Summer break, day 11, 19:40
"And now, to something a little more extraordinary. A phenomenon people all over the world have been waiting for."
The screen flickered as the camera cut to the studio. A man and a woman sat behind a news desk, both smiling with the kind of smiles that looked like they had been rehearsed in a mirror.
The woman leaned toward the camera. "Tonight marks the peak of what astronomers are calling a once in a million years meteor event," she said. "Under clear skies, thousands of meteors are expected to be visible across large parts of the world. According to scientists, a display like this will not occur again on this scale for an unimaginably long time."
Her co-host nodded. "Cities worldwide are preparing for the occasion. Public viewings are planned in parks, on rooftops, and along waterfronts."
"Exactly," she continued. "If the weather cooperates, tonight offers a rare chance to witness something truly unique. So wherever you are, it might be worth taking a moment to look up."
The segment ended with a slow zoom of simulation footage, stars sweeping over a model of Earth as a gentle piano track faded into commercials.
I stared at the screen.
Eleven days of summer break and I had not left the house once. I had not opened the front door, had not felt the sun on my face, had not spoken to anyone except my parents. My world was this room, this bed, this screen.
My phone sat in my hand, unlocked. I had been scrolling through nothing for the past hour, just swiping out of habit, not even looking. A meme I did not laugh at. An ad for something I would never buy. A blurred selfie someone had posted with the caption "ready for tonight." I had no idea who they were.
The screen dimmed and went dark. I did not turn it back on.
Then, like something sharp and sudden, my mother's voice came back to me. Last night. Through the wall. She had been crying. My father had stood beside her and held her but said nothing. I had pressed myself against the wall and listened and wished I had not.
"Aleks hasn't left his room for days."
"What is wrong with my son?"
"Why doesn't he go out with his friends?"
"Doesn't he feel lonely?"
I shook my head. Tried to think of something else. Aleks. Pull yourself together. Mum and Dad were the only people who maybe still thought about you at all, so at least try not to be the reason they cried at night.
I stood up.
My room looked exactly how it should have looked for someone who had spent eleven days rotting in it. Tissues on the floor. Dirty clothes in piles that had started to merge with each other. The curtains were drawn shut and the only light came from the TV across from my bed. Next to it was my desk with two monitors, a PC, and a gaming chair with the armrest peeling off. If I was not in bed staring at my phone, I was sitting there. Those were the two modes. There was no third.
I walked over to the shelf above the desk to grab my wallet. It was not there. The desk was buried under dishes and empty bottles, and I could not be bothered to dig through all of it, so I just grabbed my debit card and headed for the bathroom.
The mirror lit up when I stepped in front of it.
I looked at myself.
I always looked at myself with disgust. Sixteen years old and I could have passed for twelve. Short, skinny, but with a round face and thick cheeks that made me look like a child who had not grown into his own head yet. I had gone to the gym once. Six months, five times a week, never missed a session. It had been the one thing I was proud of until I saw a few of them there one morning. I never went back.
My hair was dark blond. My eyes were gray. Not blue gray or green gray. Just gray. Like static. I had never met anyone with eyes like mine. Maybe because I never looked anyone in the eyes long enough to check..
I brushed my teeth. Rinsed my face. Fixed my hair a little.
Done.
I walked back through the hallway. The lights were off but a faint yellow glow came from the kitchen.
"Where are you going?" My dad's voice.
I leaned around the corner just enough for him to see me. He sat at the table with a mug in one hand and his phone in the other. The kitchen smelled like coffee that had been sitting too long.
"Out. Meteor thing."
"With a friend?"
"Yeah."
I lied.
He nodded once.
"Aleks, don't come back late."
"Got it."
I stood in front of the door. The keys were cold in my hand. I could still turn around. I could go back to my room, get into bed, and keep scrolling until my eyes burned and the morning came and nothing changed. That was the easier thing. That was always the easier thing.
I opened the door.
The streets still held the warmth of the day. The sun sat low behind the rooftops and the sky was doing that thing it did in summer, shifting from blue to purple to gold, all bleeding into each other like someone had knocked over a paint palette. Streetlamps had not switched on yet. Everything was caught in that strange hour between day and night where the world looked softer than it actually was.
I passed people heading toward the parks. A couple laughed as they juggled a rolled up picnic blanket between them. Kids ran ahead, yelling about the meteors. A group of teenagers in matching hoodies took selfies near a fountain. Everyone moved in groups. Everyone had someone.
I kept walking.
