It came without warning.
A meteor slid across the Nevada sky. Luminous, slow, beautiful. For a moment, the city stood still. Crowds on the Strip pointed skyward, phones raised, laughter echoing under neon light.
Then it shattered.
Midair. Like glass struck from within.
A pulse of heat rippled outward, followed by an unnatural stillness. And then…
The mist came from above. It wasn't human. It wasn't random.
Golden red. Thick. Uncoiling from the broken sky like a living thing. It didn't fall, it crept. Rolled through streets and alleys. Slipped beneath doors. Seeped into vents.
It had no scent. No sound.
Just… presence.
At first, no one reacted. Then someone fell. Then another. Coughing. Convulsing.
And then came the screams.
Not fear.
Fury.
The mist didn't kill outright, it changed them. Something snapped beneath the surface of skin and bone. Tourists turned on one another in a frenzy. Eyes glazed, teeth bared. Friends became predators. Lovers became monsters. Every heartbeat sharpened into madness.
And Las Vegas was not the only one.
That same night, across oceans and continents, five more meteors fell. One crashed near the glittering Cotai Strip in Macau.
Another erupted above the heart of Dubai's financial district. A third rained down on the sleepless streets of Kabukicho in Tokyo.
In London, the iconic Soho district was swallowed in gold crimson fog. And far to the east, Gangnam in Seoul became a maze of screams and blood.
Each site shared the same nightmare.
The same golden red shimmering mist.
The same transformation.
The same echo of something not of this world.
The mist stayed for hours. Then, just as silently, it dissipated, drawn back into the sky by some unseen force, leaving behind streets soaked in blood and bodies that barely looked human anymore.
Governments scrambled for explanations. Radiation. A failed bio-weapon. A shared hallucination. But the sky hadn't lied.
The mist came from above.
It wasn't human.
It wasn't random.
And it wasn't the last.
Behind locked doors and encrypted files, they called it:
The Emberveil Event.
But outside the classified walls, survivors spoke in hushed tones. Not of gas. Not of war.
But of something watching…
Waiting…