A man in a bespoke black twintailed suit sat on a bench in a park, his legs crossed. His hair was dark and slicked back, his eyes were even darker, as if reflecting the void back into the world. His face was sharp and angular, and his body well built with clear signs of training.
He wore a long ivory scarf, embroidered with unique and unusual golden patterns, as well as a golden neck tie underneath, hanging from his neck.
His hands were covered in black silk gloves, which he then used to pull out a cigarette and lighter from his pockets, steadily lighting the cigarette and bringing it to his mouth.
That man's name was Aster Mercury, a Threadwatcher of the Avis church, though better known as a seer. On top of that, he was also a part time member of their combative task force, the ACI.
The city was bustling around him, full of life with ordinary citizens going about their daily lives, unaware of the impending threat. The clouds on the other hand, were turning darker and darker, a clear sign of the coming rain, but also a foretelling of the arriving danger.
A murder of Blackbills flew by, landing near a gothic styled water fountain to have a drink. The fountain had an attached birdbath, allowing the birds to more easily reach the water.
The birds, seemingly alert, were screeching in a show of fright but had their calls muffled by the honking of car horns.
These birds were special, their sightings often being taken as omens of disaster.
Aster, noticing this, casually pulled out his phone, looked through it for a few moments, quickly glancing at the time, and then put it back into his pockets.
'It seems that it's not time yet', Aster thought to himself.
The day prior, Aster had received a divine premonition, a premonition being something like a prophetic sixth sense, exclusive to seers and the occasional lucky augur. That sense had warned him, alerting him of an impending catastrophe, one which would appear over Tarmis city, where he was currently waiting.
Aster had already alerted his fellow ACI members, having them be stationed around the city. In total, over twenty watchmen had shown up.
Watchmen being the first and most common rank in the task force, with over ninety percent of its ranks being filled by them.
Luckily, that wasn't all, the higher ups had also sent Aster five Sentinels. Those being a tier above your average watchman.
As time passed and the clouds above him slowly gathered and got even darker, he pulled out an umbrella, unfolding it and holding it over his head mere moments before the first raindrops fell.
The downpour started gently, just a small sprinkle, but it quickly escalated. The volley of rain transformed into a true cascade as it went on, repeatedly battering the seer's umbrella.
The rain continued, lasting for over half an hour.
Until suddenly, a noticeable change could be felt in the atmosphere as a sharp cracking sound could be heard coming from above.
An earsplitting clap reverberated through the air, followed by an otherworldly groaning that seemed to resonate from heaven.
The sky itself seemed to bow under an unseen force as ripples could be felt through the air. The heavens above bucked and pushed back against whatever was forcing itself against them, seemingly mustering all the resistance they could. Yet, they could not hold. The sky collapsed with a resounding boom as it splintered into thousands of pieces. It was as if a cosmic giant had shattered a glass pane with a hammer, or a rock were thrown onto a frozen lake.
And from those cracks, millions of shining droplets fell.
The heavens were crying.
Lusterous silver droplets that could eclipse a person descended from the skies, shimmering in a bright glow of an undefinable colour.
They hung up in the sky, slowly lowering themselves like dewdrops after a night of summer rain. They contained every colour, every hue, a whirlpool of iridescent light, and those colours, they were unlike any seen before, hues so unimaginable that they could shatter the human brain in an instant.
Those droplets refracted the unnatural colours down onto the earth below, instantly sweeping over every living creature. It was as if they were searching for something, not just randomly refracting light but actually targeting the living.
Aster suddenly felt an foreign pressure as everything swept black, it didn't even leave any room for resistance, his mind becoming clouded with no space for even a single thought. His form then rapidly cooled as it started transforming into a dense, shiny chrome-like puddle.
His body was suddenly jerked backwards as it started ascending up into the sky. The air conspired against him, resisting his body and causing it to swirl like a cascading waterfall.
His new form rode up on the beam of light, like a slug slowly crawling its way up a leaf, ascending numerous meters with every climbing second.
At the exact same time, hundreds of thousands of chrome waterfalls just like him ascended into the skies, as if a puppeteer had let down their strings onto a stage, though this puppeteer seemed to be conducting his show on a much grander scale than any puppetmaster before him, one so large that the entire world would be involved.
The near uncountable number of people in ascent was staggering, it was as if the earth itself was reaching out towards the sky, trying to support it. Those hundreds of thousands of liquid silvery pillars rose and rose until they pierced the clouds, reaching so high that they looked like the bars to a birdcage.
The cracks in the sky, those were the goal of these pillars, it was as if they were magnetically attractive, pulling the pillars towards them.
Slowly but surely, over the course of several minutes, the pillars were all consumed by the sky, becoming a sort of sealant to the cracks which adorned it.
Eventually, all trace of life was gone from the surface of the earth.