I woke to the sensation of cold stone pressing against my bare skin, and I didn’t care about the chill or the sharp ache radiating through my ribs or the way my head throbbed with a dull, persistent pain that made thinking feel like wading through mud.
I was in pain.
Real, honest-to-God pain.
That meant I was alive.
A ragged laugh tore from my throat, scratching past cracked lips and echoing in whatever space surrounded me. The sound was alien— hoarse and broken, like I’d spent years screaming— but it was mine. I could hear it. I could feel the way it vibrated in my chest, the way my lungs expanded and contracted with each breath, the way my heart hammered against my ribs in a rhythm that was chaotic and beautiful and real.
Not the grey. Not the void. Not the endless nothing that had unmade me piece by piece, over and over, until I’d forgotten what it meant to exist as anything more than will and defiance held together by spite.
I’d escaped.
“I’m alive…”
The words hit me like a physical force, and my laughter dissolved into something that might have been a sob if I’d had any tears left to give. I pressed my palms flat against the ground beneath me, feeling every groove and imperfection in the stone, every bit of grit that pressed into my skin.
The pain in my side flared sharp and insistent, demanding attention, and I forced myself to focus. Right. I was injured. That was… fine. Manageable. Pain was just information, just my body telling me something needed fixing.
I tried to push myself upright and immediately regretted it as the world tilted sickeningly and fresh agony lanced through my torso. I hissed through my teeth, pressing one hand against my side and feeling the slick warmth of blood coating my fingers. A lot of blood, actually. That was less fine.
My other hand moved instinctively, reaching for my wand, fingers closing around—
Nothing.
My eyes snapped open fully for the first time, and I stared down at my empty hand with a detached sort of confusion. Where was my wand? I’d had it when I fell through the Veil, hadn’t I? Or had that been lost in one of the earlier cycles, torn away by something wearing Dumbledore’s face or Helena’s smile or my own voice twisted into mockery?
It didn’t matter. I’d learned to work without it even before I came to that place. Magic was something deeper than words or tools, something that responded to will, desire and intent when everything else had been stripped away.
“Episkey.” I whispered, focusing on the wound in my side, reaching for the familiar shape of healing magic.
Nothing happened.
I tried again, moving my body in the semi-dances despite the pain. I pushed harder, visualizing the spell the way I had taught myself years ago— centuries ago?— feeling for that inner wellspring of power that should respond to my call.
The magic flickered, weak and uncertain, like a candle flame in a hurricane. It brushed against the wound and sputtered out, leaving nothing but a faint tingle and fresh frustration.
I gritted my teeth. I’d forced the void itself to bend. I’d survived things that would have shattered gods. I could cast a simple bloody healing charm.
“Episkey.” Firmer this time, drawing on reserves that felt frighteningly shallow, like trying to fill a bucket from a nearly dry well.
The magic responded with more strength, gathering around my intention, and for a moment I felt the familiar warmth of healing beginning to knit torn flesh together. Then it slipped away from me, the spell unraveling before it could complete, and I was left gasping with the effort.
Sweat beaded on my forehead despite the cold. My hand came away from my side still slick with blood, the wound continuing to seep with a steady persistence that suggested I didn’t have unlimited time to figure this out.
Again. I could do this. I would do this.
I closed my eyes, shutting out the physical world, and reached deeper. In the void, magic hadn’t been about wands or words or the careful academic approach Hogwarts had taught me. It had been about will. About imposing my existence onto reality with such absolute conviction that reality had no choice but to bend.
I’d done it there. I could do it here.
“Episkey.” I said again, and this time I didn’t just cast the spell— I commanded it. Demanded that my body heal, that the torn flesh knit itself back together, that the bleeding stop because I refused to have escaped the void only to bleed out on cold stone in some forgotten place.
The magic surged through me like a riptide, wild and barely controlled, responding not to technique but to sheer desperate need. It flooded into the wound with a force that made me gasp, heat and power and something that felt almost angry in its intensity.
The flesh pulled together with all the subtlety of someone forcing a door closed with their shoulder. Skin sealed over torn muscle in a way that was crude and inelegant but worked.
The bleeding stopped.
I slumped back against whatever was behind me— a wall, I realized distantly— breathing hard. My fingers probed carefully at the newly closed wound, and I immediately wished I hadn’t. The skin was thin, fragile, like tissue paper stretched too tight over the injury beneath. Even gentle pressure made it ache, and I had the distinct impression that any sudden movement could tear it all back open.
