At first, people thought it was dawn.
A crack of light spread across the clouds — thin as a vein, glowing white against the blue.
The world paused, cameras turned upward, and for a brief moment, humanity felt awe instead of fear.
Then the light screamed.
It was not thunder.
It was something deeper — a sound that crawled under the skin, as if the earth itself were tearing apart.
Birds fell dead from the air. The oceans rippled like boiling tar.
Every glass window on the planet shattered at once.
That was the first second of the Rupture.
In the second that followed, the light turned black.
Satellites blinked out. Communications died.
Across every continent, people lifted their phones to record what looked like a sunrise from every direction at once.
Then the light opened wider — and the world began to bleed.
Cities dissolved into red smoke.
Every shadow turned the color of rust.
And in that haze came movement — shapes crawling out of the wound in the sky.
They were not angels, nor beasts.
They had no symmetry, no right to form — wings where mouths should be, eyes that never blinked, spines that whispered in languages no one had ever spoken.
They fell like rain — thousands of them, silent and graceful, landing in fields, streets, rivers.
And then they began to feed.
Governments reacted first.
Missiles, jets, tanks — everything modern humanity had spent centuries building was unleashed within hours.
The first wave struck Chicago. The second hit Moscow. The third vanished before launch.
Nothing touched them.
Bullets sank into flesh that healed faster than fire could burn.
One creature took a direct nuclear strike outside Beijing — and when the smoke cleared, it simply moved closer.
A billion people watched their screens flicker with static.
The last image transmitted to the world was a man in uniform, shouting into the camera, blood running from his ears.
The broadcast ended with a voice whispering from behind him:
"Your gods have left you."
And then, nothing.
Three days later, humanity realized it was no longer at war.
It was being harvested.
The sky never healed. It pulsed, bleeding light like a wound that refused to close.
The air changed — heavy, warm, tasting faintly of metal and rot.
Rain turned black.
Mountains split open and began to breathe.
Those who survived the first week saw things that should not have lived:
rivers flowing upward, forests of bone growing overnight, and stars falling from the sky only to crawl away like insects.
It wasn't an invasion.
It was a transformation.
The earth was being rewritten — turned into hell.
A soldier's diary found months later read:
"You can't look too long.
The sky moves when you stare.
The things inside the light—they watch back."
By then, hope was gone.
Armies collapsed not from defeat, but from madness.
Entire battalions walked into the red mist and never came out.
Then came the silence.
For a time, the earth stopped fighting.
The noise of civilization — engines, sirens, cities — faded.
All that remained were the whispers.
The demons didn't roar like beasts. They whispered, always in voices that sounded almost human.
Some whispered mercy.
Some whispered names.
Others simply laughed.
They built monuments of flesh — towers made of muscle and stone, thrones made of bone.
From these places, they began to rule.
Human cities became farms.
Churches became breeding pits.
Language itself began to twist — prayers turning into screams, screams into worship.
And from those who broke most beautifully, the demons made servants.
Fifty years passed.
Or maybe less. Time no longer moved the way it used to.
Seasons blurred. The sun became a rumor.
Children were born never seeing daylight.
They grew up beneath skies the color of old blood, learning that to look up too long was to lose your mind.
In some parts of the world, the demons built kingdoms.
Each ruled by a creature that had crawled through the Rupture and claimed dominion over the remnants of mankind.
Twelve of them, legends said — the Twelve demon kings.
Each took a continent and carved it into something monstrous.
In the north, towers of ice that screamed when touched.
In the south, forests made of ribs and lungs.
In the west, seas of flesh that pulsed with eyes beneath the waves.
Humans still lived — if you could call it living.
They worked the mines. They dug through the breathing earth.
They carried stones that twitched and bled.
They learned to avert their eyes when the demon kings passed.
Those who resisted were torn apart.
Those who obeyed were eaten slower.
And yet… the world still whispered.
Something remained buried deep within the flesh of the new earth — something older than the demons themselves.
The gods had left, yes, but not everything divine had gone with them.
Rumors spread among slaves, soldiers, and beggars.
Whispers of divine fragments — shards of power left behind by whatever had shattered the heavens.
They said if a human ever touched one, it could burn through their body and soul alike — or awaken something beyond comprehension.
But no one had ever seen such a thing and lived to tell.
Or so they believed.
By the time the fiftieth year arrived, the world had grown quiet.
The last human cities burned out like candles in a storm.
The oceans turned still, reflecting only the bleeding sky.
And deep beneath the ruins of what was once America, miners dug through the red stone, unearthing minerals for their demon masters.
They sang no songs.
They had no dreams.
Only orders — and fear.
The world had already been conquered.
Humanity had already fallen.
The only thing left was survival — and the faint echo of the day when the sky first split.
And even now, if you stand very still beneath the twilight clouds,
you can hear it —
the low hum of the Rupture,
still whispering,
still bleeding,
still waiting to open again.