The corner shop was open. I pushed the door and the little bell above it gave a tired jingle. Inside it smelled like old candy and cleaning spray. I went straight to the fridge in the back, opened it, and let the cold air hit my face. My hand reached for the usual, the dark red bottle with the cherry vanilla label. The one constant in my life that never let me down.
I closed the fridge and walked to the counter.
That was when the bell rang behind me.
I did not need to turn around. I knew the voice before it even started.
"Hey Carmen, look. One of the weirdos I told you about."
Brad. Leaning against the wall by the exit like the store belonged to him. Tall. Athletic. The kind of face that showed up in every girl's Instagram likes. Everyone at school knew him, everyone talked about him, and most of them wanted to be him or be with him.
And next to him was Carmen.
Her dark hair fell over one shoulder. Her brown eyes caught the neon light from the fridge. She had moved here from Spain a few years ago, and back in middle school she had been my best friend. We used to walk home together. She used to save me a seat at lunch. She used to laugh at the dumb things I said, and for a while I thought that maybe, eventually, I would tell her how I felt.
I never did. And now she stood next to Brad.
His words hung in the air like something sticky. My mouth went dry. I knew what came next. Years of this had taught me exactly how the script went. The grin. The comment. The laughter. And later, when no one was watching, the shove behind the building.
Carmen tugged on his sleeve. "Brad, stop. That's not funny."
Her voice was soft. Almost apologetic. But she did not move away from him. Her eyes met mine for half a second and I saw it. She recognized me. And then she looked away, the same way you look away from something on the sidewalk that you do not want to step in.
I wanted to say something. Something sharp, something that would make me feel like I existed. But my throat closed and my legs went stiff and the debit card in my hand was shaking and nothing came out.
I placed the bottle on the counter. Stared at the card reader. The numbers blurred.
Beep. Payment approved.
"Have fun tonight," the cashier mumbled without looking up.
I grabbed the bottle and walked to the door. In the reflection of the glass I saw Brad wrap his arm around Carmen and pull her in and kiss her.
I pushed the door open.
Outside, the air hit my face and I realized my knees were shaking. I could still hear him laughing. I could still see her looking away.
A tear ran down my cheek. I wiped it off with the back of my hand and kept walking.
The noise faded as I turned onto the quieter path. The chatter, the music, the cars. All of it fell behind me. The only sounds left were the crunch of gravel under my shoes and the wind moving through the trees.
The path wound uphill past overgrown hedges and an old metal fence. Distant apartment windows blinked in the dusk.
My spot came into view. The bench. Half buried in weeds, sitting crooked under a streetlight in a forgotten corner of the park. The light flickered once and then held, casting pale gold across the worn wood. I always came here when I told my parents I was going out. This was the extent of my social life. A bench that no one else used.
I sat down. It creaked, the way it always did.
I popped the cap off the bottle and let it fall to the ground. Took a sip. The cherry vanilla was cold and sweet and for a second it was the only good thing in the world.
The sky above had darkened enough to show the first stars. Tiny white dots appeared one by one, like someone was poking holes in a dark sheet. The clouds pulled apart slowly, streaks of purple and orange dragging across the horizon.
I leaned back.
Maybe in another universe, things were different. Maybe the Aleks from over there had people. Went out to eat, to swim, to the movies. Maybe he sat on this exact bench with friends, waiting for the show to start. Maybe he knew what it felt like to be wanted. Maybe, unlike me, he actually lived.
I took another sip and watched the sky and waited for something to happen.
Then something happened.
A broad stripe of light appeared across the sky. The meteor. It glided slowly from one end of the horizon to the other, trailing a wake of colors that stretched and grew with every second. At the very front it was a bright gold, almost white. Then it bled into turquoise, then into pink, and at the tail a deep violet that reminded me of the evening sky I had walked through to get here. Within seconds, the trail took up almost the entire sky. It turned the darkness into something else, something that glowed and pulsed and made the air itself feel different.
I stood up from the bench. I could not help it. My body moved on its own. I craned my neck and stared and my mouth was open and I did not care.
Goosebumps ran across my arms.
I had not seen something this beautiful in a very long time. Maybe ever.
And standing there, alone, on a bench in a park where nobody came, I thought about the last eleven days. About the room and the screen and the scrolling and the silence. About Brad and Carmen and the way she looked away. About my mother crying through the wall. About the gym I stopped going to and the friends I never made and the life I kept watching other people live from behind a phone screen.
I did not want this anymore.
I did not want my world to be only my room. I did not want to rot in bed while the people who ruined me had the time of their lives. I did not want to be the kid on the bench. Not anymore.
I shouted it. Out loud. Into the sky, where nobody could hear me except the stars.
