The smell of old oil and oxidized copper always had a way of grounding me. It was a heavy, honest scent, the kind that stuck to the back of your throat and reminded you that the world was made of physical things—things you could touch, break, and, if you were patient enough, fix. I was hunched over a 2014 sedan's engine block, my knuckles barked and stained with the black blood of a failing machine. The garage was dim, lit only by a few flickering fluorescent tubes that buzzed with a rhythmic, annoying persistence. That hum was the heartbeat of my mundane existence. I've always found a strange comfort in machines. They don't lie. They don't have hidden agendas. If a piston seizes or a belt snaps, it's because a law of physics was ignored. In a world that felt increasingly chaotic and loud, the logic of a mechanical failure was the only thing that made sense to me.
I wiped a smudge of grease onto my thigh, feeling the coarse fabric of my overalls. I didn't mind being invisible. In fact, I preferred it. At nineteen, most people were looking for their place in the sun, chasing dreams or drowning in the digital noise of the city above. Me? I liked the subterranean cool of this workshop, tucked away in a service tunnel beneath the heart of the metropolis. The city of Oakhaven was a sprawling beast of glass and steel, always vibrating with the kinetic energy of millions of lives I would never know. I was just the guy who fixed their cars so they could keep moving away from people like me.
"Niall, you still down there?"
The voice belonged to Old Man Henderson, the owner of the shop. He was somewhere near the entrance, his voice echoing through the concrete throat of the tunnel. I didn't look up. I was focusing on a stubborn bolt that refused to budge.
"Almost done with the radiator, Henderson," I called back. My voice felt dry, unused. I hadn't spoken to anyone else all day. That was normal.
"Leave it," he said, and there was something in his tone that made me pause. It wasn't his usual impatient bark. It was thin, reedy, like a wire pulled too tight. "Something's wrong with the sky. You need to see this."
I frowned, finally dropping the wrench. It hit the concrete with a sharp metallic clang that seemed to ring longer than it should have. I stood up, my back popping as I straightened out. I walked toward the ramp that led out of the service tunnel and up to the street level. As I moved, I noticed the buzz of the fluorescent lights had changed. It wasn't a buzz anymore. it was a vibration that I felt in my teeth. It felt like the air itself was becoming dense, like walking through invisible water.
When I reached the surface, the first thing I noticed wasn't the sky. It was the silence.
Oakhaven was never silent. Even at three in the morning, there was a low-frequency rumble of distant traffic, the hum of air conditioners, the faint sirens of the emergency services. Now, there was nothing. No birds. No cars. Even the wind seemed to have held its breath. People had poured out of the buildings and onto the sidewalks, their faces tilted upward, frozen in a collective posture of bewilderment.
I looked up, and the breath died in my lungs.
The sky wasn't blue, and it wasn't the smoggy grey of a city afternoon. It was fracturing. Great, jagged lines of shimmering violet and iridescent white were tearing through the atmosphere, like cracks in a windshield. But they weren't just colors. They were deep. They had a perspective to them, as if the sky were merely a thin veil being ripped away to reveal something massive and incomprehensible underneath.
"What is that?" someone whispered nearby. I didn't look at them. I couldn't.
The cracks were spreading, racing across the horizon with a speed that defied logic. And then came the sound. It wasn't an explosion. It was a hum, so deep and powerful that it resonated in my marrow. It was the sound of a billion voices whispering a single word I couldn't understand. It was the sound of reality being rewritten.
The Zero Point.
In an instant, the world turned inside out. A flash of white light, more intense than a thousand suns, erased the horizon. I didn't feel pain, but I felt a sudden, terrifying lightness, as if the gravity holding my atoms together had suddenly decided to let go. I fell, or perhaps I rose. I couldn't tell. My senses were screaming, overwhelmed by a sensory input that shouldn't exist. I saw colors that had no names, felt temperatures that were simultaneously freezing and burning, and heard the sound of my own heart beating like a drum in an empty cathedral.
I remember thinking of the engine I had been fixing. I thought of the bolts and the gears. I clung to that image of mechanical certainty as the universe dissolved around me.
And then, darkness.
When I finally opened my eyes, I was back in the service tunnel. Or at least, I was in the place where the service tunnel used to be. I was lying on the concrete floor, but the concrete felt different. It was warmer, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic glow. I sat up, my head spinning, my vision blurred. I expected to feel the heavy, greasy air of the workshop, but the air was sharp and tasted like ozone and dried flowers.
