Ark 00

They say the sky wept fire that day. They say the earth screamed. 

But those of us who survived the first hour remember only the silence—the absolute, deafening silence that followed the cataclysm. It was not an explosion in the way humanity understood explosions. It was an un-creation. A divine, or perhaps demonic, eraser dragged across the map, obliterating eleven seconds of reality itself from the face of Eurasia. They called it the Great Cataclysm. A sterile, scientific name for the moment the world ended and something else began. No one knew if it was nature’s final, furious rebellion or the work of a hidden hand. The cause didn't matter. Only the consequence did.

From the weeping wounds in the continent, from the new, jagged chasms that glowed with a sickly inner light, it came. It seeped, it bled, it pooled. The Black Matter. It was not liquid, not gas, not solid. It was a presence. A sentient corruption that hungered for the living. It did not just kill; it perverted. A tree, touched by its shadow, would twist into a grotesque, grasping claw of petrified wood, leaking a sap like congealed blood. A river, contaminated, would flow backwards, its waters now thick and silent, reflecting not the sky but the nightmares of those who looked upon it.
But its true horror was reserved for us. For the human heart. The BLACK MATTER was a key. It slotted into the darkest, most secret chambers of the soul and threw the doors wide open. It did not create evil. It revealed it. It amplified it. The petty jealousy you buried over a morning coffee blossomed into homicidal rage. The greed you quieted with rationalization became a ravenous, all-consuming fire. The buried trauma, the silent resentment, the latent cruelty—all of it was drawn out, polished, and given dominion over the flesh. Neighbor turned on neighbor not with the chaos of panic, but with the cold, calculated precision of their own unveiled selves. The monsters that emerged wore familiar faces, their eyes gleaming with a recognition of their own newfound, pure wickedness. This was not an invasion of aliens. It was an invasion of the self. The era of darkness did not descend; it unfolded from within.
As the long night began, as the corrupted lands spread and the newly made monsters built their dread hierarchies from the ruins of our cities, a second miracle occurred. Or was it a counter-curse? At that same fatal instance, as the Catalyst tore the world asunder, a singular point of light punctured the global gloom. It appeared not in the ravaged heartlands, but somewhere distant, untouched—a forgotten mountain peak, a deep desert, the frozen pole. No satellite caught it; no survivor witnessed it directly. But we felt it. A tremor in the spirit. A luminous, desperate hope, so potent it chose to incarnate, to weave itself into the very fabric of our broken world.
This was no mere beam of energy. It was a consciousness. A will. A luminous answer to the whispering dark. It chose a form—or perhaps many forms. Legends began, whispered in the bunkers and the hidden places: of a figure seen walking unscathed through fields of Black Matter, leaving blooming life in their footprints; of a light that could burn away the corruption from a man’s eyes, leaving him weeping and himself again, haunted but clean. This hope was not gentle. It was fierce. It was a sword forged in the same cosmic fire that birthed the Catalyst.
So the stage is set upon the ashes of our old lives. This is no longer a war for territory, for resources, for ideology. It is a war for the essence of creation itself. On one side, the creeping, oozing Dark, turning the world and its inhabitants into a reflection of their own inner abyss, a kingdom of revealed nightmares. On the other, the piercing, demanding Light, offering not just survival, but redemption—a chance to face the darkness within and outside, and to choose, agonizingly, to reject it.
The battle between light and dark is not about to begin. It has been raging since that first silent second. It rages in every contaminated forest, in every ruined city street where a survivor fights the rising corruption in their own heart. It rages in the silent, shining figure who walks towards the epicenter, and in the twisted, clever minds of those who have embraced the dark and found power in it.
What will be the fate of the world? Will it become a frozen monument to eternal shadow, a gallery of our worst selves given immortal form? Or will it be scoured clean by painful, brilliant light, reborn into something painfully new, its scars forever glowing with the memory of what was purged? The Catalyst was only the first word. The last word has yet to be written. It will be written in blood, in light, and in the choices of every soul still clinging to the crumbling edge of what remains. The silence is over. Now, there is only the scream of the conflict, and the faint, desperate whisper of hope walking into the storm.