"I keep hearing things when I'm alone… Am I the only one?"
— torn journal, date unknown
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
They didn't see it coming.
Not really.
There were signs — A week of people collapsing into comas, seizures, blank stares, and muttered words in voices not their own.
Planes dropped from the sky. Phones rang with silence. People forgot their own names.
But denial runs deeper than fear.
So they blamed the water. The tech. The air.
Anything but what it really was.
The stars had shifted. And something was watching us.
The first to fall were those who felt it — The sensitive. The shattered. The awake.
Some screamed. Some wept. Most just… stopped.
Then came them. Not dead. Not alive. No longer human.
The infected didn't walk like us — they stumbled in twitching rhythm, moved by instincts not their own.
Husks acting out fragments of what they once were.
Some survivors tried to hold on — to fences, to guns, to gods.
Others turned their eyes upward and begged for something — anything — to answer.
One did.
It didn't bring salvation. It brought the Touched.
Marked by something that doesn't belong. Changed in ways no one can understand.
Her name is Nyra Elstare. They call her The First Silence.
This isn't her origin story. It's your last warning.
The world didn't end in fire. It ended in silence.