I looked at my hands. They were still stained with grease, but the grease seemed to be moving, swirling in tiny, intricate patterns on my skin. I rubbed them together, and a spark of pale blue light jumped between my fingers. I jerked back, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"What... what did I do?" I whispered.
The workshop was a wreck. The sedan I had been working on was fused into the wall, the metal flowing into the concrete like wax. But it wasn't just destruction. It was a transformation. The flickering lights were gone, replaced by hovering orbs of soft radiance that drifted aimlessly near the ceiling. The tools on my workbench were no longer just steel; they were glowing with a soft, ethereal light, their shapes shifting slightly whenever I looked away.
I stood up, trembling. My legs felt weak, but there was a strange energy humming in my veins. It was like I had drank ten cups of coffee, but without the jitters. It was a clarity I had never known.
I walked toward the ramp, but I stopped halfway. The air in front of me shifted. It didn't just move; it folded. I could see it. I could see the lines of force, the invisible architecture that held the space together. It looked like a vast, complex web of shimmering threads, interlacing and knotted in ways that made my brain ache if I tried to follow them too closely.
I reached out a hand, hesitant. As my fingers brushed against one of the threads, a surge of information flooded my mind. It wasn't words or images. It was a feeling of *structure*. I knew, with a certainty that terrified me, that if I pulled that thread, the wall to my left would cease to be solid. I knew exactly where the stress points were, where the reality was thin, and where it was anchored.
I pulled my hand back as if I'd been burned.
"This isn't real," I muttered, my voice shaking. "I'm dead. Or I'm dreaming. This is a hallucination from the blast."
I scrambled up the ramp, desperate to see the sky again, to see something familiar, even if it was a ruined city. I needed the world to make sense again.
I burst out onto the street, and the sight stopped me cold.
Oakhaven was gone. In its place was a landscape that looked like a fever dream. The great skyscrapers were still there, but they were no longer made of just glass and steel. They were overgrown with crystalline structures that glowed with an inner light. Great floating islands of rock and earth drifted through the air, tethered to the ground by thick, glowing vines. The sky was no longer cracked; it was a swirling nebula of gold and deep indigo, with two moons hanging low on the horizon—one pale and familiar, the other a jagged, obsidian shard that seemed to swallow the light around it.
People were everywhere. Some were sitting on the ground, weeping. Others were wandering aimlessly, their eyes wide and vacant. But some... some were different.
I saw a woman standing near a collapsed bus. She was holding her hands out, and flames—real, licking flames of deep green—were dancing between her palms. She wasn't burned. She looked at the fire with a mixture of horror and fascination. Further down the street, a man was screaming as his skin turned to a translucent, glass-like substance.
The world hadn't ended. It had been reborn into something beautiful and monstrous.
I slumped against the side of a building, the stone feeling strangely soft against my back. I looked down at my hands again. The grease was gone now, replaced by a faint, silver shimmer that traced the lines of my palms.
"The Ether," I whispered. I don't know why that word came to me. It felt like a memory that didn't belong to me, a piece of knowledge that had been etched into my mind during that white-out moment of the Zero Point.
I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my chest, a pressure that felt like a heavy weight pressing down on my heart. I gasped for air, clutching at my shirt. The world around me began to flicker. The shimmering threads I had seen in the tunnel reappeared, but this time they were red, pulsing with a frantic, angry light. They were everywhere, constricting around the trees, the cars, the people.
The weight in my chest grew heavier. I realized I was seeing the "weight" of the world. Every object, every person, carried a burden of this new energy, and I was sensing the imbalance of it all. It was too much. The input was overwhelming my mind, a flood of data that my human brain wasn't built to process.
I closed my eyes tight, trying to shut it out. *Focus on the engine. Focus on the bolts. Focus on the grease.* I tried to rebuild the image of the garage in my mind, the simple, logical world where things only broke when they were worn out.
Slowly, the pressure began to recede. The red threads faded back into the periphery of my vision. When I opened my eyes, the world was still a chaotic, beautiful nightmare, but I could breathe again.
I wasn't like the woman with the green fire. I wasn't like the man turning to glass. I wasn't *using* this power. I was... observing it. I was reading it.
A shadow fell over me. I looked up, expecting to see a monster or one of the floating rocks drifting overhead.
Instead, I saw a man.
He was older, perhaps in his late forties, though his hair was almost entirely white. He wore a long, tattered coat that looked like it had been through a war, and he was missing his right arm. The sleeve was pinned neatly to his shoulder. He stood there, watching me with eyes that seemed to see right through my skin and into the core of whatever I had become.
