July 20, 2026
First light. They were still out there, those broken puppets on the pavement.
A strange van arrived as the red still banked the horizon. Several slinking shadows emerged from it, only moving between the frames. The back unhinged, snake-like, swallowing the sceneâs inhabitants.
A parcel remained in their wake, simply appearing on the doorstep when the image arrived. It bore no moniker or label. Several minutes elapsed before I built the courage to allow my hand to cross the threshold. The air was blistering, even in the early morning hours.
Within the parcel, there was a week's worth of food and drink. I havenât attempted to eat any of it, though my stomach aches. Something about it feels wrong, and my mind is elsewhere.Â
My mother messaged me last night when the humming started.Â
[Mother: I canât see.]
Something is wrong. I feel nauseous again. Maybe itâs just the Sun sickness.
July 23, 2026
I will write down the event, if it can be called that, and if memory can be trusted. I doubt it can, but I will attempt to, regardless, if simply to convince myself I may find a thread of truth within this bright nightmare.
The day started out like any other. I was on the way to fetch a fifth of whiskey, passing the nameless peddlers that littered the streets. I can almost recall some of their faces now, but they vanish when I try to hold them in my mind. The sky above was an implacable mass of gray, welling with tension that remained unbroken for days. Fog sat like a pallid mask on everything. I navigated the tents lining the sidewalk, over the junkies lying in the wet when the clouds suddenly broke loose. They scattered hurriedly across the length of the sky, parted like curtains by an invisible hand to reveal the Sun. Crepuscular morning beams leapt sharply from the puddles, growing brighter. A vagrant attempted to trouble me, but I lowered my head as if I didnât hear him. The situation was best left alone, as was I.Â
I had been that way for a long time. [Gone.] My mind was made up. A final drunken bout and enter the Solace Chamber downtown. It had crossed my mind many times before, but this was the first time I had gone so far as to schedule an appointment. I was pre-approved after a short questionnaire. The vagrant continued to pester me further, and I carried on until he became nothing but a soft noise. My eyes were following the sprawling cracks lining the broken sidewalk when they vanished.Â
A flashâwhite light. Darkness.Â
I fell to my knees, sightless. My skin was crawling with a warm static, like innumerable vibrating needles piercing the exposed flesh. I reached out for help, but no one was there. I tried to scream, but my voice was elsewhere too. Then the smell of burning flesh drifted into my nose. I crawled on my belly back to my house, blinded and terrified. I didnât understand. Everything simply stopped, caught in time like a picture. There should have been a cacophony of cars crashing, panicked screams, any sound at all, but no. Those few minutes were excruciatingly long, dragging myself across the hot concrete.
Once home, I ran sightlessly through the rooms closing the curtains. The light still seeped in and I could taste it, lingering in the air. My fingers were inflamed and raw as I shakily navigated my blurry phone, leaving blood smears across the screen. I squinted through weeping eyes, and the first thing visible was an emergency alert broadcast that read:Â
[EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM:
DHS/FEMA
A MAJOR SOLAR EVENT is currently in effect.Â
DO NOT LOOK INTO THE SUN
TAKE SHELTER until further notice
Widespread communication interference likely.]
I pressed my throbbing finger into the dismiss button. My skin was bleeding, even where the flesh was not tattered from the crawl. I called the police, I donât know why, receiving nothing but a distant, pulsing tone. Or perhaps it was the sound of my own blood coursing in my ears that drowned any voice that would have come through. The internet was still working, but social media was a maelstrom; none of it made any sense. Threads decayed as I scrolled through them. Videos play differently each time I click. A post that began with shaky mobile-camera footage of a man trying to stop his dead-eyed wife from going outside became a polished recreation upon rewinding, complete with a text-to-speech dub that described the scene differently.Â
[The blind woman is cured by the Sunlight, her husband is astonished.]
Statements from accredited physics professors, or at least their likeness, implied the Sun is bleeding to purge itself of impurities, as if it were a conscious effort. Perhaps it is. The line between the absurd and the observed dissolved in the deluge of discordant explanations that flooded the internet.Â
[Itâs Project Blue Beam. The angels are probably fake too.]
[Itâs closer, not brighter. Itâs below the clouds.]
[China has been building an artificial Sun underground since 1998. Theyâve finally used it.]Â
[John 3:19 Iâm going out there and you should too if you have nothing to hide from the LORD.]
[A cover-up if Iâve ever seen one. Government gas leak that lit the atmosphere on fire, sad.]
[Everyone asking for proof must be blind, thatâs literally how light works.]
