The night became Moon.
Death vanished for a bit.
A word uttered.
It had been ages since I slept in my own bed.
I didn’t remember much of what had happened the day before.
I felt weird.
Different.
I quickly realized that what I was feeling could be summarized as ‘less contained’.
As I opened my eyes, my only mission was to see Marie.
My scraps of memories told me she had died but then didn’t. It made no sense.
I tumbled outside, I could sense her, but didn’t believe it yet. I went to the living room, and there she was, with Astarte drinking tea.
I felt giant relief when I saw she looked perfectly healthy, but just her being next to the God-Child brought a jealous growl out of my throat.
“Gray! You’re up!” My girlfriend didn’t mind my bad manners and jumped out of her seat to meet me. I forcefully hugged her. That made me feel better.
I couldn’t even talk.
After a minute basking in her warmth, Astarte cleared her throat and talked. “Hey Gray.” She looked at me with a strange expression.
“…w…What happened?” I asked with a raspy voice.
As I was told the story, memories flooded back to me. Some of which were not really mine.
The reason why I was less in control was that the Beast was gone, leaving me just with a normal, giant wolf inside my head.
Funny how the Beast was actually helping with those animalistic instincts without me realizing it.
Of course, this was the least of my worries.
I had been called Prophetess of Chaos multiple times in my life as Igris, it was my role, after all. I was the one who predicted the events that would change lives.
Or apparently, I was the one actually causing them in the first place.
The prophecy hadn’t been taken literally enough.
When it said that two Conscients would bring Chaos to the world, it meant exactly that.
It wasn’t a prophecy about the end of the world, but a prophecy on how to summon a God.
And Chaos wasn’t gone. Far from it. She was me.
Deep within me, the dark Ocean was clearer than before, somewhere I could reach very easily.
I had the ability to bring her back in a heartbeat.
But if I did, everything would burn.
I didn’t know why, but that knowledge was certain.
If she stayed in this world any longer than she already had, her mere presence would destroy the world.
Or maybe she already had.
What happened the night before had had consequences far beyond just us.
It began with a word, one that had echoed everywhere on earth and beyond.
The Chaos Event, as it would be later called, was a moment in history where everyone and everything heard the word that meant Chaos to them.
Every sound recording apparatus collapsed at that exact same moment. For two seconds, every such device on earth and in the orbit of the planet failed, only giving back a strange and eerie crackle.
The recorder on the Mars rover would reveal the same dysfunction.
This unbelievable event created mayhem, of course. But as the phenomenon had been very short and with no real consequence, it should have been quickly forgotten, only studied by some scientists as something rare and unexplained.
This forgetfulness would, of course, be largely helped by the law keepers of the Underworld.
But the Chaos Event would never meet this fate, as it became the annunciator of the Eden Days.
After the word was spoken, the second incident occurred. Estimated between twenty-two minutes and thirty-one seconds and twenty-two minutes and thirty-three seconds after the Chaos event, death itself ceased.
For slightly more than two days, there were no records of any deaths anywhere in the world.
Sick people were still sick, wounded people were still wounded. No one miraculously resurrected or stopped being hurt.
They just did not die or suffer any fatal injuries.
Those two and a half days were just a statistical anomaly, or that was how it was explained at the time.
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Examples were plenty:
A soldier-child in Africa, for having disobeyed his commanding officer, was sentenced to death. The teenager was put on his knees, and the warlord took his favorite machete to make an example for the other kids.
As he had struck down his blade, instead of the soldier-child’s neck, it had been the machete that had snapped.
The war lord had taken another machete. It broke again. Then another. They all suffered the same fate.
He had then, under the gaze of all his brainwashed soldiers, tried to shoot the condemned with his AK-47. The gun jammed.
For ten minutes, everything he tried failed.
He then decided to use his own fists to do the deed. In his twisted mind, he had to, because he was losing the grasp of his soldiers. The other kids were beginning to see the will of god or the involvement of witchcraft and were acting more and more rebellious.
As he went to pummel the condemned child, the war lord tripped on nothing, hit his head on the ground and fell unconscious.
The child-soldier used the opportunity to try and stab him in the back. He failed miserably and knocked himself out in the process.
A fireman in Brazil with third degree burns covering his whole body had seconds to live. He survived an excruciating fifty-seven hours.
A construction worker on top of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona fell from the scaffolding, a drop of 170 m (550 feet), directly onto rock pavement.
He survived with no major injuries; his fall had been cushioned by three different flight of pigeons. In total, a group of an estimated four hundred pigeons had flown on the trajectory of his fall.
