Week 1, Day 0, Bright blue sky. The Arrival Field.
And then the voice was just gone.
No fade, no echo behind it. One second it filled every skull on that field. The next there was nothing where it had been, and the quiet after it felt worse than the voice ever had.
Then everyone lost it at once.
People screamed. Some shoved. Others just stood there, frozen. A man near me dropped to his knees and threw up onto the grass, and the smell of it set off two other people close by. Someone tried to run and made it maybe two steps before the crowd packed in too tight around him and he went down under their feet. A girl folded over right next to me and was sick into the grass, her whole body shaking with it.
I didn't move. Couldn't. My feet had locked into the ground, stiff, refusing to be mine.
Six months. Unite. Survive.
Those two words kept looping while everything else in my head came apart. Pieces of what I'd just lived through kept surfacing out of order and refusing to fit together. The sky had split open and bled red down over everything. Something made of static had screamed at me from inside an alley. I remembered wings, and then falling, and then landing here, under a sky that matched none of it.
"No. No, no, no. This isn't... this can't be real."
I said it out loud. It didn't help.
My parents.
That was the thought that finally got me moving. I shoved into the crowd, shoulder after shoulder, people yelling at me to watch it, one hand grabbing my arm hard enough to bruise before letting go. Their names came out of me in a shout, lost somewhere in all that noise. I shouted again anyway and kept pushing, checking every face I passed.
None of them were my parents. Not even close to being them.
Everyone around me looked wrecked in their own particular way. A woman in a hospital gown had both arms wrapped around her stomach, saying a name over and over to nobody who ever answered. Somewhere behind me a kid with a school bag still on his back screamed for his brother until the screaming cracked into nothing. One old man stood completely still, lips moving on the same few words again and again, quiet and steady, never stopping.
I stopped pushing because there was nowhere left to push into, and it hit me that I had no idea which direction I'd even come from. My head throbbed low and steady behind my eyes.
I looked up.
Blue. Just blue, clean across, no edge to it anywhere. A few hours ago that sky had been torn open and bleeding, and now it just hung there, empty, no mark on it anywhere, and my brain refused to hold both pictures at once. The ground tilted under me, and I had to plant a hand against my own forehead and stand still until it leveled out again.
All around me the panic kept going, voices stacking on voices, and I felt about two steps too slow for any of it.
Then something shifted. Not out there. Inside my own skull.
Pressure built up behind my skull, sudden and hard. For one second my own thoughts got shoved sideways, and then everything dropped back into place.
I understood words.
Not because I'd learned some new language in a second. The meaning was just already there, inside my head, whole.
Off to my left, a guy in military gear, maybe mid-forties, jaw set, his spine locked into a straight, trained posture, muttered something under his breath. I'd never heard that language before in my life, not one word of it. Somehow I understood every syllable.
He wasn't praying. Low and fast, working through something in his own head, he was cursing.
To my right, two elves stood close together, armored, their gear catching the light. They were talking low, and one of them threw a look toward the humans that wasn't friendly. Their words came out with a rhythm I'd never heard, sounds my own mouth couldn't have made. The meaning still landed in my head, whole and clear.
I wasn't speaking their language. They weren't speaking mine. It didn't matter one bit.
People clocked it around the same second I did, and whatever had been panic before turned into something with more edge to it.
"What the hell is this?"
"Why can I understand them?"
"Did it get inside our heads, is that what it did?"
A woman near the front had both fists in her own hair, screaming, "Get out of my head! Get OUT!" Somebody shouted back at her to calm down, that she wasn't the only one.
Someone else called it a trick. Further off, another voice shot back, a trick by who, and where the hell were they even supposed to be.
It kept building. People turned on each other because there was nothing else close enough to turn on, shoving, pointing fingers, demanding answers from strangers who had exactly as much as they did, which was nothing. I stood in the middle of it, stomach in a knot, and couldn't land on one useful thought.
My hand moved before I told it to, digging into my pocket.
I pulled my phone out and opened an app without thinking about it.
Nothing loaded. No bars up top. The little circle just spun there, spun and spun, and something in my chest dropped straight down when I understood what that meant.
My phone was useless here.
I got myself clear of the worst of the crowd, far enough that no stranger's shoulder was jammed against mine, and dropped onto a patch of grass that looked clean enough to sit on. My legs had gone soft under me. I tried to force my head into some kind of order.