"I want to finally do something out of my fucking life!"
The words left my mouth and the wind picked up out of nowhere. Hard and sudden, like the air itself had flinched. Birds burst from the trees. Somewhere far away, dogs started barking.
I stood still and listened to the echo of my own voice fade.
Then I looked up.
The trail was still there. It had not faded.
I squinted. Something was wrong. The trail was not dissolving. It was spreading. Slowly, from left to right, like a wound opening in the sky. And inside the opening was something else. Not more sky. Not clouds. Not stars.
Darkness.
The blackest black I had ever seen. So dark it swallowed the light around it. No star could survive inside it, no color, nothing. It was the absence of everything.
The opening spread until it stopped. From where I stood, it looked like a massive, glowing oval hanging in the sky. The edges still burned with the meteor's colors. Gold, turquoise, pink, violet. But the center was that void. That nothing.
Everything went still. No wind. No sound. Even the dogs stopped barking.
And then, inside the darkness, a point of light appeared.
It was small at first. A white dot, barely visible. But it grew. It became rounder and brighter and larger until it sat in the center of the oval like something staring back.
It looked like a pupil.
The sky had opened its eye.
The light inside it shifted. Slightly, almost gently. Like it was watching. Like it was blinking. Like it saw everything below it and was deciding what to do.
I stood on my bench in a forgotten corner of a park in a city that did not matter, and the sky looked at me. Or at least that was what it felt like. The bottle slipped from my hand and shattered on the ground. I did not notice.
Then the tears came.
Not mine. The sky's.
Red, glowing particles appeared around the eye. They drifted downward, slow and heavy, like drops of something liquid and luminous. They looked like blood. Each one left a thin, bright trail in the air as it fell, and more followed, and more, until the sky was bleeding.
I watched them fall. I could not move. I could not think. My body was locked in place and my brain had stopped trying to explain what was happening and I just stood there like an animal caught in headlights.
One of the drops fell right in front of me.
It hit the ground and glowed for a second, bright and red, and then it moved. The liquid crept across the pavement, pooled together, and turned darker. From red to something blacker than black.
A shape rose out of it.
I stepped back. My heel caught the edge of the bench and I stumbled. In front of me stood something that had been a drop of light a second ago. It had a form now, a body, a head. It looked like it was made of the same darkness from inside the eye, twitching and glitching at the edges, as if it could not quite hold itself together.
It lifted its head.
I had the feeling it was looking at me.
Then it screamed.
The sound was so loud and so wrong that my ears rang and my vision blurred and every muscle in my body fired at once.
"The fuck?"
I ran.
Faster than I had ever run in my entire life. Down the path, past the hedges, past the metal fence, onto the street. My feet slammed the pavement. My chest burned. My lungs could not keep up. I did not stop.
The city was falling apart around me.
The screams came from everywhere. Not just the creature behind me. From every direction, from every street, from the sky itself. I passed a bakery with its windows blown in. Glass crunched under my shoes. A car was flipped on its side and the horn was stuck, blaring a single note into the chaos.
A man ran past me with blood on his hands, screaming something about his daughter. I did not stop. Another shape moved across the sidewalk behind him, low and fast and wrong.
It was not chasing him.
It was hunting him.
And then one of them saw me.
I turned down the alley behind the gym. Narrow, steep, dark. Halfway through I realized what I had done. The wall ahead was solid. No door, no gap, no way out.
Dead end.
"Shit." I spun around.
The creature was already at the entrance of the alley. It did not rush. It walked. Slowly. Each step deliberate, like it enjoyed this part. Like it wanted me to understand what was about to happen.
I pressed my back against the wall and raised my hands.
"Please don't."
My voice barely came out.
The creature lunged.
Light.
Blinding, sudden, total light. It filled the alley so completely that I could not see anything, not the creature, not the wall, not my own hands. A sharp crack split the air and something golden slammed into the creature and pinned it against the bricks. It did not bleed. It twitched, hard and fast, and then it broke apart into smoke and sparks and was gone.
I dropped to the ground. My knees hit the pavement and I gasped.
A shape stood before me. Tall. Glowing. Two massive wings folded behind its back.
I could not see its face. The light was too bright. But I heard its voice, calm and clear and certain.
"Endure a little longer, Aleksander. You are nearly safe."
Everything in me froze.
"You know my name?"
It did not answer.
And then it was gone. No flash. No sound. Nothing. Just the empty alley and the smoke and me on the ground, shaking.
I sat there. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
Had that just happened. Had God heard me.
I stood up. Everything hurt. My legs were water. But I walked.
