Time was a concept that no longer applied.
Marcus existed in a space between existing and not-existing. Not consciousness exactly, but awareness. Not unconsciousness, but lack of the normal sensory anchors that usually defined being alive. He could observe, but not act. He could see, but not close his eyes. He could hear, but not cover his ears.
He could only watch.
The first coherent thought he experienced was *I should be dead*.
The second thought was *Why am I not dead?*
Neither thought came in words. Language required a physical brain translating impulses into linguistic structure. What remained of Marcus was something more basic—pure consciousness untethered from flesh, aware of itself but unable to articulate that awareness in any normal way.
He became aware of his body eventually. It was far below him—that didn't make physical sense, but in the void, physical sense was negotiable. His corpse lay on the bathroom floor of a house that no longer existed in any meaningful way. Or it did exist, but it existed wrong, merged with crystalline structures that shouldn't coexist with human architecture. His body was being reconstructed, but the process was slow. Agonizing in its slowness, except pain required nerve endings, and his nerve endings were currently being rebuilt.
Around his non-body, the world was ending in every conceivable direction.
He watched New York die.
Not the instantaneous death of the impact zone itself—that happened too fast for observation. The rupture opened and millions simply ceased to exist in the time it took to blink. But the periphery, the edges where two realities collided and tried to merge... that lingered.
Marcus experienced it from a perspective that was everywhere and nowhere. He saw a woman in midtown reach for her daughter's hand as the building around them started to twist. The geometry of the structure was fighting the new laws of physics being imposed by the Confluence. Steel and concrete and glass and human tissue were caught in the collision, torn between two sets of rules that couldn't coexist.
The woman's hand found her daughter's hand. For a moment—just a moment—they were together in that space between worlds. Then the building finished its transformation, and they were no longer separate. They were integrated into the structure itself, part of the hybrid landscape, neither alive nor dead but something new and wrong.
Marcus watched the Hudson River flow upward, defying gravity in localized zones. He watched the water meet the crystalline formations emerging from the ground and create something that resembled ice but wasn't ice—something that glowed faintly with bioluminescence that had no earthly source. He watched a boat full of refugees try to navigate the impossible fluid dynamics and capsize into water that was no longer bound by normal properties.
The screaming lasted longer than he expected.
London burned for three days.
Not from fire, though there was plenty of fire. London burned because the fabric of reality in that location was tearing itself apart. The creatures that came through the rupture were disoriented at first—reality was as strange to them as it was to humans. But they adapted quickly. Creatures always did. Humans built civilization. Creatures built hierarchies of violence.
Marcus watched a fire service vehicle get cut in half by something that resembled a mantis but was twelve feet tall and had too many joints in its appendages. The driver died instantly. His partner survived long enough to understand that survival was temporary. The creature didn't seem malicious about it. It simply fed, following the logic of predator and prey that transcended species boundaries.
He watched humans try to organize resistance. Watched them attempt to build barricades out of cars and rubble. Watched those barricades prove utterly worthless against creatures that didn't understand human concepts of ownership or territory. Watched the barricades become tombs.
He watched a child sitting in the rubble—alone, unharmed by whatever chance had spared her in the first moments of the rupture—simply waiting to die. She didn't scream. She didn't run. She sat with the kind of acceptance that only children and the dying possessed. A creature found her eventually. Marcus felt a strange mercy in its quickness.
Tokyo's collapse was almost beautiful in its precision.
The city had been so organized. Its systems so interconnected. Everything designed to function as a cohesive whole. When the rupture opened and the laws of physics became negotiable, that organization became fragility.
Marcus watched gravity fail in isolated zones. Watched people floating upward in some sections while being crushed downward in others. Watched the most advanced infrastructure humanity had created simply cease to function when the fundamental rules it was built on stopped applying.
He watched technology prove utterly useless. Watched computers try to compute impossible angles and fail. Watched transportation systems designed to move massive populations become death traps when the streets they ran on started existing in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
The Confluence wasn't evil. It was simply indifferent. It didn't hate humans. It didn't know humans existed. It was simply another reality, and where it intersected with Earth, both realities tried to occupy the same space, and the result was inevitable catastrophe.
Millions died in Tokyo in the first day. Billions globally by the end of the week.
The months stretched.
Marcus lost count after three weeks. Time was subjective when you weren't constrained by biological necessity. A second could feel like an hour. An hour could feel like a second. He experienced the death of civilization in fragments and full immersion simultaneously, watching everything from a perspective that was and wasn't present.
He watched governments attempt to respond and fail. Military forces deployed to the rupture zones proved utterly useless. Soldiers trained to fight humans found themselves against creatures that could exist in multiple physical states simultaneously. Weapons that had worked on Earth suddenly ceased to function or functioned differently, with physics in flux.