Many of them died doing so.
The Eden Days did not affect other animals, even though bio-marine whale and mammal scientists as well as some big ape zoologists claimed the opposite. Those claims would never be verified.
The second event had created more than a little disorder. For two days, there had been no deaths, but after those, everything had caught up extremely quickly. Death tolls doubled, even tripled afterward. People died stupidly believing they were immortal and could do the craziest stunts with no repercussions.
Others believed it was the end of times. They began questioning reality, science, everything.
But the Underworld, even though it had not been spared by the chaos, reacted well. It found explanations, tried to calm the minds and stop the inquisitive ones to look beyond.
Short term, it should have been impossible of course, but in less than a week, with the help of the vampire’s compulsion and magic, people just began moving on.
That is when the last event occurred.
It would not be named for a long time.
Every earthquake sensor in eastern Indonesia and east-southern Asia activated.
The readings showed a cataclysmic event. It was far out, deep in the Mariana Trench, but even though the earthquake would not be dangerous as it was far away from any coasts, it would create a deadly tsunami reaching unprecedented heights.
No wave came.
Instead, in the sky stood something impossible.
A sea serpent rose, reaching beyond the skies, visible from the eastern coast of China and the western coast of the United States alike.
Saying it was big or gigantic was ridiculous. There were no words.
Humans looked at the sky and did the only thing they could. They prayed.
Governments tried to react, mobilize troops, but everyone knew.
This was not a thing that could be fought.
It stood there.
As helicopters and boats surrounded it, as all the cameras of the world pointed towards it, as humanity finally saw its end, the creature lowered itself, and vomited earth and rocks in the ocean for one day and one night.
People could do nothing else but stare.
A new island the size of Madagascar was born between Japan and North America.
Lots of videos surfaced of the creature’s act.
What would be remembered most was how careful and gentle it was, how little disturbance it had created.
There were no tsunamis, neither when it moved, neither when it created land.
It did not kill a single thing.
Then, its work done, it spoke in a very deep, soothing tone. Its voice wasn’t strong, and only the military boats and media outlets around it heard its speech. Every linguist around the world reacted, but before its words could be translated, it was already back inside the trench.
As if it had never been in the first place.
Except the island did not disappear with it. Unescapable evidence of what had transpired.
Old Sumerian was established as what it had spoken. Translating it had been easy enough, but the repercussions of those words were more world-shattering than everything that had occurred before.
“My Mistress woke me to tell a truth. There is only humanity, but humanity is plenty more than humans. Magic exists, hidden from you since eons. Use her power wisely and rise beyond the stars, or don’t and become dust. She shall not interfere.”
After that, there was nothing the lawmakers of the U could do. It was decided to reveal the Underworld to everyone.
For a while, Chaos reigned.
North America’s power structure shattered, as most of the high instances were revealed to be controlled by vampire compulsion. The Hunters used it to boost their ranks and strived, one of their leaders even got elected as president of the United States. Vampires fled. Witches very slowly made themselves known, but many stayed in hiding, not revealing their powers, even though they now could. They suffered from persecutions, as they were considered partially responsible for trying to brainwash humans into forgetting.
South America became a bloodbath, war between the hunters and vampires killed with no respite, normal humans and U members alike.
Europe suffered, but quickly adapted. Most likely because it was where the most powerful witches lived. They refused the fate that always befell them and took charge for once. They stopped any fighting between hunters and vampires, driving the more belligerent of them outside the borders. Then, they joined with normal human scientists, politicians and journalists to ease the transition into a new world. Many things burned and change was not easy, but the old witches acted well to avoid the mistakes of the past.
China became the home for the biggest vampire coalition. In a way, it didn’t change much, people were still controlled, albeit in a more violent and open manner. Hunters and witches were purged, in a silent, horrendous way.
Most countries of Africa were not ready for the truth, and most there suffered a terrible price. People died, accused of being monsters. Sometimes they were; Many times, they were not. Nothing, not even vampires, could handle angry mobs of scared people. The strongest of the U fled, the rest perished.
A rather unexpected thing was Australia. It handled the transition exceptionally well. Some suggested it was because of the absurd number of life-threatening creatures that lived there, a few more didn’t change much. A more serious explanation was the rather low ratio of U residents per habitant, most of them witches. The magic-wielding humans also helped save the country from complete desertification, which greatly eased their insertion in the society.
Then, things calmed, once again. New normality began.
The world was faced with a truth, that it needed to change. But whether that change would be for the better or for the worst, no one could tell.