But it was closed. I wasn’t actively bleeding out anymore.
That would have to do.
I gave myself a moment to just exist, to let the adrenaline fade and my heartbeat slow to something approaching normal. My body felt wrong in ways that had nothing to do with the injury— heavy and awkward and different— but I pushed that concern aside for later. One crisis at a time.
I forced myself to my feet, moving slowly and carefully to avoid stressing the fragile healing. The world spun for a moment before settling, and I had to brace one hand against the wall until I was sure my legs would hold me.
When I was confident I wouldn’t immediately collapse, I finally took a proper look at my surroundings.
I was standing in what had once been a building of some kind. The walls were still partially intact, though large sections had collapsed inward, leaving jagged gaps that opened onto darkness beyond. Rubble littered the floor— chunks of concrete, twisted rebar, shattered glass that I instinctively avoided as I shifted my weight. The ceiling above was mostly gone, open to the sky, and—
My breath caught in my throat.
The sky was wrong.
That was my first thought, immediate and visceral. The sky was wrong!
“What is this…?”
It was pitch black, darker than any night I’d ever experienced, stretching in every direction without a single star to break the endless void. But it wasn’t empty. Deep purple auroras snaked through that blackness, moving with an unnatural fluidity that made my eyes ache to follow. They pulsed and writhed like living things, casting everything below in an eerie, shifting light that turned shadows into uncertain, moving entities.
No moon. No sun. Just that oppressive darkness and those wrong, beautiful lights.
I stared up at it for a long moment, feeling something cold settle in my chest. Whatever had happened while I was gone, it had been catastrophic enough to make the sky look like the place I’d gone to as I battled against Quirrell, so long ago.
I forced my gaze away from that disturbing vista and focused on my immediate surroundings, looking for anything that might tell me where I was. The building had been picked clean of anything obviously useful— no furniture remained intact, no supplies, nothing but rubble and decay.
But there, half-buried under a collapsed section of wall, I spotted something. I picked my way carefully across the debris field, mindful of both my injury and my bare feet, and crouched down to examine it more closely.
A sign. Old wood, the paint faded and cracked but still partially legible in the purple-tinged light filtering through the gaps above.
Orphanage of—
The rest was broken away, but I didn’t need to see it to know what it said. I knew that font. I’d seen it every day for years, had traced those letters with small fingers while waiting for parents who would never come.
Orphanage of Pity.
My orphanage. The place I’d grown up in this world before the Hogwarts letter, before I learned I had magic.
I was in Warminster.
I straightened slowly, something like vertigo washing over me that had nothing to do with my injuries. I was home. Or at least, I was where home used to be.
I moved toward what had once been the main entrance, my feet finding the path from memory even though the building had been transformed into a skeleton of itself. Every step brought new evidence of devastation. The common room where I’d spent countless hours was now just a crater, the walls blown outward as if by some massive explosive force. The dormitory hall had collapsed entirely, leaving a mountain of debris that would take days to excavate.
I stepped through the empty doorframe that had once held the front door and stopped dead.
The destruction wasn’t limited to the orphanage.
Warminster— my quiet, unremarkable hometown— had been reduced to ruins.
Every building I could see bore the scars of violence. Walls with chunks torn from them, as if massive claws had raked through stone and mortar. Roofs collapsed inward, skeletal frameworks of homes and shops exposed to that wrong sky above. Some structures had burned, leaving only blackened husks behind. Others looked like they’d been hit by artillery, craters where buildings used to stand.
But it wasn’t the uniform destruction of a bombing or natural disaster. It was chaotic, random, like a war had been fought building by building, street by street, with no clear front lines or strategic targets. Just… devastation.
And silence.
That might have been the worst part. A town this size should have sound— cars, voices, the ambient hum of human civilization. Instead there was nothing. Just the whisper of wind through broken windows and the occasional creak of unstable structures settling.
I stood in the ruins of my childhood, staring at the corpse of my hometown, and felt the first real stirrings of fear since I’d clawed my way out of the void.
What the Hell had happened here?
I needed answers. But first, I needed clothes. The cold was starting to seep into my bones despite the adrenaline, and wandering around naked would attract the wrong kind of attention if there was anyone left to see me.
I turned back to the orphanage ruins, picking my way carefully back inside.
I found the storage room— or what was left of it— behind a partially collapsed wall. I squeezed through the gap, ignoring the way the rough edges scraped against my newly healed skin, and emerged into a space that looked like it had been ransacked years ago. Boxes overturned, contents scattered, most of it water-damaged or torn beyond use.
