The world was collapsing.
And yet, everything seemed frozen.
Figures tore through the night in a tumult of shouts and blood, sprinting breathlessly across the frozen pavement. The wind—thick with a black dust no one dared to name—howled like a wounded beast through narrow alleyways. Every breath scraped the throat raw; every step betrayed a panic too old to hide.
The city was no longer alive. It was dying.
Screams echoed between stone walls, broken by muffled prayers and desperate cries.
— "There's another one! Over there!"
— "Where are the Awakened?! They should be here!"
— "Run! For God's sake, run!"
But no one ran fast enough.
Beneath a collapsed archway, half-hidden by a toppled patio umbrella, Jinra sat. Her body hunched under a coarse blanket, she held in one hand a half-eaten shawarma—greasy, lukewarm, pointlessly alive. The world could burn—and it was burning—but she kept chewing.
A sharp crash tore through the air.
Something fell from the sky like a bag of ruptured flesh. The body struck the pavement just meters from her and split in two with the wet crunch of a bursting melon. A piece of leg rolled to her boots. She looked down without flinching.
Her eyes, a shade of gray too pale to be truly human, lingered for a moment in the soiled snow.
Then she sighed.
— "Disgusting."
A bite. Chewed. Swallowed. Another world, another crime.
— "They never learn. Still think someone's coming to save them. The sirens started twenty minutes ago, and they waited… for what? Divine intervention?"
She clicked her tongue, more annoyed by their stupidity than by the death itself.
— "Collective delusion. Always the same."
Someone screamed, farther off. But this scream was different. Younger. Frailer.
Jinra raised her head.
A child ran down the street, little more than a flicker in the blizzard of ash and snow. Behind him, a shape—or no, the absence of one. A warped silhouette undulating like spilled ink across the fabric of reality.
An Echo.
It wasn't running. It glided. As if it obeyed no laws of this world. Each of its steps bent time, twisted air. It moved with inhuman patience, soundless, but its presence weighed on the atmosphere like a funeral bell that never ceased to toll.
The child stumbled.
His bare hands plunged into the filthy snow, his small chest shuddering with sobs no adult could hear without breaking. He called for something. Someone.
And the Echo bent down.
From its twisted maw, a sound emerged—muffled, monstrously tender:
— "...where is my… daddy…?"
Jinra watched without a word. Her fingers slowly tightened around what remained of her shawarma.
A man burst into view, as if ripped from nothingness. His arms flailed through the air—desperate, useless. He ran without seeing, his eyes drowned in raw fear.
He collapsed in front of her, fell to his knees, pleaded in a hoarse voice.
— "Help my son. Please. I… I can't save him, I won't make it. But you… you're… awakened, aren't you?"
She didn't answer right away.
She was watching the child.
He looked so small. So alone.
The Echo now raised an amorphous weapon—a club, or a broken bone, or perhaps a fossilized memory—ready to strike its judgment upon the world.
— "What a pathetic end for a ruined world," Jinra said.
The man reached out again, still begging.
— "Please…"
She stood slowly.
— "If I step in, he'll kill us both."
The club came down.
The child's scream shattered the night—a scream so pure, so sharp, it split the silence like a blade.
Then came the blood, the splintering of bone, and a silence heavier still. The father crumpled. He did not weep. There was nothing left to cry for.
Jinra watched, unmoving.
Then, as if something finally peeled away inside her, she set the shawarma down, wiped her fingers, and murmured:
— "I'm sorry. It shouldn't be my scent that finishes you."
A breath. A whisper.
— "But at least… your son won't suffer anymore."
She checked the time: 11:57 PM.
— "Three minutes."
The man didn't respond. His hands dug into the snow, searching for a warmth that no longer existed.
— "To make it up to you… I'll die in three minutes too."
She walked closer. He didn't see her. He saw nothing anymore.
And she spoke, more to herself than to him.
— "This world is a lie. It never gave me a chance. It judged me before it even offered me a life."
Her eyes met those of the Echo, now very near. Its weapon still dripped with blood too fresh to cool.
— "Maybe I'm like it. An aberration. A thing people look at with horror… but deserve."
She closed her eyes.
— "I'll fall. Let myself be devoured. Become like them."
One more step, and the Echo would see her.
She whispered, without hate, without fear:
— "And maybe… I'll kill it from the inside."
But as she stepped forward, the creature halted.
It turned its featureless head. One eye—or the illusion of one—seemed to fix on her.
Then it vanished.
No, it didn't vanish. The world blinked. And the Echo was simply gone.
Only the wind remained.
⸻
⸻
The Echoes
They say they come when the silence grows too thick.
When the scream of the world dies in the throat.
They were not born. They became.
Torn memories, regurgitated regrets. Fragments of thought rejected by death itself.
They have no voice, no heart, no fixed shape. Their twisted limbs drift through dimensions that flesh cannot grasp. Around them, lost faces hover—smiles extinguished, eyes decomposed. Witnesses to what we let die within us.
And when they come…
They do not hunt.
They demand.