The building groaned like a dying beast.
Gray stood in the center of his apartment, feet planted on the warped floorboards, and listened to the architecture surrender. The sound came from everywhere and nowhere—a low, grinding protest that vibrated through the soles of his boots, through the bones of his legs, settling somewhere deep in his gut where fear lived and bred. The walls were warping. Not bending, not leaning, but *warping* in ways that physics should have forbidden, the plaster cracking into spiderwebs that spread like frost on a winter window.
Outside, the skyline of Ash Harbor was buckling under a sky the color of a fresh bruise.
He had noticed the color first that morning, when the dawn had refused to come properly. Instead of gold or even the muted gray of the city's typical overcast, the horizon had bled into something purple and sick, swollen with light that hurt to look at directly. Now, at midday, the sky had deepened into something worse—a throbbing violet that pressed down on the rooftops like a physical weight, making the air thick and difficult to breathe.
Something inside Gray shifted.
The sensation arrived without warning, cold water flooding behind his eyes, filling the hollow spaces of his skull with an icy pressure that made him gasp. He pressed his palms against his temples, but the feeling wasn't external—it was *inside*, spreading through him like ink dropped in water, staining everything it touched. For one terrible moment, the air itself seemed to crystallize into threads of something visible, thin silver lines that mapped the space around him with geometric precision.
He could see the stress fractures in the ceiling before they appeared. He could see the way the support beams were twisting, the exact point where the metal would snap. And he knew—without knowing how, without understanding why—that the stairwell would fall before the sound of its collapse reached him.
Gray ran.
The apartment door stuck in its frame, swollen by the same impossible forces that were reshaping the building. He threw his shoulder against it, feeling the impact jar through his collarbone, and the wood splintered inward with a crack that echoed down the hallway. The corridor stretched before him, lit by flickering fluorescent tubes that cast everything in a sickly green pallor, and the cold sensation behind his eyes intensified until his vision began to white out at the edges.
*Not now*, he thought, staggering forward. *Not now, not now, not now.*
The building screamed around him—a sound like tearing metal and shattering glass, like the world itself was being unmade. He reached the stairwell just as the first cracks appeared in the concrete, spiderwebbing outward from the center of each step, and that impossible sight returned. The threads. He could see them again, silver and gossamer, weaving through the structure like the skeleton of some vast and invisible creature. They showed him where to step, which sections would hold, which would crumble beneath his weight.
He didn't question it. He couldn't afford to question it. He simply moved, his body responding to knowledge that his mind couldn't process, descending the stairs three and four at a time while the building came apart above him.
A chunk of ceiling crashed down behind him, close enough that he felt the displaced air against his back. He didn't look back. Looking back was for people who had the luxury of curiosity, and Gray had long ago learned that survival required a certain selective blindness. You didn't watch the things that were trying to kill you. You just ran.
The ground floor lobby was already gone—collapsed into a pile of rubble and twisted rebar that blocked the main entrance completely. Gray skidded to a stop, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and felt that cold pressure surge again. Through the white haze at the edge of his vision, he saw the threads reorganize, pointing him toward the service corridor to his left. The back exit. The building hadn't been designed with emergency escapes in mind, but the staff entrance behind the stairwell would lead to the alley.
He took the corridor at a sprint, his footsteps echoing against the linoleum, and burst through the fire door into daylight that was anything but natural.
The alley was narrow, choked with debris that had fallen from the upper floors. Gray stumbled over a chunk of concrete and caught himself against the brick wall, his fingers scraping against rough mortar. The cold sensation was receding now, draining away like water from a cracked vessel, and in its wake came a throbbing headache that pulsed behind his eyes with every heartbeat.
He looked up at the sky.
The bruise-colored expanse stretched from horizon to horizon, unbroken by clouds or birds or any of the ordinary markers of a world that still made sense. The light that filtered down was wrong—not just in color but in quality, as if the sun itself had been replaced by something that only pretended to give warmth. Gray could feel it on his skin, a faintly greasy sensation that made him want to wipe his arms clean.
Behind him, the building gave a final, shuddering groan and collapsed inward with a roar that shook the ground beneath his feet. Dust billowed outward in a choking cloud, and Gray pressed himself flat against the alley wall, covering his mouth and nose with his shirt, breathing through the fabric as the particulate matter settled around him like gray snow.
When the air finally cleared enough to see, he turned to survey the damage.
The apartment building—his home for the past three years, the place where he'd kept his few possessions and slept his restless sleeps—was gone. Reduced to a mountain of rubble and twisted metal that rose from the street like some grotesque monument to destruction. Other buildings nearby were in similar states of collapse, their facades cracked and leaning, windows shattered, the very bones of the architecture exposed to the bruised and bleeding sky.
Ash Harbor was dying. He could feel it in the way the ground trembled beneath his feet, in the way the air tasted of dust and copper and something else—something that made his stomach clench and his skin crawl. The city was being unmade, piece by piece, and he had no idea why.
Gray pressed his palm against his forehead, feeling the lingering echo of that cold sensation. It had saved his life—he knew that with a certainty that bypassed logic—but it had also terrified him in a way that the collapsing building had not. The falling masonry was comprehensible. The warping walls were strange, but they were still *physical*, still bound by some rules of cause and effect.
But the threads. The silver lines that had shown him the way down. The knowledge that had appeared in his mind without any source or explanation.
That was something else entirely.
He didn't have a name for it. He didn't have words to describe what had happened inside his skull, or why the air had suddenly become visible, or how he had known exactly where to step. All he had was the memory of cold water flooding behind his eyes, and the lingering headache that throbbed in time with his pulse.
Gray pushed himself away from the wall and started walking. He didn't know where he was going—only that staying here, in the shadow of a building that might still have more collapse left in it, was not an option. The streets stretched before him, cracked and cluttered with debris, and the bruised sky watched from above like the eye of something vast and patient and hungry.
He had survived. For now, that was enough.
But somewhere deep in his chest, in the place where instinct lived and reason died, Gray knew that something had changed. The world had shifted beneath his feet, and he had shifted with it. The cold sensation was gone, but he could feel it waiting—coiled somewhere in the back of his mind like a snake in tall grass, ready to strike again when he least expected it.
He walked, and the city crumbled around him, and the sky bled purple overhead.
And Gray did not look back.