You reach out to embrace that stillness, but something deep inside you stirs in protest. And so you rebel against finality.

You let out a primal scream that echoes throughout your psyche, binding your disparate shards together.

As it does so, you feel the strength of it build up inside you. But it’s far more than you can handle, and it overwhelms you, almost suffocating you with its sheer rawness. You fear it will envelop you and swallow you whole, but instead it bursts like a dam.

Suddenly, you feel energy flowing out of you in endless waves, in every direction.

Then, for one eternal moment, you sense everyone and everything around you in a moment of pure stillness. They’re all dead or dying. Anyone still alive is feeling excruciating pain, just like you did. Or still are, you can’t tell any longer.

More than that, you can feel how everyone and everything around you is getting torn asunder into thousands of slivers and shards.

This isn’t just your death, but the death of everything.

Your heart beats in protest.

You feel it become heavier as your disparate shards stop sliding outward. As something inside you pulls them back inward. Despite the overwhelming pain, you know deep down that it just can’t end like this.

So with a deep breath inward, you harness the energies spilling out of you. You use it to compress your psyche, and slowly pull it all back into place. Each of the crystalline slivers slide back inward and put you back together piece by piece by piece.

Another eternal moment flashes by before you make yourself whole again, and the pain completely vanishes. But it’s more than that. You aren’t merely whole again - you feel remade. You feel more alive than you’ve ever been your entire life.

You can feel yourself vibrating, as though your whole body is standing still at a thousand kilometers a second.

It takes a third eternal moment for you to realize that you’ve overcome an excruciating death, and that something inside you has changed as a result. You find yourself unable to understand how or why, but you’re certain that nothing will be the same ever again.

You try to open your eyes, but your subconscious holds you back. Instead, you feel your awareness slowly curl open, your Third Eye waking. And what you see through it is this primordial soup of energies that dance and weave all around you.

The thin golden threads ebb and flow around you, much like the undercurrent of a vast, invisible ocean.

Each one stops at the muted silhouettes of everyone around you, as though the thread belongs to them and them alone. But they pass through a few others around them as well, before they ultimately join up in the vast current.

The threads are airy, translucent, but they feel tangible at times. You reach out to grab one, but something tells you to do no such thing.

Instead you reach out gently, and let one pass through you.

In an instant, you’re flooded with the feelings, thoughts, and memories of dozens of people, all of whom are connected to that same thread. You get flashes of their lives in between long periods of fear and agony.

The imprint of their psyches wash over and through you, overwhelming you.

As their experiences flow around your mind, you realize that these memories aren’t just their past - it’s their futures as well. And the only reason you can tell is because so many of their memories stop right at this exact moment.

But plenty enough pass beyond, and you see the lives they have beyond this moment. Some end not long after.

You jerk your hand away, suddenly afraid of the future.

You turn your Third Eye towards Kaja and see her muted glowing outline in front of you. And she too has a thread, like everyone else. You’re tempted to reach for it when you realize that it’s thicker than the others. More than that, tt almost feels as though it’s exuding energy, while the others merely hang in the airy ocean.

You draw back, unable to touch her thread. You find yourself afraid of witnessing her memories and her heart.

And besides, it’s intrusive.

Instead, you compare your own thread to hers, and find that yours seems to be exuding energy just like hers. Except, yours is far thinner than her thread. It’s far thinner than everyone else around you.

Out of nowhere, a voice echoes throughout your psyche, shaking you to your core. It bounces around in every direction, and comes at you all at once.

A spark shoots through you when you realize that it’s coming from the physical world, rather than… this one? What was this, anyway?

“Hey,” says the voice, “Wake up! Please be alive! Please!”

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Your Third Eye slides shut as your regular eyes widen. Light spills into them slowly, as does Kaja’s face. The distress written on it melts away as she watches you wake.

“Thank fucking hell,” she breathes out in relief. “Are you alright?”

You find yourself on the floor. It seems you had fallen down as you thrashed around in pain. Kaja sits at your side, looking expectantly at you.

A dull ache pulses at the side of your skull, like a migraine threatening your future. You can feel it drumming around the side of your head, as though it is marching towards some battle deep within.

You rub your temples as you sit back up in an attempt to hold back the tide.

It does nothing of the sort.

Of course, you have a million and one questions, but the only one you can think to say is, “What happened?”

“You mean, what’s still happening?” she replies.

You instinctively look around, thanks to her insinuation, and find that the worst has only just begun. More than half of the people in the cafe are lying dead, their faces frozen with the absolute agony they had endured.

