The first thing that vanished was the sound.
Not all at once. Not suddenly.
It faded in fragments, like the world forgetting how to finish its own sentences.
Kaelen noticed it while sitting on the floor of an abandoned convenience store, counting cans he already knew were useless. Outside, torn posters shifted against broken glass. The wind moved—but no noise followed.
He stopped counting.
His breathing sounded too loud. Wrong. As if the world around him had shrunk, leaving him exposed inside it.
"Did you hear that?"
The voice came from the back of the store.
It was tight. Alert. Afraid of silence.
Kaelen didn't answer, because there was nothing to hear.
The shelves were nearly empty, stripped clean days ago. Dust lay thick enough to soften footsteps. The lights had failed that morning, but the store still felt safer than the streets. Walls did that. They convinced people that survival still followed rules.
There were four of them inside.
A woman by the counter, both hands wrapped around an empty mug, waiting for warmth that would not return. A teenage boy slumped against the freezer, eyes unfocused, staring at something that wasn't there.
Kaelen himself.
And the one who had spoken.
"Say something," the voice said again. Closer this time.
Kaelen turned.
The space behind the shelves was empty.
No footsteps. No movement. No disturbance.
As if no one had ever stood there.
The mug slipped from the woman's hands and shattered on the floor.
She screamed his name—not Kaelen's, but the name of the man who was no longer there.
Kaelen was already moving.
They searched until exhaustion erased urgency. Shelves were overturned. The back door was forced open. They shouted into the alley until their throats burned.
Nothing answered.
No blood. No struggle. No body.
Just absence—clean and precise, like a paragraph removed from a page.
By nightfall, they stopped looking.
By morning, the boy was gone too.
Kaelen did not remember sitting against the wall, but he was there when the sky lightened—thin and pale, struggling to resemble morning. The woman lay where she had collapsed, eyes closed, expression calm.
Not dead.
Just… finished.
Gone the same way the others were.
That was how it happened now.
No warning. No clear pattern.
People simply ceased to be.
Kaelen left the store alone.
Outside, the city leaned inward, buildings twisted at angles that hurt to observe for too long. Roads fractured into suspended slabs, hanging above darkness that swallowed light without reflection.
Technology had not failed violently. It had hesitated. Signals faded. Machines stalled mid-function, as if uncertain why they were meant to work at all.
The world had not ended.
It had stopped explaining itself.
He walked with his head down, counting steps. Counting helped. Numbers still behaved. Structure meant sanity.
His bag was light. It always was. He no longer carried anything meant for the future.
There was no future yet.
Only continuity.
At the entrance to a collapsed metro station, something had been carved into the concrete long ago—deep enough to survive time, shallow enough to be ignored.
Three overlapping inscriptions. Different languages. Same meaning.
When the Void came, the gods went silent.
Kaelen stared longer than he intended.
Gods.
He had never believed in them. Gods were excuses—stories people told when the world frightened them.
But excuses did not erase people mid-sentence.
He touched the carving, half-expecting it to vanish when acknowledged.
It didn't.
For the first time in days, something remained.
That night, Kaelen slept beneath broken concrete and a sky that refused to remember stars. The silence pressed closer, dense enough to feel like pressure.
And somewhere beyond his understanding—
Something registered that a man had not broken.