No one agrees on the exact moment it happened.
Some say it was when the sky changed color.
Others swear it was the sound, a low and impossible groan that rolled across continents, deep enough to rattle bone. Satellites recorded it. Seismographs caught it. Animals screamed hours before anyone saw anything.
But the truth is simpler.
The world did not end.
It split open.
Yggdrasil did not descend like a god. It did not crash or conquer. Its branches phased into reality, breaching the sky, the oceans, the mountains, the cities. They slipped through existence as if Earth had always been waiting for them.
Gigantic limbs of bark and light pierced cloud layers and concrete alike. Roots coiled through subway tunnels and bedrock. Leaves unfolded in the upper atmosphere, glowing like fractured constellations.
Reality did not reject it.
Reality adapted.
Within minutes, the first signs appeared.
Plants nearest the branches twisted first. Bark split to reveal glowing veins. Crops rotted where they stood. Animals grew erratic, territorial, violent. Entire forests fell silent overnight, replaced by something older and watchful.
Then people began to change.
Hospitals noticed before governments did. Thirteen-year-olds collapsing in waiting rooms. Adults screaming as symbols burned into their skin. Some lost consciousness. Some laughed through the pain. Some died before doctors understood what they were witnessing.
The markings were never the same.
Runes etched themselves into flesh, bone, and nerve. Some were clean. Others jagged and unstable, as if the body had resisted them.
No two were exactly alike.
Governments responded as expected.
Emergency broadcasts flooded the airwaves. Borders closed. Militaries mobilized. Quarantine zones rose around visible branches and dense urban centers where infection spread faster than explanation.
None of it held.
Soldiers learned quickly that conventional weapons worked only sometimes. Fire slowed growth. Explosives shattered Blighted matter but did not stop it from reforming elsewhere. The threat did not advance like an army.
It spread.
The Blight did not move with intent. It followed proximity, density, emotion. Underground transit systems became veins. Hospitals became accelerants. Places of panic grew sick faster than anywhere else.
The first Blighted were still recognizable.
People whose veins glowed faintly green. Neighbors who grew aggressive, obsessive, frightened. Some could be isolated. Some recovered. Others slipped further, their bodies reshaping around fear, grief, or hunger.
When they fell, something else rose.
Creatures that no longer remembered being human. Forms drawn from old myths and newer nightmares. Blightspawn, born when identity collapsed entirely.
By the second day, reports surfaced of corpses standing back up.
By the third, governments stopped using the word disaster.
They used Blight.
It entered official language less than forty-eight hours after the Break.
Communication failed where branches grew thickest. Power grids collapsed under organic interference. Supply chains snapped. Cities became islands, then traps. Cult symbols appeared beneath glowing roots, carved into walls by hands that believed this was salvation.
It was discovered by accident that fighting the Blight changed people.
Those who killed Blighted entities felt their runes react. Heat. Weight. A sense of resistance loosening. Some collapsed from exhaustion moments later. Others tried again, chasing the sensation.
Most burned themselves out.
At this stage, control did not exist. Tiering was theory at best. Runes leaked power into unprepared bodies, accelerating infection when overused. Many early deaths came not from the Blight itself, but from people trying to wield forces they did not yet understand.
Still, they fought.
Because the alternative was waiting.
By the end of the first week, the world stopped pretending this was temporary.
Schools closed indefinitely. Birthdays became feared milestones. Parents watched their children for glowing veins and sudden pain. Turning thirteen was no longer a celebration.
It was eligibility.
Maps were redrawn daily.
Some regions were marked Lost.
Others were simply erased.
Above it all, the branches of Yggdrasil remained. Silent. Immense. Uncaring. They did not advance. They did not retreat. They simply existed, as if Earth were now part of something far larger.
Humanity, for the first time in its history, was no longer at the center of the world.
This was not an invasion.
It was an integration.
And it had only just begun.