The city sounds didn't just stop; they were erased.
At first, it seemed like the rain had simply eased. The steady tapping against the glass softened, then thinned, until the silence returned deeper than before.
Kaelen remained by the window, his reflection faint against the darkened glass. He watched the street below, waiting for a car to pass, for a light to flicker, for anything to prove that time was still moving forward.
Nothing did.
The lights stayed on. The buildings stood where they always had.
But the color was draining out of them.
Vibrant reds of taillights, yellow glows of streetlamps they didn't fade to black; they simply ceased to be colorful, washing out into a dull, flat gray. The world was being stripped of its details, layer by layer, reverting to a sketch before it vanished entirely.
A frown creased his brow.
Under his palm, the glass was colder than it should have been. Not painfully so just wrong. Smooth, but without texture, like touching a mirror in a dream.
Pressing his hand more firmly against it, he tried to force a sensation of cold or pressure.
Then, he pulled back.
The sensation lagged.
His hand was already at his side, but the cold ghost of the glass lingered on his palm for a second too long. His body was reacting a moment too late.
That was when the realization hit:
The quiet wasn't coming from outside.
It was inside him.
The faint hum he had never noticed until now—the distant buzz of electricity, the subtle pressure of sound that made silence feel alive—had dulled into something flat and indistinct.
Opening his mouth to take a breath, he hesitated, uncertain when his last one had ended.
His chest didn't rise.
His heart, usually a rhythmic thrum against his ribs, had fallen into a cadence so slow it was impossible to track.
Panic didn't come.
Only confusion.
Stepping away from the window to find a chair, he found the floor strangely distant. Solid, yet unconvincing. His weight shifted, and for a brief moment, the apartment seemed to tilt beneath him not sharply, not violently.
Just enough to force a pause.
Instinct drove him to reach out and steady himself against the table.
His hand passed through the edge.
He stared at it.
No resistance. No shock. His fingers didn't tingle or burn.
They simply… went through, as though the table existed a fraction of a second behind him.
He tried again, swiping his fingers through the wood. The molecules didn't displace; they ignored him entirely.
He was becoming a ghost in his own life before he had even left it.
Flexing his fingers slowly, he watched them move with a faint sense of detachment. The motion obeyed him, but the response felt delayed, like a reflection lagging behind its source.
He pressed his palm against his chest.
No warmth.
No resistance.
Just the vague idea that something should have been there.
"No."
The word died instantly. No echo. The air didn't carry the sound; it swallowed it.
This couldn't be happening yet.
He hadn't collapsed. He hadn't felt pain. There was no moment he could point to and say this is where it ended.
Desperately, he tried to recall the last clear sensation he'd felt—real weight, real breath but each attempt slid away before taking shape. The harder he focused, the more fragmented his thoughts became.
His mind itself was slipping out of sequence.
He took a step forward.
Then another.
The apartment did not respond.
Distance lost meaning, stretching and compressing without warning. The space between him and the wall seemed to rearrange itself every time he blinked.
A dull irritation surfaced.
Not fear.
Not anger.
This wasn't how things were supposed to end.
The disconnect was worse than pain.
"So… this is how it happens," he murmured.
The words sounded thin, stretched, as if spoken through a long hallway. Even his voice felt borrowed.
His gaze drifted to the bookshelf.
The photo frame was still there.
The last proof that he had existed.
That he had been loved.
A sudden, desperate need seized him. He didn't want to fade without holding it one last time.
Wading through air that had turned viscous, he moved toward the shelf. He reached out for the frame, fingers trembling, aiming for the cool metal edge.
His hand phased through the glass.
It passed through the smiling faces of his parents, through the paper backing, through the wood of the shelf.
He grabbed nothing but empty air.
The image in the frame began to smear, the ink running like wet paint. His father's smile dissolved into a blur of gray; his mother's face unspooled into meaningless lines.
The memory wasn't just fading.
It was being deleted.
He didn't remember sitting down, but suddenly he wasn't standing anymore.
The apartment blurred at the edges, lines softening, colors fading into something less certain. The room no longer felt like a place it felt like a memory recalled incorrectly.
He tried to count backward, anchoring himself to something methodical.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
The numbers slipped out of order. Six came before seven. Five repeated twice.
Then there was nothing at all.
He searched for smaller memories instead. Mundane ones.
The smell of coffee in the morning.
The weight of his phone in his pocket.
The sound of keys against the table.
Each detail surfaced briefly, then unraveled, leaving behind only the impression that it had once mattered.
It wasn't just his surroundings dissolving.
The context was going with them.
Events lost sequence. Emotions detached from causes.
He knew his parents had existed.
He knew they had mattered.
But he could no longer remember why that mattered so much.
The loss felt wrong in a way he couldn't articulate. Like tearing pages out of a book before finishing the chapter.
Oddly, what bothered him wasn't fear.
It was the timing.
He had just decided to move forward. Just accepted that standing still wasn't enough.
The thought lingered now, stubborn and intact, even as everything else began to loosen and slip.
Was that all it took?
The walls receded further, dissolving into vague impressions of space and shape.
Geometry broke down. The sharp corners of the ceiling rounded off. Shadows detached themselves from the floor and floated upward like smoke.
Sound followed soon after.
The rain was gone.
The city was gone.
Even silence lost its meaning, replaced by something vast and undefined.
He felt lighter.
Not weightless but unburdened, as though gravity itself had grown tired of holding on.
Time stopped behaving properly. There was no sense of falling, no sense of rising.
Only drifting.
Thoughts came slowly, each one forming with effort before unraveling again.
His name surfaced briefly.
Kaelen.
It felt important. More solid than the rest.
It was the only thing he was allowed to take with him.
He held onto it, anchoring himself to the sound, even as everything else—faces, places, regrets began to fade at the edges.
He tried to recall his parents' faces one last time, but the image was gone, replaced by the static of the void.
Strangely, the resolve remained.
Not the words.
Not the reasons.
Just the feeling.
A quiet insistence that he wasn't finished yet.
Something shifted.
The shift didn't feel sudden.
It felt overdue.
The vastness around him began to narrow, not violently, but with quiet persistence. The undefined space pressed inward, guiding rather than forcing.
Boundaries formed soft at first, then firmer. The freedom of drifting gave way to containment.
Whatever lay ahead did not want him scattered.
A brief flicker of resistance surfaced.
Not fear.
Reluctance.
He wasn't ready to let go of everything yet.
But the current didn't acknowledge hesitation. It carried him forward with the same indifference the world always had.
The pressure increased.
Warmth replaced distance.
The void collapsed into a singular direction, a narrowing passage that left no room for thought.
He realized dimly that this wasn't an ending.
It was a transfer.
The darkness thinned, replaced by something warmer.
Tighter.
A pressure wrapped around him from every side, enclosing him completely. It was uncomfortable, constricting, as though the space itself had decided he no longer belonged anywhere else.
Fluid sensation pressed against skin he didn't remember having, pulsing with a rhythm that wasn't his own.
His thoughts slowed.
Then fractured.
And slipped away entirely.