Denver, Colorado
The skies never cleared.
Even under sunlight, the horizon was wrong, tinted faint gold as if the atmosphere were a filter, and the clouds moved with purpose instead of wind. Most people no longer looked up. They moved like shadows beneath high tension wires, eyes lowered, speech scarce.
The noise had stopped.
No sirens, no aircraft. Not even birds.
The only sound now was the low, ceaseless hum, something just under the threshold of perception, like a tuning fork pressed against the soul.
Captain June Alvarez stood behind sandbag barricades outside the Capitol building, rifle slung slow, breath fogging in what should've been 80-degree air. The cold was sudden, like the world had been plunged into a fridge but no one turned down the thermostat.
"They're not attacking," said Corporal Hanes beside her, peering through binoculars at the edge of the city.
"That's what scares me," she muttered. "You don't invade without purpose. They want something."
They had seen them, or rather 'it' only once. A massive figure, twenty feet tall, descending into the old Federal Reserve. It had no face, just a cluster of interwoven gold and bone, with arms that branched like old trees and legs that did not quite touch the ground. It moved like it was falling through time.
It hadn't harmed anyone. But where it walked, electronics failed. Glass warped. People.... changed.
Some stopped speaking altogether. Others couldn't stop screaming.
"I think it looked at me," Hanes whispered.
Alvarez didn't answer.
Because she thought the same.
Elsewhere in Anchorage, Alaska, riots had flared briefly and then died like matches in rain. What remained was worse; apathy.
The people didn't surrender to a superior force. They surrendered because reality itself no longer made sense. crops began to grow in unnatural geometries. Rivers ran backward. Sleep no longer brough rest and dreams were filled with chanting in languages that they've never heard before, but for some reason they understood every word.
Churches were filled and emptied in waves. Athiests prayed as the priests wept, no one knew what was real anymore. A radio host broadcasted non-stop for 72 hours before breaking down on air.
"They don't talk to us. They don't want us dead. That'd be easier than living like this, not knowing which breath's gonna be your last..."
Above the skies, Within the iridescent shell that circled the Earth like a thought half formed, Lord Khaliel watched Earth's undoing. His body had grown stranger, parts of him phasing slightly out of sync with the space around him. His wings, or what remained of them had long since shed their feathered illusions. Now they were rigid growths of prismed bone and light, curved like crescent blades.
"Humanity adapts quickly," said General Serach, reviewing environmental metrics. "They have not yet struck back with full force. But tensions among their nations are rising. Fragmentation imminent."
Khaliel nodded. "Expected. The harmonic inversion wil trigger irrationality before clarity. It is the nature of lesser minds under pressure."
Another voice interjected its tone, sharper, colder.
"They do not see us as Gods."
The speaker was Thauriel, a Dominion-strain tactician whose body resembled a rusted cathedral perced on spidery limbs. He had no mouth. His words vibrated directly into others' bones.
"They see conquest where we offer order."
Khaliel turned slowly. "Let them. When chaos blooms fully, they will beg for stillness, and we will grant it."
**Underground Bunker - West Virginia**
The President of the United States sat in a cold room ten stories underground with a half-dozen advisors, none of whom had slept in two days. The table was covered with printouts, grainy images, failed tactical reports and a single bloodstained satellite photo from the Brazil incident. The subject in the image glowed faintly, even in black and white.
"We still don't know what they want," said the Defense Secretary.
"They've taken key sites," the Joint Chief said, pointing. "Power plants, archives, CERN, old test sites, places with either data, energy or history."
The president leaned back. "So they're looking for something."
No one contradicted him.
A White House science advisor finally spoke up. "We analyzed the energy emissions. They're building something. Not a weapon. A signal or more likely a structure that would be in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Like a satellite, except it vibrates with Earth's magnetic field."
"And what happens when it finishes?" the President asked.
Silence.
Then a quiet answer.
"We stop being the main character."
---
A minor Virtue knelt before Khaliel, clutching a containment orb. The orb flickered with echoes of ancient energy, resonance from the artifact beneath Earth's crust. It pulsed erratically.
"It is waking," the Virtue said, bowing. "And it predates even our oldest records."
Khaliel took the orb.
He felt it, event through the containment layers, an intelligence, not sentient but perhaps aware. Like an eye half opened beneath a thousand layers of soil and time.
A thing even a Seraphim had chosen to forget.
And it sirred due to their presence.
Khaliel turned slowly toward his tacticians.
"Ready the deep-seal teams. We found it."
---
The clouds above Denver split, not like storm clouds, instead it mimicked curtain fabric torn from within.
Something massive descended.
A figure, three stories tall, built like a construct of failed architecture and broken geometry, wings jagged and too many eyes... but it sang. Not with music, with light and gravity. People fell to their knees, simply because their bones no longer understood the concept of standing.
Captain Alvarez screamed into her radio. "We have a visual!! We have something!!. We-"
Static.
However, the 'thing' didn't attack, it only watched. And across every screen, every phone, every reflective surface, a single message appeared in flawless, shifting language:
"This world is no longer yours."