Abnormally, finned flying,
Beserk environment, flooding,
Souls free, floating,
Eerie atmosphere, freaking,
There’s none left, fleeing.
The sky had torn apart, and from the heavens poured, not rain, but something darker. Something older. Something that, beyond the stars, had waited for its time. The world, solid beneath the feet of those who lived upon it, was fluid and unstable now, as if reality itself had begun to melt away.
It started, as these things so often do, with a weird pulse in the air. It was hardly noticeable at first, a flicker on the outer edge of the consciousness. Birds began flying strangely, their wings no longer acting in concert with the laws of nature. Their feathers were slicked with water when the sky was clear, and some of them grew fins rather than wings. Every night, they'd carve through the atmosphere, trails of liquid darkness shining like oil on water.
The humans remained oblivious to the world's subtle shifts and continued as if everything was the same. But deep beneath, where their eyes never wandered, the world had already started to disentangle. Ophelia saw it-feelt it-in every endless life. The ground beneath her had liquified long ago, only nobody else seemed to notice. There was no solid ground in this world, only an endless sea which shifted and heaved with desire and death and rebirth.
But now, the flood had come.
The creatures, once bound by gravity, soared twisted and distorted into eldritch shapes across the skies above the broken remains of the world. Ophelia drifted between the bodies of the dying, watching them pass silently overhead, cold, their eyes hollow as though their very life force had been siphoned out. Neither bird nor fish, but a mix of both, they had been the first sign that the end had come.
The world was flooding—not with water, but with souls.
It was as if the sky fractured, and from that fracture spilled a flood-not of rain, but of forgotten spirits-those that once moved within the eternal cycle. Uncoupled from bodies, they no longer roamed upon the earth in search of new vessels. Free and wild, they filled the air with a silent scream that was never-ending. And they didn't understand what happened. It had been too abrupt, too violent, and they knew only one thing: they had been torn from the cycle.
Ophelia had seen souls like these before-souls who had been pulled too far, stretched too thin by the endless desires of their hosts. These souls, once fragile, had transformed into something darker, something more dangerous. She watched as they churned through the air, seeking and yearning, and never finding a body in which to take residence. And yet, the world below them seemed oblivious to this madness, mired in its last moments, as if they thought there was anything left to save.
There was nothing left to save.
The tide of souls washed over the land, and the humans disappeared-not by claw or tooth, but by some insidious, quiet force. Their bodies remained, empty shells, but their souls had been drawn out from within, pulled into the air like vapor. The few who had known, those witches and wizards whose souls had been honed keen by knowledge and power, had already seen this end. It was to come, and they also knew there was no escaping it.
Once, they had been like Ophelia-souls who had lived many lives, reborn again and again, each time carrying a little more knowledge, a little more power. Centuries had honed them into beings of wills of iron, warping the dictates of life and death to their whim. But now, even they floated like leaves in the tide of souls, no different from the rest.
The air thickened with floating souls, and with the air alive with their silent screams, the world became unspeakably dreadful. The living could feel it, if not understand it. Their hearts raced faster, eyes scanning about in terror-but not seeing-what was coming for them.
Floating between bodies, she felt the tension in the air rise, the weight of it settling over the assembly. But Ophelia knew already that there was no escaping it now. She had lived too many lives to be afraid now. Fear was for those who still believe there was something to lose. But Ophelia had lost everything long ago, perhaps in one of her earliest lives, or perhaps she never possessed anything to begin with.
Now, she watched with only a strange hollow curiosity as the souls swirled and rose into the darkening sky. What would become of them all when the flood was complete? What would happen when every soul was torn free, when every body lay empty, waiting to decay?
Would the cycle finally break?
One by one, the humans ran away.
Where to? The flood did not leave even a single place to hide from it, no protection against the tide of the lost souls. In an instant, those who were left behind were taken; their bodies buckled, their spirits extracted into the atmosphere. Even the animals, predators of this bizarre world, started disappearing. All the lions, the wolves, the birds of prey-all had been taken, their essence pulled out into that selfsame, inescapable force that had also taken the humans. Soon, there was just nothing left: no bodies, no beings, an empty world filled with drifting souls.
And yet Ophelia could feel the wheel turn. And in this void, it would go on. The souls, so free, did not disappear into nothing. They would change.
They had been human and animal both, and these souls started taking shape now. Twisted and whirled, they joined together with each other and took new shapes, new bodies. They took on different forms, darker ones: wizards and witches, born from shredded souls of times gone by.
In the end, there was no salvation, no escape. The free souls now once again were in prison, not in human bodies this time, but in shapes of their own creation. They became the very magic they had sought to control and would walk once more upon the earth, bending reality to their whim, but always in a jail of the same cycle.
And when their power became too great, when desires consumed them as they always had, the flood would come again. The souls would rise, and the cycle would repeat. There was no protagonist in this story, no victor, no savior. There was only the wheel that turned without end, the eternal flood of souls, and the silent scream that echoed through a darkened sky.
In the end, nothing was left but the water.
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