"You're seeing the lines, aren't you?" he asked. His voice was calm, a sharp contrast to the panicked cries of the people around us.
I stared at him, unable to find my words. I nodded slowly.
"Most people just see the light or the fire," the man said, stepping closer. "They see the symptoms. They think they've become gods. They don't realize they're just children playing with a leaking reactor."
"What happened to the world?" I finally managed to ask. My throat felt like it was full of sand.
"The world grew up," the man replied, a grim smile touching his lips. "Or maybe it just woke up. The Zero Point wasn't an ending, son. It was the collapse of the veil. The Ether has returned, and it's reclaiming the reality we borrowed from it."
He looked around at the shimmering, distorted city. "My name is Elion. And you, boy, are very lucky. Or very cursed. Depending on how long you can keep your sanity."
"I don't want this," I said, my voice rising. "I just want to go back to my shop. I want things to be solid again."
Elion laughed, a dry, hollow sound. "Solid is an illusion. It always was. You're just the only one who can see the cracks now. But listen to me carefully: don't try to pull the threads. Not yet. The Ether isn't a tool. It's a language. And if you speak it wrong, the universe will erase you to fix the grammar."
I looked at the shimmering threads again, invisible to everyone else but glaringly obvious to me. They were the blueprint of existence, and I was holding the pen. The thought was terrifying. I wasn't a hero. I was a mechanic who barely passed high school. I fixed radiators and changed oil. I wasn't supposed to understand the fabric of the cosmos.
"Why me?" I asked, looking at Elion.
"Maybe because you were in the dark when the light hit," he said, turning to walk away. "Or maybe because you spent your life looking at how things fit together. The Ether likes minds that appreciate structure. Come. Standing here is a death sentence. The monsters will be coming soon."
"Monsters?"
As if on cue, a piercing howl echoed through the street. It wasn't the sound of an animal. It was a distorted, electronic screech that set my nerves on edge. Down the block, one of the people who had been wandering aimlessly suddenly collapsed. Their body began to bloat, their skin stretching and tearing as something dark and oily began to push its way out from their insides.
The people around them screamed and began to run, but they were slow, stumbling over the new terrain.
"The ones who couldn't hold the weight," Elion said, his tone devoid of pity. "Their internal structure collapsed. Now, they're just echoes of hunger. We call them the Aberrations. And they can smell someone who can see the lines from a mile away."
I looked at the transforming person, the horror of it hitting me like a physical blow. This wasn't a movie. This was the man who probably bought coffee from the stand on the corner. This was a human being becoming a glitch in reality.
I felt the panic rising again, the red threads pulsing in my vision. I wanted to run, to hide in the deepest corner of my service tunnel and wait for the world to fix itself. But I knew, looking at Elion's retreating back and the encroaching darkness, that there was no going back.
The Zero Point had changed the rules of the game. And I was the only one who could see the board.
I took a deep breath, the sharp air stinging my lungs. I looked at my hands one last time, seeing the faint glow that refused to fade. I wasn't just Niall Arkan, the mechanic, anymore. I was something else. Something unfinished.
I started to run, following the one-armed man into the heart of the new world. I didn't know where we were going, or if I would survive the night. All I knew was that the silence was over, and the scream of the new reality was just beginning.
My knuckles were still stained with grease. It was the only thing I had left of the world that made sense. I gripped my wrench, which I had subconsciously tucked into my belt, feeling its cold, solid weight. It was a small comfort in a world that was becoming liquid.
"Keep up, boy," Elion called out without looking back. "The first rule of the post-Zero world: if you stop moving, you become part of the scenery. And trust me, you don't want to be the scenery here."
I didn't answer. I just ran, my eyes fixed on the shimmering lines of the world, trying to find a path through the cracks.
The city of Oakhaven was dying, and something ancient and hungry was being born in its ruins. And I, for reasons I couldn't yet understand, was right in the middle of the birth.
Zero Point. The beginning of the end. Or the end of the beginning.
I didn't care about the philosophy. I just wanted to survive. But as I looked at the sky, at the swirling indigo and the obsidian moon, a small, dark part of me wondered: if the world was a machine, and it was finally broken... was I the only one who could fix it?
Or was I the one who would finally break it for good?
The thought haunted me as we disappeared into the crystalline shadows of the city.
The hum in my teeth didn't go away. It only got louder.
And for the first time in my life, I felt truly, terrifyingly visible.
The journey had begun, and the Ether was watching.