Prologue

The world doesn’t end in fire or flood.
It ends in silence—
—in the slow fading of voices no one hears,
—in the quiet vanishing of people no one remembers.

Children disappear.
At first, the world notices. Then it forgets.

But one boy refused to forget.

And when he vanished,
he left behind more than a silence.

He lit a fire.

This is the story of Alex.