Chapter 1: The Crimson Dawn

Chapter 1: The Crimson Dawn

The first sign that the world had ended was the color of the light.

It wasn’t the gentle, golden wash of a city sunrise. It was an angry, invasive stain, a deep crimson that bled through the thin fabric of their blackout curtains. Leo felt it on his eyelids before he was truly awake, a pressure and a heat that didn’t belong. He grunted, rolling over and pulling a pillow over his head, assuming it was just a garish new billboard across the street.

The smell of coffee was already drifting from the kitchen, a testament to the automatic brewer that was the one piece of modern convenience he truly loved. It was his anchor to the mundane, the predictable rhythm of his life. Wake up, drink coffee, analyze data for twelve hours, come home, watch a movie with Alice, sleep. Repeat. It was a stable, if unfulfilling, existence he clung to.

“Leo, are you seeing this?” Alice’s voice was tight, a thread of unease woven through it.

He pushed the pillow away, blinking the sleep from his eyes. Alice was standing by the living room window, her slender frame silhouetted against the violent red glow. She had one hand on the curtain, pulling it back just a fraction of an inch. Her other hand was pressed against her mouth. In her work-from-home uniform of an oversized band t-shirt and yoga pants, with her long dark hair uncombed, she should have looked perfectly ordinary. But the tension in her posture was electric.

“What is it? Some new ad?” Leo mumbled, swinging his legs out of bed. His feet hit the cool wood of the floor. The apartment was silent, save for the gurgle of the coffee pot. Too silent. The usual morning symphony of distant traffic and construction was missing.

“It’s not an ad,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Look.”

He padded over to her, his analyst’s brain already cataloging possibilities. Atmospheric phenomenon. A chemical fire. Some elaborate city-wide art installation. He stood beside her and peered through the gap she’d made in the curtains.

And his brain stopped working.

There, hanging in the morning sky beside the familiar, gentle sun, was another one.

It was a perfect sphere of dark, molten crimson, the color of cooling blood. It didn't radiate light so much as it bled it, painting the clouds and the glass towers of the city in its hellish palette. Encircling the sphere was a furiously pulsing halo of electric blue, expanding and contracting like a monstrous, cosmic heartbeat. It wasn't just a light in the sky; it felt like an object. A presence. An eye.

Leo felt a wave of vertigo, his mind scrabbling for a rational explanation and finding none. "What... what the hell is that?"

Before Alice could answer, both their phones shrieked in unison. It was the jarring, dissonant tone of a national emergency alert, a sound designed to cut through sleep and complacency. They both jumped, snatching their devices from the coffee table.

The message was stark, written in cold, block capitals.

CIVIL DEFENSE ALERT. SEVERE CELESTIAL ANOMALY DETECTED. DO NOT LOOK AT THE SKY. REPEAT. DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SKY. SHELTER IN PLACE. AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

Leo’s blood ran cold. He yanked the curtain closed, plunging the room into a dim, reddish twilight. “Did you… did you look right at it?” he asked, his voice sharp with a fear he hadn’t felt since childhood.

“I… I don’t know. Just for a second,” Alice stammered, her eyes wide with terror. She clutched her phone like a lifeline, her knuckles white. “My parents. I have to call my parents.”

She scrambled for her contacts, her fingers fumbling on the screen. Leo’s own mind was racing. He was an analyst. He dealt in patterns, in cause and effect. This had neither. This was an impossibility tearing a hole in reality. He flicked on the television, desperate for information, for an anchor of reason in this sudden storm of the surreal.

The news was chaos. Every channel showed the same thing: terrified anchors trying to read from teleprompters while shaky, handheld footage played on a loop. Videos from across the globe showed the same impossible sight—the two suns. Panic was a universal language. In Tokyo, commuters were frozen on the streets, staring upwards. In London, the feed showed people screaming and running.

“They’re not answering,” Alice sobbed, pulling the phone away from her ear. “It just rings and rings.” The sound of the unanswered call felt louder than the TV, a small, personal tragedy in the face of a global one. She tried again, the frantic beeping filling the space between her choked breaths.

On the screen, a stern-faced government scientist was trying to speak, his voice drowned out by the shouting of the newsroom. “…advise everyone to stay indoors, away from windows. The radiation is… it’s not like anything we’ve ever seen. The effect on the human mind is… unpredictable.”

Suddenly, the city outside their apartment, once so strangely silent, erupted.

It started with sirens, dozens of them, wailing from every direction. But then another sound began to weave through the alarms. Screaming. It wasn’t the sound of panic anymore. It was something else. A high, keening shriek that rose and fell in unnatural rhythm. It was a sound of ecstasy and agony combined.

Leo rushed to the door, peering through the peephole. The hallway was empty, but the sounds from the neighboring apartments were growing louder. Muffled thuds. A crash of breaking glass. And the shouting. Through the thin walls, he could hear his neighbor, Mr. Henderson, a quiet retiree, yelling. Not in fear, but in rage. Or maybe… reverence. The words were indistinct, but the tone was that of a mad sermon.

“What’s happening?” Alice whispered, wrapping her arms around herself. She had given up on the phone, which now lay discarded on the sofa. Her face, usually so warm and expressive, was a pale mask of dread.

“Stay away from the door,” Leo commanded, his own voice tight.

He turned his attention back to the TV. The feed had switched to a live shot from a news helicopter, pointed not at the sky, but at the streets below. People were pouring out of buildings. But they weren’t running for cover. They were walking, stumbling, crawling towards open spaces, their faces tilted towards the crimson sun. Some were weeping, others laughing. Many were clawing at their own eyes.

Then, the anchor on the primary news channel, a woman Leo had seen deliver the evening news for years, faltered. Her professional facade crumbled in an instant. Her eyes, wide and bloodshot, stared directly into the camera, but it felt like she was looking through it, at something beyond.

“I see it,” she whispered, a beatific smile spreading across her face. “Oh, it’s so beautiful. It’s… it’s calling.”

Her producers screamed off-camera for someone to cut the feed, but it was too late. The woman began to speak in a language that wasn’t a language at all, a series of melodic clicks and guttural hymns. The static on the broadcast intensified, but it wasn't random noise. It was rhythmic. A pulse. A low hum that vibrated through the speakers and seemed to sink directly into Leo’s bones.

A new sound joined the chorus from outside. A wet, tearing noise, followed by a shriek that bent the air, a sound that was not and could never be human. It was answered by another, and another, from all across the city. It was no longer a cacophony of chaos. It was a symphony. A choir of rupture and rebirth.

Leo lunged for the remote and slammed the power button, silencing the anchor’s horrifying prayer. He tore the power cord from the wall for good measure. They were in near total darkness now, the only light the thin, blood-red lines around the edges of the curtains. The apartment, their sanctuary, suddenly felt like a tomb.

He and Alice stood frozen in the suffocating silence, the unearthly screeches from outside the only proof that the world still existed. The horror was no longer on a screen or in the sky. It was in the next room. It was on the street below. And the low, hypnotic pulse from the television still echoed in his skull, a silent invitation. The sun was calling. And all over the city, people were answering.