But there, in the back corner, a metal locker had somehow remained upright and relatively intact.
I wrenched it open with hands that felt too large, too strong, and froze.
My hands.
I’d been so focused on survival, on healing, on processing the destruction around me, that I hadn’t really looked at myself. Not properly.
These weren’t the hands of a thirteen-year-old boy.
They were bigger, broader, and far stronger than they should be. I stared at them in the dim purple light, turning them over, watching the way muscles moved under skin that seemed stretched over a frame that had grown while I wasn’t paying attention.
How long had I been in the void?
The question sent a chill down my spine that had nothing to do with the cold. I’d thought— I’d assumed— that time worked differently there, but seeing the physical evidence of years passing while I’d been trapped in that grey nothing…
I shook my head sharply. Later. I could have an existential crisis about lost time later. Right now, I needed to get dressed before hypothermia added itself to my list of problems.
I grabbed the first items of clothing I could find that looked like they might fit. A long-sleeved shirt, faded grey and worn soft with age but mercifully intact. Pants that were meant for someone slightly shorter— they’d be too short on legs that had apparently grown longer than I remembered, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Socks with holes in the toes. The shoes weren’t much better, but they were comfortable and infinitely better than bare feet on broken glass and rubble.
I dressed quickly, trying not to think too hard about the way everything felt wrong on a body I barely recognized. The shirt was tight across shoulders that had broadened. The pants ended above my ankles. Even the way I moved felt different— my center of gravity had shifted, my limbs longer and requiring adjustments to movements that should have been automatic.
It was almost like wearing someone else’s skin.
When I was finished, I looked around for something reflective, anything that might serve as a mirror. I needed to see, to confirm what my hands and clothes were already telling me.
There— a large shard of glass, part of what had once been a window, propped against the wall at an angle that caught the strange light from outside.
I approached it slowly, some instinct warning me that I wasn’t going to like what I saw.
I was right.
The face staring back at me was mine, but aged. Not by decades, but enough. The softness of childhood was gone, replaced by harder lines and sharper angles. My jaw had squared, my cheekbones more prominent, the baby fat that had still clung to my features at thirteen completely burned away. My features had settled into the shape they’d always been destined to take— still recognizably me, but older. Maybe eighteen? It was hard to tell.
But none of that held my attention for more than a second.
Because both of my eyes had gone milky white.
Not just the right one— the eye that had changed after I’d first unlocked the ability to see the soul threads, that had marked me as different. Both of them now, pale and clouded and blind-looking even though I could see perfectly well through them. They stared back at me from my reflected face, colorless and wrong, like someone had replaced my irises with polished marble.
Memory hit me like a fist to the gut.
The summer before the tournament. The boggart in Grimmauld Place.
I’d watched Harry face his fear, then it had been my turn.
I’d stepped forward, wand ready, expecting… I didn’t know what. Quirrel, or Voldemort. Mina, perhaps. She was a creature I’d created with my own mind, and that could be my worst enemy, at times. But when the boggart had shifted, taking shape in front of Harry, Remus and Sirius, it hadn’t shown me any of those things.
It had shown me myself.
Older. Not by much— maybe the age I was looking at now in this broken mirror. Standing in darkness with both eyes pale and sightless, blood coating my hands up to the elbows. And behind me, barely visible in the shadows, shapes moved— twisted and wrong and eager, following my unspoken commands with horrible devotion.
The boggart had shown me becoming a monster.
Afterwards, Sirius had pulled me aside and asked if I was alright while I had some chocolate, if I wanted to talk about what I’d seen. I’d told him I was fine, that it was nothing, just a stupid fear that didn’t mean anything.
That was a lie.
Because I’d recognized those shapes in the shadows. I’d seen them before, in dreams that felt more like memories, in the spaces between thoughts where something whispered promises of power if I’d only reach out and take it.
I still remembered its words like it was yesterday.
“I can see you for what you are. A fool playing with powers too complex for him to ever truly fathom. A killer who only thirsts for more power and bloodshed; no matter how many pathetic lambs you’ve slaughtered, you can’t ever seem to get enough, can you? Playing them like strings on a harp… But you would know all about those threads, wouldn’t you?”
My hand moved to touch the glass, fingers trembling slightly as they traced the reflection of those empty eyes. The eyes from the boggart’s vision. The eyes I’d been terrified of seeing in my own mirror.
Was this it? Was this the boggart’s prophecy coming true?
