Chapter 0: Before the Silence
The world did not end with fire.
It ended with quiet.
Cities still stood, their bones of steel and concrete unbroken, but something essential had gone missing—motion with purpose. Cars slept in the middle of roads. Screens glowed with frozen smiles and unfinished sentences. The wind moved freely now, unchallenged by crowds or voices, whispering through broken windows like it was trying to remember how people used to sound.
Life had not vanished.
It had failed.
In the ruins of what was once a hospital, a figure sat upright on a gurney.
He should not have.
His heart did not beat. His lungs did not draw breath. The machines around him were dark, their final beeps long since swallowed by time. Yet his eyes opened anyway, pale and unfocused, staring at a ceiling stained by years of neglect.
Memory came slowly, like fog rolling over an empty field.
A name—maybe his.
A face—someone important, now unreachable.
Pain—then nothing.
He rose, joints stiff but functional, skin cold and faintly gray, though not decayed. Whatever had happened to the world had happened to him too, but differently. He was not like the others he would soon meet—the wandering bodies outside, trapped between instinct and rot.
He could think.
He stood and listened.
Far away, something howled—not in rage, but hunger. Closer still, something scraped along the floor, slow and aimless. The undead filled the streets like echoes of humanity, repeating the last action they ever knew.
He was one of them.
And yet, he wasn't.
Outside, the sun climbed over a skyline that no longer cared. Its light revealed a truth the living never got to see: a world could die without collapsing, and death could walk without being alive.
The man took his first step into the dead world.
And the dead world noticed.