Rimora woke as if dragged upward from the depths of something vast and suffocating. Darkness pressed against her senses before she could even open her eyes, thick and heavy, wrapping around her chest so tightly that her first breath scraped through her lungs like broken glass. For several long moments, she lay frozen, unsure whether she was awake or trapped inside yet another vision. Time had lost all meaning; her body felt wrong—aching with exhaustion, yet vibrating beneath the skin with a strange, restless strength that made her fingertips tingle.
When she finally forced her eyes open, the world revealed itself in fragments. Pale, trembling light leaked through jagged cracks high above, cutting through the darkness in thin, uneven lines. The glow illuminated shattered stone, rusted metal, and damp walls scarred by age and neglect. Somewhere in the distance, water dripped steadily, each drop echoing through the chamber with unbearable clarity. The sound settled into her chest like a second heartbeat, slow and merciless. The silence between those drops felt louder than screams.
Her memories returned unevenly, like shards cutting through fog. Arin's eyes—haunted, restrained. The tension that had clung to her in the days before she vanished. The feeling that something enormous was moving beneath the surface of the world, unseen but unstoppable. Then nothing. Just emptiness. Whatever had brought her here had erased the space in between, leaving her stranded in this hollow place with only her breath and her thoughts.
At first, when the images came, she thought she was losing her mind.
They struck without warning, slamming into her consciousness with brutal clarity. Skies darkened and bled red as if wounded. Rivers boiled and churned, releasing thick steam that swallowed the land. The ground split open, exhaling black smoke that blotted out the sun. She saw people fall in the middle of laughter, their bodies collapsing as though something inside them had simply switched off. Entire streets emptied in seconds. Cities dissolved into dust, their outlines burning away like fragile paper held too close to flame.
Each vision left her shaking, her breath torn from her lungs, her body soaked in cold sweat. Her throat burned as if she had screamed until it tore—but no sound had ever left her lips. She pressed her palms to her eyes, rocking slightly, whispering to herself that these were only hallucinations, echoes of stress and grief, the madness people had always accused her of carrying.
But the visions did not fade.
They sharpened.
Patterns began to form where chaos should have been. The images stopped feeling distant or symbolic. They felt immediate, current—like watching something unfold in real time through a shattered window. Slowly, terrifyingly, Rimora understood what her mind had been refusing to accept. This was not prophecy alone.
The first wave had already begun.
It did not arrive with sirens or fire or public declarations. It slipped into the world quietly, disguising itself as coincidence, feeding on disbelief. The signs were subtle but relentless. Healthy men collapsed mid-sentence, faces frozen in confusion. Children drowned in fountains too shallow to justify death. Workers fell lifeless on crowded streets without illness, without warning. Doctors wrote "natural causes" with tired hands. Priests murmured about fate and divine will. Elites spoke of statistics and probability, using the deaths to reinforce the idea that the poor were fragile, expendable.
But Rimora saw what others refused to see.
The deaths followed a rhythm. A synchronization. They were not random. They were preparation—carefully placed strokes laying the foundation for something far larger. The catastrophe was not approaching. It was feeding.
When she finally stumbled into the streets, her body moved before her fear could stop it. Her hair was loose, her eyes burning with exhaustion and conviction. She shouted in marketplaces that the air itself was poisoned, that the soil carried death, that everyone was already standing inside the mouth of disaster. Mothers dragged their children away from her. Vendors cursed her breath. Beggars stared with hollow pity. Guards laughed openly, saying the poor always invented tragedies larger than their hunger.
She did not stop.
She went to schools, warning teachers that their lessons would soon turn to ash. She stood in temples, declaring that even gods would fall silent before what was coming. In alleyways, she whispered to anyone who would slow their steps long enough to hear her. Most turned away quickly—not because they disbelieved entirely, but because listening was dangerous.
Denial was easier.
Her desperation hardened into obsession. She began to write relentlessly—on scraps of stolen paper, on the walls of abandoned buildings, in dust beneath her knees. She drew collapsing bodies, burning skies, rising waves. Children laughed and erased her warnings. Men tore them down. Women whispered that she was cursed, possessed. Slowly, the elites took notice—not because they feared the truth, but because fear itself was spreading among the restless poor.
Rumors grew.The girl who sees death.A disturbance.A spark.
The council summoned her.
Not to listen.
To silence.
She stood barefoot in their marble hall beneath chandeliers that glittered with obscene calm. Gold surrounded men whose hands had never touched hunger. Her dress was torn, her voice already fraying, but she spoke anyway. She begged them to prepare, to act, to acknowledge what was already happening. She told them the first wave was killing silently, that the next would arrive screaming, that cities would burn and drown and vanish.
They laughed.
They called her a liar, a witch, a child desperate for attention. They accused her of sowing chaos, of weakening unity, of disguising rebellion as madness. When she screamed that they were already dying, guards seized her arms and dragged her across the cold marble floor. Her voice shattered as it echoed through the hall, tearing itself apart on the truth:
"You are already dying, and you don't even know it!"
The prison they threw her into was damp and windowless. Mold crept across stone. Straw rotted beneath her body. Iron burned her wrists. But none of that broke her. What broke her was the sound beyond the walls—laughter, footsteps, carts rolling past, bodies wrapped in white cloth.
The catastrophe continued.
Unnamed.Unacknowledged.Accepted as fate.
The visions followed her even there.
Night after night, oceans of bones rose behind her eyes. Cities drowned in shadow. Fire rained from torn skies. Sometimes she saw Arin—standing alone, grief carved into resolve. She saw Blue too, chained and beaten yet burning with defiance. She saw herself older, trembling, still pointing toward the horizon, still warning, still unheard.
That was when understanding settled into her bones.
Her prison was not stone.
It was disbelief.
Days blurred into nothingness. She carved marks into the floor until they lost meaning. Time no longer mattered. Only truth did. And truth, she knew now, did not require belief to exist.
In the deepest silence of her cell, Rimora clenched her fists and swore she would not stop—not even if her voice had to be burned into the bones of the earth itself.
Because this was only the beginning.
The first wave had risen quietly.
The next would not whisper.
It would roar.