Or was this another trick? Another illusion from the void, one last twist of the knife to break me after everything else had failed? Maybe I was still there, still trapped in that grey nothing, and this entire experience— the pain, the cold, the ruins, all of it— was just another elaborate torture designed to give me hope before snatching it away again.
No.
No, that couldn’t be right. I’d felt the real, tangible connection back to the living world that I’d fed power to for… however long it had taken. I’d forced a doorway open through sheer will and desperation, had thrown myself through before it could close, and had felt the claws of oblivion rake across my back as I escaped.
The pain was real. The cold was real. The hunger gnawing at my stomach was definitely real— the void had never bothered with something as mundane as hunger in its tortures.
This wasn’t another illusion.
This was just… what I’d become. What I’d had to become to survive.
I stared at my reflection for another long moment, watching those white eyes stare back, searching for some trace of the boy I’d been. He was still in there, somewhere, buried under the changes and the scars and the weight of however many years I’d spent refusing to break.
Then something in my expression shifted. Changed. Hardened.
My gaze went from uncertain to cold, from questioning to resolved.
So what if my eyes had changed? So what if I looked like something from the boggart’s vision? I’d survived the void. I’d clawed my way back from true death, had refused to break even when creatures and monsters wearing familiar faces had tried to unmake me piece by piece. Whatever I’d become in the process— whatever price I’d paid for that survival— was just another reality to adapt to.
My eyes might be white. My body might have aged. My magic might feel different, darker, sharper than it used to.
But I was alive.
And I’d be damned if I was going to waste that by collapsing into an existential crisis in the ruins of my childhood over something as trivial as eye color.
The boggart had shown me a warning. It hadn’t shown me an inevitability.
I could still choose who I became and what I did with this second chance.
I turned away from the mirror, squared my shoulders despite the way my newly healed wound ached in protest, and walked out of the orphanage for what I suspected would be the last time.
I had to find out what had happened to the world.
xxx
The streets of Warminster were a maze of destruction and decay. I moved through them carefully, taking in every detail with an attention that had been honed by the void to notice even the smallest inconsistency. Survival there had depended on seeing the patterns, recognizing when the grey shifted in ways that meant something was coming for me.
Here, the patterns told a different story, but one equally grim.
Evidence of looting everywhere— storefronts with their windows smashed in, glass crunching under my worn shoes. Doors hanging off hinges or missing entirely, the interiors picked clean of anything valuable or useful. Cars abandoned in the middle of roads, some burned out to skeletal frames, others just sitting there as if their drivers had simply walked away mid-journey. Rust and neglect had claimed most of them, weeds growing up through broken engines, nature beginning the slow process of reclaiming what humanity had abandoned.
But no bodies. That struck me as odd. A catastrophe large enough to destroy an entire town, to break the sky itself, and yet no corpses rotting in the streets. No bones picked clean by scavengers. No signs of mass graves or hurried burials.
Either someone had cleaned them up— organized it, which seemed unlikely given the state of everything else— or the people had left. Evacuated, fled, been taken.
Or worse: there was nothing left to bury.
I filed that disturbing observation away and kept moving, my feet carrying me down streets I’d walked a thousand times as a child. Everything was familiar and alien at once. I knew these roads, and had memorized every crack in the sidewalk during the second half of my first ten years here. Those cracks had become chasms, the familiar landscape transformed into something from a nightmare.
I passed what had been Mrs. Henderson’s corner shop, where she’d always kept a jar of sweets for the orphanage kids. The building was gutted now, the interior blackened by fire. The old oak tree where we used to climb was still standing, but half its branches had been torn away, and something had carved deep gouges into its trunk— claw marks, maybe, though I couldn’t imagine what would have claws large enough to make marks like that. Dragons?
It would make sense, what with the charred surfaces…
A pharmacy came next— thoroughly ransacked, the distinctive smell of old medication still clinging to the ruins. Shelves overturned, glass and pills crunching under my feet as I glanced inside. Nothing worth taking remained.
Then a bank, its vault door hanging open like a broken jaw. The interior was completely empty. Not just of money, but of everything. Even the benches at the center had been stripped out.
Houses followed, street after street of them. I looked through windows when I could, seeing the same story repeated over and over. Systematic searches. Floorboards pried up. Walls torn into. Cabinets emptied. Every space that might hide something useful had been thoroughly examined and stripped bare.
Whatever had happened here, it hadn’t been quick. This was the kind of thorough, desperate looting that spoke of prolonged scarcity. Of people hungry enough and desperate enough to tear apart their own homes looking for anything that might help them survive another day.
