In London's East End, the damp air always carried the scent of fish and chips.
Beneath the legs of Jack Miller's narrow bed lay a heavy, ancient book with a peeling leather cover.
Like a forgotten soldier, it bore the weight of the bedframe without complaint.
Its pages were made of a tough, yellowed parchment, inscribed with twisting, coiling script—neither the elegant curves of Latin calligraphy nor the stark lines of Nordic runes, but something closer to primal scribbles from the depths of a nightmare.
A relic from his great-grandfather's "Oriental Gold Rush" days, its only distinction in the Miller family was its service as a makeshift wedge for furniture and beds.
When Jack was at university and broke as a joke, his father, Old Jack, had once sneaked this "heirloom" around Hatton Garden's jewellers and Portobello Road's antique stalls.
The verdict? Appraisers scoffed. "A cheap imitation, paper no older than thirty years," "Ink? Utterly ordinary!" "A century-old family treasure?" Old Jack flushed crimson, nearly tossing it into the Thames for the eels.
Passed down to Jack, the book resumed its life as a prop until he scraped together a deposit for a flat in Essex. History repeated: no buyers. The rejection hit him like London rain—cold and soaking.
He gave up dreaming. The book gathered dust in a corner, a silent monument to his failure.
Then came the whisky-drenched night.
After five years with Sophia ended, Jack drank himself into oblivion.
Staggering toward his bed, the wedge-like book **erupted without warning!** A blinding, platinum-white flame shot from its pages, devouring the dimness of the room.
It lasted less than twenty seconds but burned into Jack's retinas like eternity.
Sobriety hit. His heart hammered against his ribs. Though mates clapped his shoulder the next day, joking he'd "seen holy light in Johnnie Walker," Jack *knew*.
That light had been cold, intense—utterly inhuman.
"Treasure? Trash?" The thought coiled around him like ivy.
He returned to Hatton Garden only to face dismissive shakes and polite "please leaves." Desperate, he paid for exhaustive tests: material analysis, carbon dating.
The report was cold as a mortuary slab: modern wood-pulp paper, standard carbon ink, maximum age—**fifty years**. Frustration ebbed, leaving a jagged question: *This book was here when I was a boy.
It was here when Dad was young. Forty years, at least!* The contradiction split reality like a crack. This book… was no accident.
It was a riddle wrapped in rubbish.
Jack studied the "riddle." After science failed, his UCL linguistics training kicked in.
Those twisting symbols mocked him. By wild visual guesses (one rune resembled "strength," another curved like a hieroglyphic "sun"), he brute-forced meanings for 300 basic glyphs. Barely enough for a children's book.
By page ten, the text became an impassable thicket. Yet in those first pages, one phrase drummed like a funeral march:
> **"The Aether Tide Returns, Laws Reforged, Dimensions Torn, Mortals Wail."**
Heartbroken and rattled by news of Alpine glaciers vanishing and freak Mediterranean storms, jacked up on apocalypse films, Jack grew morbidly obsessed. Bored, he calculated the date of the "Aether Tide's Return" using the book's complex calendar—a fusion of defunct star charts, forgotten solar terms, and dizzying base-12 maths.
The result froze his blood.
The "Laws Reforged" event landed squarely on **the 28th**—**seven days after** an online doomsday prediction (claiming the 21st was the end).
The book warned this would trigger "Dimensions Torn."
Jack recalculated obsessively. Had his meagre vocabulary misled him?
But as he deciphered more, the date—**the 28th**—held fast. Dread, bone-deep, seized him.
The book felt alive now, whispering, forcing belief.
He anonymously posted the date on obscure occult forums and prepper groups. It drowned in theories of planetary alignments, alien harvests, and zombie plagues.
Not a ripple.
Then, three months ago. Jack switched off his bedside lamp, eyelids heavy.
At the edge of sleep—***Bang!*** Not sound, but pure light.
Not blinding white this time, but living auroras—rivers of emerald, sapphire, amethyst—surged from the book, flooding his bedroom. Walls, furniture, Jack himself bathed in unearthly radiance. Stone-cold sober, he heard his own heartbeat.
Doubt died.
Jack Miller vanished.
In his place stood a machine fuelled by urgency.
He sold his mortgaged Essex flat, liquidated beloved vinyl and trainers for cash.
He leased two sturdy units on the **16th floor** of a Canary Wharf tower—high enough to avoid floods (the Thames lurked nearby), low enough to dodge storms or falling debris. Crucially, the book hinted that "extradimensional entities" might invade during "Dimensions Torn," and "lifeforms long starved of Aether" would be vulnerable.
He sealed doors and windows with ballistic-grade steel, leaving only spy holes.
The flats became an ark: mountains of tinned rations, bottled water (calibrated for 15 years), energy bars, antibiotics, toilet-paper towers, hand-crank generators, batteries, salt, sugar, Colombian coffee, and single-malt whisky (currency and comfort).
Through an old uni mate with "Balkan connections," he acquired a Glock 17 and ammo. By the 21st, his bank balance shrank to three figures—not from lack of trying, but because even the bathtub overflowed with biscuits.
His landlord, a Monaco-bound hedonist, never noticed Jack silently drilling through drywall to merge the units, sealing the outer door of the second flat with more steel—a self-made tomb. He waited.
He'd tried warning friends.
Until the end, they insisted he "needed a holiday and therapy."
No one believed.
Loneliness became his final armour.