Before it all ended, I was just another nameless face in the crowd. An ordinary man, living on the margins of a world that never offered me much beyond repetition.

  I’d wake up early, tidy the house, make coffee, and care for my grandmother — the only person who still gave my days any meaning.

  She was already very old, could barely walk, and had a memory that liked to vanish now and then. Still, she always recognized me. Always said my name with tenderness, as if my presence was the last anchor to her reality. And maybe it was. Through everything, she was my best friend. I cared for her like a soldier guarding his final post. Not out of duty. But because I wanted to. Because she was all I had left.

  The rest of my family had been gone for years. The closest names buried beneath tombstones time had long swallowed. Just distant cousins, scattered contacts, voices that felt more like memories than living ties. No wife. No children. Just me, my grandmother... and the routine.

  The routine was comfortable. Rigid. Like a cocoon where everything was predictable. And in a way, living like that was easy. The days blurred together: grocery store, pharmacy, an episode or two on TV, and the certainty that life, even dim, was still moving forward.

  But something strange lingered in the air, even before it all began. A silent feeling, almost imperceptible, that the world had started breathing differently. We didn’t know it yet, but the end was already watching us.

  Things started to shift subtly — like a polite knock before a door is kicked down.

  First came the signs — frequent internet outages, news articles that vanished minutes after posting, and a strange hum that echoed from electronics in the dead of night. Small disturbances no one could explain — glitches, maybe, or something deeper.

  I remember one night clearly. It was around three in the morning, and I’d gotten up to check if my grandmother needed anything. The TV was off, but a red phrase crawled across the black screen, like an electronic whisper: "The order has been undone."

  It flashed three times and vanished.

  No buttons worked.

  And the next day, no one mentioned it.

  Like it had been nothing more than a fatigue-induced hallucination.

  The city started changing too. Faded faces, people staring into nothing for long stretches, and an ever-growing silence. The once chaotic traffic had turned oddly smooth. Fewer cars. Fewer horns. Fewer people.

  Human presence was becoming an echo.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  And the animals... vanished.

  The dogs that once barked in backyards were gone within a week.

  The birds stopped singing.

  Even the sky felt heavier, too loaded for weather that should’ve been clear.

  The sun no longer looked the same.

  It felt like it was watching us — indifferent — as if something greater had already taken control of fate.

  That’s when I knew — the world wasn’t sick.

  It was being erased.

  Patiently.

  Piece by piece.

  The day everything became hell began normally.

  I made my grandmother’s porridge, opened the windows, and looked at the sky.

  It was gray — but not because of clouds.

  It was as if a dull film had been cast over the whole world.

  The air was thicker.

  The silence heavier.

  And the city’s noise sounded muffled, as if we were all trapped inside a giant glass jar.

  Around 10 a.m., the tremors started.

  Not an earthquake.

  There were no cracks in the ground, no swaying buildings.

  It was something deeper.

  As if time itself had begun to shudder.

  People started screaming in the streets — not from pain, but panic.

  They pointed to the sky.

  And when I looked up, I understood why.

  Rifts had opened above.

  Like deep wounds, bleeding white, pulsing light.

  So many they looked like scars in the heavens.

  And from them... descended shapes.

  Incomplete.

  Shadowed.

  Nothing the human brain could fully process.

  Some were massive, others swift and small.

  But all shared one thing:

  They didn’t belong to Earth.

  The collapse was swift.

  Within hours, cities vanished.

  Literally.

  A light would tear across the horizon and, where there had been buildings and life, only dust remained.

  No time to run. No time to warn.

  The entire world seemed bound to an invisible countdown.

  One by one, continents disintegrated like wet paper.

  On my street, the power poles began to snap.

  I saw a child frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes completely white, staring at something I couldn’t see.

  She turned to ash before my eyes, carried off by the wind.

  The screams grew louder.

  The sound of cars vanished.

  Buildings lost color, then shape.

  We were being deleted.

  I brought my grandmother to the living room, trying to stay calm.

  She looked strangely peaceful, as if she’d always known this would happen.

  She whispered something like “everything returns to the beginning...”

  and fell asleep in my arms.

  She never woke up again.

  Outside, there was no city left.

  Only the void swallowing everything.

  I don’t know how long passed after that. Minutes? Hours? It didn’t matter.

  Reality no longer obeyed logic.

  The room where I held my grandmother started dissolving like smoke, piece by piece, as if the world was being erased by some divine eraser.

  I looked at her one last time.

  She looked at peace, a faint smile on her lips.

  In some way, I was grateful she’d gone before seeing what would come next.

  I walked to the door.

  What used to be my street had become a field of ruins and silence.

  The sky... if it could still be called that... was an ever-shifting abyss, full of cracks that pulsed with living light.

  The entire world felt like it was suspended in time — a final breath before death.

  And then I felt it.

  Not pain.

  A calling.

  A pressure in my chest, like something — or someone — had placed a hand on my existence.

  It wasn’t a being.

  It was a system.

  A code.

  An invisible entity that, for some reason, had decided I needed to continue.

  But first... I had to die.

  The ground beneath me gave way, and I was pulled into the void.

  My body shattered before I even fell.

  I felt my skin flake away, my bones break, my senses disappear.

  Nothing of me remained —

  except the awareness that… this wasn’t the end.

  Not for me.

  They called me many things before all this.

  A common name.

  A common life.

  David, I think.

  But now? Now I understand.

  I always was…

  And I always will be…

  Uthred.

  And destiny is all.