The hunger in my own stomach had progressed from a mild annoyance to a persistent ache that was getting harder to ignore. When was the last time I’d eaten? In the void, I hadn’t needed food— hadn’t needed anything except the will to keep existing. My body had simply… been. No hunger, no thirst, no physical needs at all beyond the psychological torture of existing in nothing.
But apparently I was making up for lost time now. My stomach growled, loud in the eerie silence, reminding me that this body had physical requirements I couldn’t ignore forever.
I needed to find something. Anything.
Store after store yielded nothing. They’d all been picked clean, some of them so thoroughly that even the shelving units had been removed— probably stripped for materials or firewood. I was starting to wonder if I’d have to try hunting whatever animals might still be living in these ruins when I spotted something larger up ahead.
A supermarket. One of the big chains, the kind that used to stock everything from groceries to electronics to garden supplies. The parking lot was full of abandoned cars, and the building itself looked like it had taken some kind of impact— there was a massive hole in one wall, exposing the interior to the elements.
If there was anything left to find in this town, it would be there.
I approached cautiously, all my senses on alert for any sign of other people. The void had taught me that the most dangerous predators were often the ones that looked like prey until you got close enough.
The entrance doors hung at crooked angles, glass long since shattered and cleared away. Inside, the purple light from the sky filtered through gaps in the roof, casting everything in those same unnatural, shifting shadows that made it hard to judge distances properly.
The place had been thoroughly ransacked. Aisles overturned, shelving units knocked over like dominoes, products scattered and crushed underfoot. The floor was a minefield of broken glass, spilled liquids that had long since dried into sticky residue, and unidentifiable debris.
I picked my way through the chaos, checking each section systematically even though I knew the chances of finding anything were slim.
Canned goods section— completely empty. Not a single tin left. Even the shelves themselves were damaged, like people had torn them apart looking for anything that might have rolled underneath.
Dry goods— same story. The shelves looked like they’d been licked clean. Boxes of pasta, rice, cereal, anything that could last— all gone.
Frozen section— the freezers had long since stopped working, their contents reduced to unidentifiable sludge or completely decomposed. The smell was atrocious, and I moved past quickly.
I moved through the store with growing frustration, my stomach growling its displeasure. There had to be something. Even in the most thorough looting, people missed things. Dropped items, food that rolled under shelving, cans that got kicked into corners and forgotten.
I was in the back corner of the store, near what used to be the dairy section, when something caught my eye.
There— underneath one of the broken-down refrigerators. A splash of familiar blue and white packaging, barely visible in the gloom.
A can of tuna.
I approached it carefully, already seeing the problem. The refrigerator had collapsed at an angle, one of its doors torn completely off, the other hanging by a single hinge. It had settled in such a way that left a gap underneath— just large enough for something can-sized to have rolled beneath it during the chaos.
But the floor around it was absolutely covered in broken glass. Thick, jagged shards from what looked like multiple broken bottles, creating a minefield between me and that can. And the interior of the refrigerator that I’d have to reach past to get to it looked… unpleasant. Months— maybe years— of food rot had turned whatever had been stored there into a biohazard, a mass of mold and decay and things I didn’t want to identify.
That’s probably why no one else had bothered with it. Too much risk, too much effort, for a single can that might not even be edible anymore.
I reached with my hand, about to cast a spell, before thinking better of it. There was no sense in wasting power currently. I had no idea what to expect from this world, so I needed to save all of my power for things like combat and recovery.
I weighed my options for another half second before deciding that dignity was significantly less important than food. I grabbed a piece of relatively intact cardboard from a nearby pile of debris, tested its weight, and laid it down over the worst of the glass to create a makeshift path. It wouldn’t protect my worn shoes and feet completely— I could feel shards pressing through even the thick cardboard— but it was better than nothing.
I got down on my hands and knees, mindful of my still-fragile wound, and carefully crawled forward.
The smell from the refrigerator was worse up close— spoiled dairy products mixed with something that might have been meat once, all of it fermented into a noxious cocktail that made my eyes water. I breathed through my mouth and reached carefully past the disgusting mass of rot, my fingers stretching for that blue and white can.
Almost… there…
My fingers closed around metal. Cold, solid, real.
Got it.
I backed away quickly, clutching my prize, and didn’t stop until I was well clear of both the glass and that horrible smell. Only then did I examine what I’d found.