Through the empty streets. Through the smoke. Through the ruins of the city I had grown up in. Buildings stood hollow with their insides spilling out. The air was thick with ash and something chemical that burned the back of my throat. Somewhere a phone was ringing. Nobody answered it.
I walked past a woman lying under a broken streetlight. Her eyes were open. I kept walking.
One block later, a car burned quietly. Something moved across the rubble ahead, low and twitching, like something pretending to be alive. It did not see me. I pressed myself against a wall and waited until it passed.
I kept going.
My mind had stopped. I was not processing anything. I was not scared anymore or sad or confused. I was just legs and lungs and forward motion. I was just a body trying to get from one second to the next.
Then the ground lit up beneath me.
A circle of light appeared under my feet. Symbols I did not recognize glowed one by one along its edge, forming a pattern that looked like something from a ritual, something ancient and deliberate and wrong.
"Holy sh..."
The ground vanished.
I fell.
There was no wind, no sound, no sense of direction. I could not feel my body. My thoughts scattered like paper in a storm. I reached for something to hold onto and there was nothing.
Was I dying.
This was it. This was how it ended. Sixteen years of nothing and then this.
No. If this was death, it should have been darker. Quieter. I should have seen something. A memory. My parents. Their faces.
I saw nothing.
Then, impact.
Hard stone slammed against my back. Cold air rushed into my lungs. I gasped and twisted onto my side and coughed until my ribs ached.
I opened my eyes.
Blue.
The sky was blue.
Not torn open. Not bleeding. Just blue. Bright and still and endless, the kind of sky you see in photographs of places you will never visit.
I blinked. Then again. Then again.
I pushed myself up. My arms shook. My shirt was soaked with sweat and dust and something I did not want to think about. The stone beneath me was smooth and pale, not asphalt, not concrete, something else entirely.
I was somewhere else.
And I was not alone.
Voices. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They hit me all at once, a wall of sound that came from every direction. Screaming, crying, praying, speaking in languages I did not understand. My brain tried to sort them and failed.
I turned my head.
A massive crowd.
People packed shoulder to shoulder across a wide, open field. Grass so green it looked fake. Men in office suits standing next to women in hospital gowns. Teenagers with school bags. Children clinging to strangers. Elderly people sitting on the ground with blank faces.
Everyone looked lost. Everyone looked exactly the way I felt.
I scanned the horizon. Searched for something I could recognize. A building. A road sign. A skyline. Anything that could tell me where I was.
Nothing.
Just the field. Distant treelines. And a sky that was too clean, too bright, too perfect. The air smelled sharp and cold, like a morning that did not belong to any season I knew. Even the sunlight was wrong. It came from an angle my body did not recognize, casting shadows that pointed in directions that did not make sense.
My stomach dropped.
"This is not Earth."
The words came out before I could stop them. Quiet. Small. Stupid. Like saying it out loud could undo it.
I had been in my city. I had been running. I had been falling.
And now I was here.
I looked at the crowd again and this time I saw them.
Not all of them were human.
Some of them were tall. Taller than anyone I had ever seen. Their ears were long and pointed and their eyes caught the light in a way that made my skin crawl. Their faces were sharper, their movements smoother, their posture too perfect. They wore clothes that shimmered and shifted in the light and they stood apart from the human crowd like a different species. Because that was exactly what they were.
Elves.
My brain tried to reject it. Tried to call it cosplay, a prank, a hallucination. But then one of them turned and the movement was too fluid, too natural. No fake ears. No seams. The shape of the skull itself was different.
And then I saw the shorter ones.
Stocky. Broad. Arms like tree trunks and shoulders like boulders. Beards that could have been made of wire. They did not look like short humans. They looked like someone had carved people out of stone and dared them to breathe.
Dwarves.
My legs gave out. I sat back down on the stone and stared.
"Is this a dream?" My voice cracked. "Did I finally go crazy?"
Nobody answered.
The ground beneath us pulsed.
And then a voice came from the sky.
Not from speakers. Not from a person. From everywhere, all at once, as if the air itself was speaking. It pressed against my chest and hummed inside my skull and I knew with absolute certainty that every single person on this field could hear it.
"You have been spared."
Silence. Total, immediate silence. Thousands of people stopped breathing at the same time.
"The creatures which destroyed your worlds will also come for this one."
My stomach twisted into a knot.
"You have six months."
Someone in the crowd shouted. "Six months for what?!"
The voice did not acknowledge him. It did not pause. It did not care.
"Unite. Learn. Survive."
A beat of silence.
"Or perish, like your world did."