He watched the stock market crash and then become irrelevant as the institutions that created wealth simply ceased to exist. He watched supply chains collapse. He watched cities run out of food. He watched, in the early days, desperate violence between survivors competing for resources. He watched as survivors realized that cooperation was more valuable than cannibalism, and then he watched as cooperation itself became impossible when there was simply no food left to divide.
He watched the rise of settlement communities in places the ruptures had missed or only partially transformed. Watched humans begin the adaptation process, learning that electricity didn't work the same way anymore, that plants grew wrong in some areas and thrived in others, that the fundamental nature of reality in the Confluence had changed and they had to change with it.
He watched his wife.
Jessica Hayes was in Denver when the rupture hit the city center. She was at work—at the marketing firm where she spent her days trying to make people want things they didn't need. Marcus would have found that detail bitterly amusing if he'd retained the capacity for irony.
She survived the initial impact through random chance. The rupture opened three miles from her office building. Close enough to destroy the power grid and most of the infrastructure, far enough that the physical destruction didn't immediately kill her. She'd been in a meeting when the lights went out. She'd been discussing Q4 campaign metrics when the windows exploded.
Marcus watched her climb down the stairs of the office building—seven flights, while other survivors pressed against her, panicked, some of them willing to kill for position. He watched her step over a woman who'd fallen on the third-floor landing. Watched her not stop. Not look back. Simply continue descending.
He didn't know her anymore. She had always worn kindness like a mask, but it had been a mask she could remove in the privacy of their home. Now that mask was gone, and what remained underneath was nothing he recognized as his wife.
She found David Santos—of course she did. The affair had continued right up until the end of the world. David was at their apartment when she made it back to the neighborhood. They had perhaps five days together before the fundamental logistics of survival made continuing the affair impossible. Food ran out. Water became contaminated. The shelter they'd created in the basement of their apartment complex had no power, no heating, no resources.
Marcus watched David make a choice to leave the apartment looking for supplies. Watched Jessica not try to stop him. Watched her, instead, immediately take the resources David had left behind and redistribute them to the area of the basement closest to her sleeping space.
When David didn't return—when it became clear he'd been killed by creatures in the ruins outside—Jessica didn't grieve. She simply consumed his remaining supplies and waited.
She was efficient about survival. She was ruthless. She was, Marcus realized, exactly the kind of person who had always been under her own skin, waiting for civilization to fall so she could stop pretending to be something else.
Years seemed to pass, though it was always the same year—2025, repeating over and over in Marcus's fractured perception.
He watched Haven be founded by a group of refugees—humans, elves, dwarves—who decided that cooperation was the only sustainable strategy. He watched them choose a defensible valley and begin building shelter. He watched an elf warrior named Lysera Thorne take leadership of their defensive efforts, organizing the humans and other species into a structure that could protect them from the creatures beginning to organize their own hierarchies in the Confluence.
He watched Valerius gather power in the ruins of Denver. Watched him take survivors and force them to augment themselves with Aetherium crystals and old-world technology, creating soldiers that were neither human nor something else entirely. Watched him build an empire of order through ruthless force.
He watched Jessica find Valerius and offer her services. He watched the tactical mind she'd always possessed finally have space to operate. He watched her become valuable to him—not as a lover, but as a strategist. He watched her explain that survival required order, and order required that some people control others. He watched Valerius listen to her.
He watched the world stabilize into factions. Haven and its alliance. Valerius's Empire. The Wanderers who refused to settle. The communities of dwarves, elves, faekin, and other races either integrating into human settlements or maintaining isolation.
And through all of it, Lilith's presence grew in Marcus's consciousness.
She didn't speak often. But her influence was constant. She whispered to him. Showed him futures. Explained that the Confluence wasn't a disaster. It was an opportunity. It was the first step in the Cycle—the universe's process of destruction and rebirth. And he—Marcus Hayes—was going to be instrumental in accelerating that Cycle.
He would be her instrument. He would become something more than human. He would become her weapon.
*And you will do this willingly*, she assured him, *because when I release you back into that broken world, you will see what has been done to it. You will see how those you loved have been transformed. And rage will consume you—a rage so pure it will feel like purpose. You will think you are choosing to become a weapon. But really, you will simply be expressing the nature I have cultivated in you since before your birth.*
He wanted to argue. Wanted to resist. But resistance required will, and his will was already being shaped, molded, made ready for the role she intended him to play.
***
The year ended—or restarted, or simply concluded in the way that liminal spaces concluded—and Marcus felt Lilith's grip on his consciousness begin to relax.
His body was fully reconstructed now. The toxins were burned away. The cells had been rebuilt according to specifications that went far beyond normal human biology. He was enhanced. Optimized. Ready.
*Wake up, little soldier*, Lilith whispered one final time.
*Time to become what you were always meant to be.*
And in the void between death and life, between the old world and the new, Marcus Hayes opened his eyes.