The rest writhe around as they clutch their heads. Their throats gurgle and wheeze as they attempt to scream in pain, but it’s clear that they’ve since broken their own vocal cords.

You rub your own throat when you realize that it feels raw and rough, a result of your own desperate cries moments ago.

A thought shoots through you like lightning, which causes you to scramble madly for your phone. Your thumbs fumble as you unlock it, then scroll through your contacts.

“Dad!” you shout out as you tap on his icon to dial.

But nothing happens.

You tap it over and over again, only to see that the signal bars keep flickering from one to four to none every second or so. Your heart sinks when you realize that your cell service won’t stop flapping. After a moment, the battery fizzles out completely. Great…

Kaja!

You glance over to ask if her phone’s working, but find that she has since moved to the next closest person to help them out. You watch as she gives a frenzied teen CPR, or at least tries to.

But the boy writhes around too frantically for her to actually do any good. His body convulses violently for a few seconds as his body goes into shock, then lies still. His last breath escapes his mouth in a long gasp.

Kaja sits deep in silence for a moment.

“I’m worried about Dad,” you quietly say. “I can’t reach him over cell.”

“Let’s go check on him,” she says.

“We… we just broke up. You don’t have to.”

“The hell I don’t.”

Kaja picks herself up off her knees then goes over to help you up.

And just as the two of you exit the cafe, the ground underneath you rumbles. The rumbling grows in intensity over the course of seconds, until it’s a full-blown earthquake. Everything around you shakes with intensity, more than enough to knock everything off the shelves.

The large glass windows shatter into pieces as the both of you tumble down to the ground.

You stare in fearful wonder as massive shards of violet crystals erupt out of the ground outside. They shatter and crumble the asphalt and concrete as they continue to grow outwards at every angle. Not only that, but they tear into the buildings all around and tear them to pieces as they extend out further and further.

The ground beneath you begins to rumble, then bulge upwards - and for a moment, the world slows down for you.

You watch as a giant crystal erupts from beneath you, catching both of you at its tip. It extends upwards rapidly into the ceiling, where it pushes both you and Kaja into the roof, crushing you, killing you...

Time speeds back up to normal, and the floor is back down to a slow bloat. Despite the earth shaking madly all around you, you grab Kaja then roll away just as the crystal column breaks through.

The two of you scramble away from it on your hands and knees, even as it tears through the ceiling and out the top. You’re out in the street by the time it breaks through countless more floors above the coffee shop, into the apartment building above it.

Kaja gasps as she puts a hand to her mouth at the sight of it. And of all the crystal columns tearing their way through the glass and concrete all around. Buildings are torn apart and shattered easily, causing huge chunks of them to rain down to the street.

“All those people…” she mutters.

You’re also in absolute awe. Not just as the sheer death and destruction all these crystal columns are doing, but because of something else.

“I saw it happen before it happened,” you say.

Kaja grabs you by the arm and squeezes, which takes your attention. Her eyes are wide and filled with a kind of clarity you have never seen before.

“Me too,” she replies. “We need to get outta here.”

The two of you break into a run down the street despite the rumbling around you. The both of you leap left and right as everything falls apart all around you.

At first, you head towards the subway station, but stop to a halt as terrified screams come from the street entrance. It isn’t a second later when a group of people run out from below with sheer panic written on their faces.

They scatter in every direction, mindless of whatever else is going on around them.

Some are crushed flat by falling concrete or sliced apart by shattered glass, while others continue to run blindly out of sight.

“What the actual fuck!” shouts Kaja.

She reaches out to grab your arm blindly, as if to check that it’s still there. She simply can’t take her eyes off of the thing that climbs out of the subway entrance.

To be fair, neither can you.

A large, meter and a half long insectoid rips through a number of people as it claws its way out of the entrance. Its thick, bone-like chitinous exoskeleton appears incredibly thick and durable. More than enough to protect its ink-black soft interior.

Not only that, but all manner of spurs and spines and setae line its hard shell, all of which appear hard enough to tear through flesh easily. So easily that it tears the people around it to shreds with only a few slashes.

You shudder at the image.

Its razor-sharp legs stab into the concrete with such force that they embed themselves a quarter of a meter deep, causing cracks to spread in every direction. The insectoid chitters as it comes out to ground level, then vibrates its antennae to the point where it makes a sharp note.

More screams echo from down below, but this time they are joined by the sounds of wet slicing and heavy thuds. The screams do not seem to end, but they do ebb as the moments pass.

And it isn’t a few moments later that two more insectoids emerge from beneath, their segmented legs covered in blood. They synchronize the vibrations of their antennae to the first, and cause their harmonized note to intensify sharply.