I was ten when the sky bent.
It didn't crack, or flash, or scream like the stories said it would. It just... bent. The clouds curved around something that wasn't there, the sun flickered, and then the sea began to hum. Not the ocean—all water. Faucets. Rivers. Rain. It vibrated like it knew something we didn't. Something that had waited a long, long time.
Then came the dreams.
Every night, the same image: an eye the size of a continent, opening not in space, not in the sky—but behind my thoughts. People clawed at their faces, at walls, at each other. Cities fell quiet before they fell apart. Planes crashed. Birds stopped flying. The sound of language started to dissolve mid-sentence. The mind was the first battlefield. Then came the rest.
Eichaudh did not arrive.
Eichaudh was revealed.
In the span of weeks, most of humanity died or vanished. The numbers aren't precise. Counting doesn't really work anymore. Clocks are wrong. Maps change. Names don't stick. You write them down and they slide off the page like oil. But if I had to estimate it would be around 98.6%.
Now, the world is... wrong. Familiar shapes stretched into impossible forms. Trees that bleed saltwater. Animals with extra mouths whispering in sleep. Cities submerged in air, where people drown in silence. Sometimes gravity works in reverse. Sometimes you can hear the ocean miles inland.
The few of us who are left—we hide, mostly. We wrap our homes in wet iron and carved bone. Some of us wear blindfolds and let our hands remember the world. Some go silent and learn to think without words. You adapt, or you unravel.
I live in the ruins of a radio station. The tower still hums, whispering things at night I don't understand—but it keeps the deep things away. I broadcast once a week, reading from old books, diaries, recipes—anything human. I don't know if anyone hears me. But I do it anyway. It reminds me I'm still here.
Eichaudh doesn't hunt. It watches. And when it watches too long, people forget who they are. They stop being people. I've seen it. A woman in the woods stared at a pool of black water for three days. When I called to her, she turned, and her mouth was a spiral. Not just the teeth—all of her. A spiral that turned forever inward.
There's no resistance, no army. Just survivors. Wanderers. Some say Eichaudh is sleeping again, or that it only needed to erase the noise of civilization to hear something older beneath it. Others think it's reshaping the world to mirror whatever place it came from.
But me?
I think we were a dream it had once. And it finally woke up.
Now we live in its memory.