Okay. If this was real, if I really was sitting on some other world surrounded by elves and dwarves, I had a survival problem to deal with. I also couldn't do any of it by myself. And underneath both of those sat the actual problem, the one that had been there long before tonight: it was me. Whatever came next still had to go through me.
I watched people find each other. Whoever had come here with somebody grabbed on and didn't let go. Old friends were hugging hard enough to bruise. A couple had their faces buried in each other's necks. Even total strangers were clumping together in twos and threes, because right now nobody wanted to be the only one standing alone.
I sat there by myself, and it was the most familiar thing that had happened to me all day.
Maybe I should've just stayed in my room.
The thought came in quiet and tired, nothing dramatic about it. This wasn't the first time I'd had it. I'd spent two months barely making it out my own front door, and now, apparently, leaving it had ended the entire world. Impressive work, honestly.
I made myself stop staring at my own hands and look somewhere else instead.
A cluster of elves stood together, off to one side, not moving much, not talking loud. They already knew each other. That much was obvious even from here. On the other side of me, a looser mix, humans and dwarves and a couple more elves, trading pieces of what they'd each seen right before landing here. It beat sitting alone in my own head.
I got up and walked toward them, trying to keep my pace normal.
Then a scream cut clean across the whole field.
"Water! There's water over here, I found a stream, it might be drinkable!"
Everybody moved at once. Whatever conversations had been starting up around me died on the spot, because thirst wins over talking every single time. I stood still for maybe a second, then went too. My throat was raw and dry, scraped out, and I already knew how bad the rest of me had it.
The field thinned out into trees, and the air went cooler under them the second we crossed into the shade. Up ahead the crowd bunched up and stopped moving, because the front of it had already reached the water and there was nowhere left to go.
I couldn't see any of it from where I was stuck, too many backs and shoulders in the way. So I cut left instead, up a low rise where I could see over people's heads without shoving through them. From the top I finally saw it. A stream, narrow, cutting through the trees, the water catching the light in little flashes as it moved.
People were already down on their knees in it, drinking straight from cupped hands, filling anything they had. A couple of dwarves were gulping it down without stopping to breathe.
The trees around the water were just trees, rough bark, green leaves, the kind you'd walk past at home without a second look. Even the dirt under my boots had that plain wet-earth smell, nothing more. None of it looked wrong, and somehow that was worse than if it had. Wrong, I could have explained away. This was too real to explain away.
I dropped to my knees at the edge of the stream and leaned toward it.
Before I got my hands in, a voice came from behind me.
"You shouldn't drink too much of that."
I turned around fast.
An elf stood a few steps back, watching the whole scramble at the water with a face that wasn't panicking about any of it. His hair was short and pale gray, almost silver where the sun hit it, and he looked about my own age. He had on a dark blue tunic, short sleeves, silver stitching running across the chest and down the hem, something clearly old and expensive that had been made specifically to fit him.
"It could be bad for you," he said. "Try a little first. Wait an hour, maybe two. If your stomach turns on you, at least you'll know before it gets worse."
I just blinked at him for a second.
He was right, and that annoyed me more than it should have, because I'd been about thirty seconds from face-planting straight into that water and drinking without a single thought in my head.
"Yeah, no, you're right," I said, rubbing at my eyes. "Can't think straight right now. At all."
"You wouldn't be the only one." He tipped his head toward a dwarf who was still drinking without pause, both hands cupped and moving fast.
I looked at the dwarf, then back at him.
Something in how calm he was made it a little easier to breathe. He hadn't talked down to me, hadn't rushed to fill the silence, hadn't so much as glanced at the chaos still going on behind him. That steadiness helped more than it should have.
I cupped a little water in both hands and drank just that much, then made myself stop even though my whole body wanted more. It was cold. Clean. Better than anything I could remember drinking in months.
Getting up took more effort than it should have.
"I'm Aleksander." The full name came out and then just sat there, too big for the moment somehow. "Aleks. Just... Aleks is easier."
He gave one small nod.
"Cealith." A pause. "Good to meet you."
Manners, in the middle of the end of the world.
I nodded back at him because it was the only ordinary thing left that I still knew how to do.
"Yeah," I said. "You too."
Around us people kept shoving and drinking and shouting, and through all of it one thought sat in my chest, quiet and cold and refusing to leave.
If six months was really all we had, I didn't even know how I was supposed to get through one single day of it.