Here's something they don't tell you about the end of the world: it's quiet.
No trumpets. No countdown. The colors just drain — sky first, then buildings, then people. I watched a woman across the street go transparent, then thin, then gone. Not dead. Deleted. Like the universe decided she was a rough draft.
I was at my desk. Writing. First time in three years the words were actually working, the sentence building toward something I might fin—
Walls went next. City after. Sky after that.
The last thing I saw was a fox in the alley below. Small. Rust-colored. Amber eyes holding no fear. Just an ancient, bone-deep exhaustion.
Like she'd watched worlds end before.
I woke to something dying outside my window.
Normal morning in Greyhaven.
Two hunters dragging an Ironmaw Wolf toward the butchering station — Tier 2 beast, metallic jaw, frost smoking off dead fur. Beyond them, silver Aether mist clung to the treeline where the world's raw energy pooled thick enough to see.
Life at the edge of civilization. Monsters bred fast out here. Nice sunsets though.
"Zael! If you're late to your own Awakening—"
"MOVING."
I pressed my palm to my chest. The cold was there. Always there after the dream. Something vast coiled behind my ribs, sleeping with one eye open.
Sixteen today. Awakening day. The day that split every life in Greyhaven into before and after. I'd watched kids walk into that courtyard as nobody and walk out with futures glowing between their palms.
I'd take anything. Just give me a start.
Twenty-three kids against a wall. One Awakener from the capital who looked at our town like something on his boot.
"Thessyn Koss."
My best friend since seven walked forward like the man owed her money. Dark hair, sharp jaw, eyes that made people check if they'd done something wrong.
His thumb touched her forehead.
The air cracked.
Her grimoire blazed into existence — spinning, crackling, alive with lightning that made every hair in the courtyard stand straight.
"Ninety pages. Lightning affinity."
The courtyard erupted. Ninety pages from a border town was mythological. Thessyn caught my eye — not gloating. Never gloated. She just looked at me like she expected me to do something worth seeing.
Beat that.
Not a chance in this life or the last one.
More awakenings. Thirty pages, forty-two, twenty-eight — all glowing, all real.
"Zael Velcross."
The Awakener didn't look up. Thumb out. Next.
He touched my forehead.
Cold. Bottomless. Ancient. Flooding my skull like winter filling an empty cathedral.
Behind my ribs, the sleeping thing LUNGED — slamming against my chest like a caged animal smelling freedom.
The Awakener's hand spasmed.
Then his grimoire — holstered at his belt, tool of a man who'd done this ten thousand times — detonated. Pages riffled on their own. His inscriptions, decades of accumulated power, blurred and leaned toward me. Straining. Reaching for my chest like water rushing toward a drain.
He ripped his hand back so hard he stumbled.
Silence. The kind where everyone thanks every available god they're not standing where I'm standing.
He stared at me. Not with pity.
With fear.
"Blank. No pages. No affinity. Hollow."
He called the next name before I could ask what just happened. Before my mother's voice finished breaking behind me.
A gap opened around me at the wall. Instinctive. Like what I had was contagious.
Thessyn stared at me with something fierce and almost angry.
And at the courtyard's edge — old Mordren, the town drunk nobody ever looked at — watched me with a bottle in his hand and recognition in his eyes.
That night. Dark room.
No pages meant no inscriptions. No hunting. No rank. No future. In a world where monsters poured from the wilds daily and your grimoire was the only thing between you and irrelevance — I was nothing.
I pressed my palm to my chest.
You're not empty. You REACHED for him. You almost ripped his inscriptions right out of his grimoire. A man who's done this ten thousand times was AFRAID of you.
What are you?
The pulse hit like a hurricane through a keyhole.
Not gentle. A flood — grief and hunger and something ancient crashing through me hard enough to bow my spine off the mattress. Not my grief. Something else's. Something enormous.
Vision went white.
And in the white — pages.
Infinite pages stretching in every direction like a landscape with no horizon. Covered in luminous text I'd never learned but recognized the way you recognize your own heartbeat in a silent room.
No edges. No final page.
No limit.
And burned into the center like a scar in reality —
ZAEL.
My name. In a language from a dead world. Inside a grimoire that supposedly had nothing in it.
There before today. Before I was born.
Maybe before this world existed at all.
The vision shattered. I was gasping in the dark, shaking, chest burning.
My grimoire wasn't empty.
And whatever lived inside those infinite pages — vast and ancient and carrying a grief that could drown oceans — had always known my name.