Volume 3 – Chapter 1: The Hour of Stillness

It was 4:12 AM.

The world did not end in fire or in fury.

It ended in a whisper.

And Kaito heard it—felt it—before he even opened his eyes.

This was a quiet unlike any he had experienced before. Not the deathly quiet of sleep, nor the soft, fragile silence of fear. This was the quiet of aftermath. A breathless pause after the moment when something irrevocable has happened, where the body knows it is alive, but the soul is unsure whether it is permitted to follow.

The house stopped shaking.

Now, it was quiet.

But something was gone.

He opened his eyes. The ceiling above was cracked a bit, with a thin line running from one corner to the other like a wound. Dust held the light, a shimmer stain of gray from the early morning, coming through the curtains.

Next to him was Rika. Awake. Eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling as though it might give away the answer neither could discern.

There was silence between them.

What was there to say?

The house had not collapsed, and no one had screamed. No fires lit anywhere. How could they feel so different? The weight of the previous night must have settled inside; the tense silence after the final tremor still clung to everything around.

And now, it was constricting them.

In a slow movement, Kaito sat up, uncustomarily stiff. Everything felt sluggish, as if time itself was disinclined to flow onward. Rika too stood straight, but for the first time in long, she did not reach for his hand.

Straight ahead she watched.

At last, it fell from her mouth, thin and strange. "Did we survive?"

Kaito didn’t know how to answer.

They were alive. The house remained standing. The world had not been reduced to oblivion in some grand instant.

But survival wasn't quite that simple anymore.

They were in a state intermediate between survival and death.

In some way, they were caught in limbo. It was some kind of end, except it was not the end they had always known. One deeply ingrained thing in their hearts had cracked.

"Let’s check the others," he said finally, not because he wanted to move but because sitting still seemed unbearable.

In the kitchen, they found their families, who were all sitting in silence.

Her mother stared into a cup of cold tea as though it might reveal some deeper truth, while his father leaned against the counter, bloodshot eyes on the radio and hearing nothing but static.

"No signal yet," he said quietly, without looking up.

Kaito swallowed. "Anything?"

"Just noise."

"What about outside? " Rika asked.

"I went out an hour ago," her father replied. "Power lines are down. Street is intact, but something's wrong. I can't explain it. Even the birds… they're gone."

Gone.

The word sank through the stillness like a stone.

"What time is it?" Rika whispered.

"Past four."

Their wedding was to be at noon.

But noon felt like a past life. 

Kaito perched at the table with his arms resting on its surface, his fingers curled tightly into fists. Inside, thoughts moved so slowly against an adrenaline-fueled fog that rested on nothing at all.

He was not afraid of dying anymore.

He was afraid of not knowing.

What had changed? What had broken? An end of the beginning or a beginning of the end?

He saw Rika and, for the first time, noticed something new in her visage-something that was not fear; not even sadness.

Absence.

As if something within her had withdrawn from this world; a retreat-a surrender to the immeasurable unknown.

He remotely wanted to be with her, but how?

Not now.

Not yet.

At long last, he said, "We should go outdoors," relishing the taste of the words on his tongue like something rotten. "We have to see it for ourselves."

No one moved.

For no one wanted to know.

Unsurprisingly, however, staying inside was not a solution either.

So, one after another, they edged out, out of the home into a world further stretching before them, looking just like the one they should have known:

But very much not.