A can of tuna. The label was water-damaged and partially peeled away, but I could still read the important parts. The can itself showed no signs of rust or compromise, no bulging that would indicate spoilage. The expiration date was long past, but canned food could last for years beyond that if stored properly.
It was food. Real, actual food.
I was halfway to the exit, already trying to figure out the best way to open it without a can opener— maybe find a rock and carefully puncture the lid, or look for a piece of metal sharp enough to cut— when I felt cold metal press against the back of my skull.
“Don’t move.” A voice said.
Young. Female. Her voice was trying to be threatening but with an undercurrent of fear that made the threat more dangerous, not less. Scared people with weapons did unpredictable things.
“Hand over whatever you found.” The voice continued. “Slowly.”
I froze, every instinct I’d honed in the void screaming at me to react. To summon the chains that had become as natural as breathing, wrap around her and pull until—
No.
I forced those instincts down, buried them under a layer of deliberate calm. I wasn’t in the void anymore. This wasn’t some eldritch horror wearing a familiar face. This was a real person with a real gun, and I had no idea what the rules were in this broken world. Using magic here— especially the kind of magic I’d learned in that place— might have consequences I couldn’t predict.
And more than that, I didn’t want to be the person who reflexively killed someone over a can of tuna. If they were doing something truly horrible, sure I had no problem eviscerating them, but over something like this?
I raised my hands slowly, the can still clutched in one, and spoke in what I hoped was a calm, non-threatening voice. “Okay. No problem. I’m going to turn around, alright? Slowly.”
“Just… no funny business.” The voice said, and now I could hear it more clearly. Young, definitely. Uncertain. The kind of uncertainty that came from never having actually shot someone before but being desperate enough to consider it.
“I’m turning around.” I said again, keeping my movements deliberate and visible. “I’m not going to try anything.”
I pivoted slowly, hands still raised, and got my first look at the person holding a gun to my head.
A girl. Maybe fourteen, though it was hard to tell— malnutrition had a way of making people look both older and younger at the same time. She was thin in a way that spoke of chronic hunger rather than genetics, her clothes hanging off her frame like they’d been made for someone twice her size. Dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, dirt smudged across her face, and eyes that were trying to be hard but couldn’t quite hide the fear underneath.
The gun in her hands was large— too large for her, really. Some kind of pistol, though I didn’t know enough about firearms to identify the model. Her grip was uncertain, both hands wrapped around it but her arms trembling slightly from the weight of holding it extended.
She’d probably never fired it. Might not even know how to work the safety. But at this range, that didn’t matter. Even a scared kid could pull a trigger.
“Here.” I said, extending my arm to offer her the can. “Take it.”
Her eyes flicked to the can, then back to my face, then to the can again. She was trying to decide if it was worth the risk of lowering the gun to take it. Trying to calculate whether I was faster than her, whether I’d try something the moment she reached for it.
I let my vision shift slightly, unfocusing in that particular way that had become second nature. The world took on that strange double-exposure quality as the soul threads became visible, overlaying physical reality with something deeper and more fundamental.
The girl’s thread coiled around her in shades of grey and dull green, tattered at the edges like fabric that had been worn too thin. Fear, yes— that was obvious even without the threads. But woven through it, I could see desperation, exhaustion, and underneath all of that, something that might have been guilt or shame.
No malice, though. No violence rooted deep in the core of who she was. The aggressive posture, the gun, the demands— all of it was surface level. A role she was playing because she thought she had to, not because it came naturally.
She was just a scared kid trying to survive.
That didn’t mean she wouldn’t pull the trigger, of course.
The gun wavered slightly as she reached forward with her other hand, eyes never leaving my face. Her fingers wrapped around the can, snatched it from my grip, and immediately she stepped back, putting distance between us while the gun returned to a two-handed grip.
She looked at the can. Really looked at it, reading the label with an intensity that suggested this might be the first real food she’d seen in days. Maybe longer.
Then her gaze lifted back to my face, and I saw her eyes widen slightly.
She was staring at my eyes. My white, colorless, wrong eyes.
I saw the moment recognition hit. Not recognition of me specifically, but recognition of something. Her expression shifted, the fear mixing with something else. Pity, maybe. Or sympathy.
“Here.” She said abruptly, thrusting the can back toward me.
I blinked, genuinely surprised. “What?”
“Take it.” She pushed it at me again, and when I didn’t immediately move, she closed the distance and pressed it into my hand. “Just… just take it and go.”
The gun lowered, not all the way, but enough that I wasn’t staring directly down the barrel anymore.
