The world ended on a Tuesday.
Not with trumpets or prophecy or the kind of warning that allows you to make peace with your ending. The end came quietly, then violently. It came with a sound that wasn't a sound—a tearing, a ripping, a screaming of reality through a throat it had never possessed.
It came for reasons no living human would ever fully understand.
In Antarctica, beneath two miles of ancient ice and classified research protocols buried deeper still, the barrier weakened. For decades—perhaps longer, perhaps since the beginning of time—something had waited on the other side. Something old. Something patient. Something utterly certain that its moment would arrive.
On that Tuesday, it did.
Five ruptures opened simultaneously across the globe. Not in sequence. Not gradually building. All at once. As if reality had been holding its breath and finally decided to exhale.
**New York**: The rupture tore open above Manhattan at 14:47 UTC, revealing impossible geometry and structures that defied human spatial comprehension. The sky didn't gradually lighten. It *broke*, spilling light and shadow in equal measure. Creatures emerged—entities that shouldn't exist, that violated every biological law, that carried the stench of a world fundamentally different from Earth's. Within sixty seconds, three million people experienced their final moments. Within sixty minutes, the island was transformed into something between a tomb and a shrine to wrongness.
**London**: The British capital fractured next, its ordered grid descending into chaos as the barrier between worlds collapsed. Creatures poured through like water breaking through a dam. The Thames flowed upward. Buildings twisted at angles that shouldn't be possible. A thousand years of human civilization reduced to rubble and ash and the screams of those still conscious enough to understand what was happening.
**Tokyo**: Organized chaos gave way to disorganized horror. Technology meant nothing. Order meant nothing. Millions died in seconds, their structured, disciplined society utterly unprepared for the moment when the rules ceased to exist. Gravity failed in isolated zones. The ground became unstable, merging with crystalline formations that belonged to no earthly geological timeline.
**Lagos and São Paulo**: Followed in rapid succession, their ruptures adding to the global convulsion.
Billions died.
In that first day alone, the global population decreased by approximately 40%. Civilization—fragile, dependent on systems too complex to survive catastrophic disruption—collapsed in hours. Governments fell. Communication networks went dark. The infrastructure that humans had spent thousands of years building fell apart like a sand castle facing an unexpected tide.
Somewhere in that chaos, a man named Marcus Hayes was dying.
He didn't know about the ruptures yet. His consciousness hadn't yet expanded beyond the personal apocalypse occurring in his small Denver bathroom. He was focused on the pills dissolving in his stomach, the toxins shutting down his nervous system in orderly fashion, the relief of finally—*finally*—getting something right.
But in the void between living and dying, between consciousness and the peace he'd been chasing, something vast and ancient was paying attention.
Her name was Lilith.
She was not a god in any traditional sense. Gods were concepts humans had invented to explain forces they didn't understand. Lilith was something older and stranger—a cosmic principle given form and consciousness. She was the Weaver of the Cycle, the architect of eternal death and rebirth, the voice that whispered to those destined to become instruments of universal transformation.
She had been waiting for this moment. Waiting for the barriers to weaken. Waiting for her moment to pull the threads that would reshape reality according to her vision of what it should become.
And she had already selected her instrument.
Marcus Hayes had been marked since before his birth. His trauma was no accident. His betrayal was no coincidence. His despair was fertilizer for the seeds she had been cultivating in him since the moment of his conception. She had guided the random chaos of human existence toward this precise point—his overdose coinciding with the moment the barriers fell.
Serendipity, if you believed the universe was fundamentally kind.
Cruelty, if you believed it operated according to her designs.
Lilith believed in the latter.
As the sky tore open and civilization began its collapse, she reached through the dying dream that was Marcus Hayes's consciousness and grasped hold of what remained of his will to survive.
*Not yet, little soldier*, her voice said, and it was not a voice that came from outside. It came from within—from the deep places in his consciousness where survival instinct lived, where the animal brain that ruled mammals screamed at the threat of oblivion.
*Not yet. I have need of you.*
And in that moment of collision—the moment when two worlds merged and billions died and reality fractured—Marcus Hayes experienced resurrection he did not want and could not refuse.
His body, already destroyed by toxins, was forced to heal. Not gently. Not mercifully. But violently, comprehensively, and with absolute certainty that this death would not be allowed.
Lilith's power reshaped him at the cellular level. She burned away the poison. She restarted systems that had begun their final shutdown. She forced his body to live when every conscious part of him yearned for peace.
*You will survive*, she said, and it was not a promise. It was a sentence.
*You will survive because the Cycle demands it. You will survive because your despair is a weapon I intend to wield. You will survive because some mercies are worse than any cruelty, and what I have planned for you is the cruelest mercy of all.*
And so Marcus Hayes, who had tried to die, found himself forced back into a world that was ending.
He would spend the next year in a strange liminal space—neither fully alive nor fully dead, suspended in the void between breaths, forced to watch everything collapse while unable to influence any of it. He would witness the end of civilization. He would see the birth of the Confluence. He would feel Lilith's presence growing stronger, deeper, more certain in his consciousness.
And when she finally released him back into the world, he would be something other than human.
Not yet a monster. But close.
Very close.
The journey toward the Demon King had begun.