The world did not end with fire.
It ended with hesitation.
For a single, immeasurable moment, the wind stopped moving. The sky forgot how to breathe. Even the distant oceans vast and eternal paused, as if waiting for permission to continue.
No one noticed.
Except Caelum Ward.
He was standing knee deep in mud, repairing a broken irrigation channel on the edge of a forgotten farming village. His hands were rough, his clothes stained with earth, his cultivation if it could even be called that barely enough to keep his body healthy.
Yet when the pause came, Caelum felt it.
Not as fear.
Not as pressure.
But as a question.
Should I continue?
The thought did not come from his mind.
It came from beneath his feet.
The moment passed.
The wind resumed. The sky exhaled. Life flowed forward again, ignorant and fragile.
Around him, villagers laughed, complained, and argued about water flow. Someone cursed the broken channel. Someone else joked about bad harvests.
Caelum said nothing.
He simply knelt back down and continued working, even as a strange chill lingered in his spine.
That night, he dreamed of cracks.
Not cracks in stone or land, but in meaning.
He saw mountains standing where laws no longer applied. Rivers flowing uphill because gravity had forgotten its duty. Demons not invading but feeding, quietly, patiently, on something far more fundamental than flesh.
He woke up gasping.
And for the first time in his life, Caelum felt something watching him
Not from the sky.
But from everywhere.
If you fall,
everything follows.
The voice had no tone. No emotion. No identity.
It was not a god.
It was not a demon.
It was simply the world, realizing it could no longer hold itself together.
Caelum sat in the darkness of his small room, heart pounding, hands trembling not from terror, but from an unbearable weight pressing down on his existence.
He wanted to refuse.
He wanted to forget.
But deep down, he already knew
The world was not asking him to fight.
It was asking him to stay.
Outside, far beyond the village, something ancient stirred within the Abyss.
And for the first time in countless eras, it smiled.
End of Chapter 1