“Wait.” I said, my mind racing. This was my chance. Maybe my only chance to get real information about what had happened here. “Can I ask you something?”
She paused, suspicious but not running yet. Not pointing the gun back at me either, which I took as a good sign.
“What happened here?” I gestured vaguely at the ruins around us, at the broken supermarket and the destroyed town beyond. “Why is the city like this? Why is the sky…”
I trailed off, not sure how to finish that sentence. Why is the sky wrong? Why is it dark? Why are there purple auroras instead of sun and stars?
The girl stared at me like I’d suddenly sprouted a second head. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. “What?” She finally managed.
“I know it sounds crazy.” I said quickly, before she could decide I was dangerous and run off. Or worse, decide I was dangerous and shoot me. “But I don’t… I don’t remember. Any of it. The last thing I remember clearly is October 1993, and now everything’s…”
I gestured around again, at the devastation, the wrongness, the world that had clearly ended while I was gone.
Understanding dawned in her eyes. The suspicion didn’t disappear entirely, but it shifted, transformed into something closer to shocked recognition.
“Another one.” She muttered, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it. Then, louder, barely above a whisper: “Another one wiped by them.”
“Wiped?” I repeated. “What does that mean? Who’s ‘them’?”
But she was already backing away, shoving the gun into the waistband of her too-large pants with the kind of careless handling that made me wince internally. She studied me for another long moment, those calculating eyes taking in my white eyes, my ill-fitting clothes, my general appearance of someone who’d just woken up from a very long, very bad sleep.
“Follow me.” She said finally.
It wasn’t a request, and she didn’t wait to see if I’d comply. She just turned and started walking toward the exit, her thin frame disappearing into the purple-tinged shadows.
I hesitated for only a moment before following. It could be a trap— probably should assume it was a trap, given everything the void had taught me about trusting strangers. But I needed information more than I needed safety right now. And something about the way she’d looked at me, about that phrase “wiped by them.” Suggested she knew something important.
Besides, I’d survived worse than whatever this broken world could throw at me.
Probably.
We moved through the ruined streets in silence. The girl led with the confidence of someone who knew these ruins intimately, taking turns that seemed random but were clearly chosen with purpose. She avoided certain streets entirely, giving a wide berth to buildings that looked no more unstable than any of the others we passed.
Avoiding something. Or someone.
I followed, keeping a careful distance— close enough that I wouldn’t lose her in the maze of destruction, far enough that I wouldn’t seem threatening. My newly healed wound ached with each step, the fragile skin protesting the extended movement, but I ignored it. Pain was just information. I could deal with information.
The purple auroras overhead pulsed and shifted, casting everything in that eerie, unstable light that made shadows move like living things. I found myself glancing up at them repeatedly, trying to understand what I was seeing. They weren’t like normal auroras— those moved, yes, but with a kind of natural flow that followed magnetic fields and solar winds. These moved with purpose, slithering through that black sky like serpents made of light.
What could do that to the sky? What kind of catastrophe had the power to break reality itself?
After about fifteen minutes of walking— though time felt slippery and uncertain under that lightless sky— the girl stopped in front of a building that looked marginally more intact than its neighbors. It was a former office building, maybe three stories tall, with most of its walls and roof still present. Some of the windows were broken, but not all of them. The structure looked stable, relatively speaking. Defensible.
“In here.” The girl said, glancing back at me. “And… maybe don’t mention the gun thing. They’re not happy about me going out alone.”
Before I could respond to that— before I could ask who “they” were or why it mattered— she pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside.
I followed, squinting as my eyes adjusted to the dimmer interior. The purple light from outside filtered through the remaining windows, but it was significantly darker in here, shadows pooling in corners and making it hard to see clearly.
The ground floor had been converted into some kind of makeshift settlement. My eyes adjusted enough to make out details: maybe twenty people, all ages, occupying what had clearly once been a lobby. They’d set up sleeping areas using salvaged mattresses and blankets, created a cooking area with what looked like a camping stove and some pots, even established some kind of water collection system using tarps and containers arranged near gaps in the ceiling.
It was organized. Functional. The kind of setup that spoke of people who’d been surviving like this for a while and had figured out how to make it work.
Every single person turned to look when the door opened, and I felt the shift in atmosphere immediately. It was like a physical thing, the way the temperature seemed to drop as twenty pairs of eyes fixed on me.
Hands moved toward weapons. I saw makeshift clubs, knives with wrapped handles, a couple more guns. Faces that had been exhausted but calm twisted into expressions of hostility and fear. A woman pulled a small child behind her. A man stood up from where he’d been sitting, positioning himself between me and a group of younger kids.
