendly, just... assessing. It made me feel like an insect under a microscope.
One Tuesday morning, after a particularly long and harrowing Dark Hour where the silence had felt more malevolent than ever, I was struggling.
I leaned heavily against the cold iron of the school gate, taking deep, steadying breaths, trying to push the lingering green haze from my mind. I must have closed my eyes for a second too long.
When I opened them, she was there.
Mitsuru Kirijo was walking past, her schoolbag held neatly in one hand. The morning sun caught her hair, making it look like a spill of wine against her dark blazer. Our eyes met. It was no different from a dozen other fleeting glances.
But this time was different.
This time, I didn't look away quickly enough. I was too tired, too raw from the night's secret terror to maintain my mask. And in that unguarded moment, I saw something shift in her eyes.
It wasn't the blank, slightly confused look that everyone else had after the Dark Hour passed over them. It wasn't the sleepy gaze of someone who had just woken up.
It was a sharp, immediate focus. A flash of intelligence so keen it was almost a physical force. Her eyes narrowed just a fraction, and in that deep crimson gaze, I didn't see a fellow student.
I saw a soldier. I saw someone who had also stood watch in the dead of night. I saw recognition.
She knew.
She knew about the green-tinged world. She knew the sound of absolute silence. She knew the fear that coiled in your gut when the clocks stopped.
She carried the secret, too.
The moment lasted less than a heartbeat. She continued walking without breaking her stride, her expression smoothing back into its usual, impenetrable calm. But the connection had been made. A wire had been strung between us, taut and humming with unspoken truth.
It was the first thread. A single, silent acknowledgment in a world that demanded our silence. It was not a friendship. It was not an alliance. It was a shared burden.
And in the heavy, quiet weight of that burden, something new was born. A spark of understanding in an endless, dark ocean. I didn't know it then, but that spark was about to be plunged into gasoline.
My world of quiet fear was about to erupt into a storm of fire and shadow.