They thought I was a threat.
“Jolene?” A man’s voice, rough with age and smoke. An older man— maybe forty, with grey streaking through his dark beard— stood up from where he’d been sitting near the cooking area. “Who’s that?”
The girl— Jolene, apparently— must have felt the tension too, because she spoke quickly, her words tumbling over each other. “Found him at the supermarket. His mind was wiped by those people. He doesn’t remember anything.”
The effect was instantaneous and startling. The hostility didn’t disappear entirely— the weapons didn’t lower, the protective stances didn’t relax— but it softened. Shifted. The fear was still there, but it was joined by something else.
Recognition. Understanding. And underneath it all, a kind of weary sympathy that was almost worse than the hostility had been.
People exchanged glances. Some of them nodded knowingly. Others looked at me with expressions that were uncomfortably close to pity.
“Another one?” A woman with a baby on her hip spoke up, her voice carrying a note of exhausted resignation. “How many does that make now?”
“Too many.” The bearded man— clearly some kind of leader here— responded. His eyes stayed fixed on me, assessing. Not hostile anymore, but not exactly welcoming either. “Come in, then. But we don’t have much to share. You understand?”
I understood perfectly. Another mouth to feed when food was already scarce. Another person taking up space and consuming resources that were probably stretched dangerously thin already. They’d let me in because of whatever this “wiped” thing meant, but they weren’t happy about it.
“I understand.” I said, stepping fully inside and letting the door swing closed behind me with a heavy thud that echoed in the space. “Thank you.”
No one responded to that. They just watched me, wary and uncertain, as I looked around for somewhere to position myself. Somewhere that would seem non-threatening but wouldn’t make me vulnerable if things went wrong.
I found a spot against one wall, far enough from the others to not seem like I was crowding them but close enough that I wouldn’t appear to be hiding. I slid down to sit with my back against the wall, wincing slightly as the movement pulled at my wound, and settled in to wait.
The can of tuna sat in my hands, solid and real and absurd. A single can of tuna, in a world that had apparently ended. It felt like a joke, except nobody was laughing.
The settlement gradually went back to whatever they’d been doing before my arrival. Conversations resumed in low voices, people returning to their tasks. Someone was attempting to repair torn clothing with a needle and thread. A group of children in the corner were playing some kind of quiet game with rocks and string, their movements subdued in the way children got when they’d learned that loud play attracted the wrong attention.
I waited, patient in the way the void had taught me to be patient. Waited for the right moment, for the tension to ease enough that I could ask questions without seeming demanding or threatening.
Finally, when it seemed like the settlement had mostly adjusted to my presence, I spoke up. Not loud, but loud enough to carry in the space.
“Can someone tell me what happened?”
The quiet conversations stopped. People looked at me, then at each other, then at the bearded man who was clearly their leader.
I continued before the silence could stretch too long. “I know what Jolene said. About my memory being wiped. And maybe that’s true— maybe that’s exactly what happened. But the last date I remember clearly is around October 1993. If someone could just… explain what I’ve missed. What happened to make the world like this.”
The silence that followed was heavy enough to be physical. It pressed down on the space like a living thing, suffocating and dense. People looked at each other with expressions I couldn’t quite read— something between horror and resignation and exhausted grief.
Finally, the bearded man spoke. “What’s your name, son?”
“Adam. Adam Clarke. I used to live in the Orphanage.”
He nodded slowly, studying me with eyes that had seen too much and survived anyway. “That old place, huh? Jenny used to work there before everything happened— she’ll confirm your identity. I’m Marcus. And before I answer your question, I need you to understand something. What I’m about to tell you… it’s not easy to hear. Especially if you really don’t remember.”
My hands tightened on the can until my knuckles went white. “I need to know.”
Marcus studied me for another long moment, his gaze searching my face for something. Sincerity, maybe. Or maybe just trying to gauge whether I’d break when he told me whatever he was about to tell me.
Whatever he saw must have satisfied him, because he nodded and took a breath.
“Alright. The year is 1999.”
Six years. I’d suspected, given the changes to my body, but hearing it confirmed still felt like a punch to the gut. Six years gone, just like that. Lost in that grey nothing while the world moved on without me.
“And October 31st, 1993…”
Marcus’s voice dropped, taking on a quality I recognized from the void. The tone of someone recounting a trauma so vast it had reshaped their entire existence.
“That was the day the world ended.”
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