The noise online gnaws at what little truth I still hold. Each reply is a sycophantic garble of automated praise. Nobody is wrong, and no one is saying the same thing. I remain bedridden with a case of Sun sickness, in which my skin peels from me like dried glue. Black spots drift like spirits through my periphery, shadowy spectators of the digital kaleidoscope that Iâm stuck in.Â
No word from the government since take shelter until further notice. There is no true way to determine who is an authority on any matter.Â
[You have to see it to believe it,] they say.Â
[I was right all along,] they laugh, between the endless nameless obituaries.
July 27, 2026
[Itâs just daylight bleeding through,] but the Sun shouldnât be bleeding at all. The whole world drowns in its blood, and no one cares. That's if the world out there actually persisted without my witness.
I donât have much to go on that hasnât been laid waste by algorithms. At one point, I believed I uncovered legitimate footage with a solar lens, though I am unsure now. It began as a coronal mass ejection originating from the belly of the Sun. Incandescent beams arced the surface, breaking free, twisting about the ichorous void. They culminated in a violent swirl that crested up to the starâs crown as a brilliant halo. A flash. The whirling glow dispersed, spreading like squid's ink in water to encompass the space between us in radiant tendrils of gold and amethyst. A thing you can almost see breathing, stretching slowly towards us each day, getting closer. Ever closer.
[UV INDEX: 18 â MODERATE]
The days have grown so tremendously luminous that, with direct exposure, one could be stricken with Sun sickness within a walk to the mailbox. Prolonged exposure is a death sentence, bereft of mercy. Man and monument were both laid bare in that cleansing light, the infrastructure itself taking on the appearance of a dried corpse. Roofing shingles curled like fingernails. Windows hazed like cataracts. Everything faded to a gray thing. In that infernal ire, man endures only long enough to remember his native tongue. Dust.Â
Inside offers no respite from the burning gaze. Rolling blackouts have become more frequentâbetween gales of terrestrial and heavenly sourcesâcutting off the world entirely. When the air goes motionless, thoughts turn feral. My inhibitions quickly devolve into their most animalistic, and without the comfort of artificial luminance, each light is predatory. I pace around, searching for them. But it remains that even a tenuous grasp on the world is better than none when it finally goes dark. Now, anything could be lurking there. The house unfurls into a symphony of ineffable echoes.
[Thud.]
[Clatter.]
Outside becomes, paradoxically, the greatest fear and the only salvation. I still have the choice, and I can bide my time deciding. Others have had salvation set upon them with raging fires, engulfing entire city blocks, speckling the distance in a flickering orange vagueness. Ash and soot fall like fat snowflakes. The world has been made to kindle. Entire ecosystems have likely been expunged from existence. It can only be a matter of time before the food stops coming, for it already runs thin. The second delivery had half the supplies.
When that grinning skeletal moon hangs, the bleeding stains the stars. It bathes three parts of the night in a bilious yellow aurora and a faint electrical hum, like the soft cooing of a robotic mother. The cadence is insidiously familiar, in a way that reverberates through my mind, shaking loose buried memories. It calls to people after dusk, and they stand outside with their mouths agape, staring dumbly into that strange, inky tendril of light churning the bitter void. They carry a euphoric malaise in their eyesâsome beautiful burden. Not a word, nor gesture, nor any motion that could be construed as sentient emerges from those swaying silhouettes in the street.Â
They make their pilgrimages at all points in the night, seemingly all for unrelated reasonsâgoing to a friend's house, walking the dogâheads down in their phones to avoid the uncomfortable and uncanny stillness that surrounds them. Then, they happen to glance up to look at a sign or avoid bumping into another looming figure in the street, and they see those great glittering wisps sliding their way across the crashing waves of the aurora. By some particular or non-particular point in the sky, it utterly transfixes them. They stand staggered for hours, with dangling arms outstretched, through the night. Dogs look at their masters, puzzled, before slinking off into the unnatural twilight. They remain enraptured in its splendor, until the same caress of the cosmos burns and bubbles their faces come morning light. They arrive back to reality with a profound bemusement, as if they had merely blinked and it was morning. Others cannot pull themselves back. They follow the light, mindless as a sunflower, until they drop, disappearing come dawn.
I try not to stare out there for too long at them, lest I fall under the same spell of those strange puppets. I use the doorbell camera to monitor them safely, though the feed often dies or gets corrupted completely. Windows are too risky. Mine remain sealed in layers of crumbling cardboard. The outermost layer has begun to bake in the Sunâs gaze, making it brittle. Through the cracks, the light twists in like the aroma of a cartoon pie, beckoning me to the windows to come and see.
While in bed, the humming crescendoes. A low, throat-deep vibration that settles in the marrow. It emanates from deep within the house, projecting itself through the outlets. In the distance, through the thinning walls, I can hear a dog barking. Harsh howling. I drink to sleep.
[ALERT: PERSON DETECTED AT THE FRONT DOOR]
Theyâre out there now, in their catatonic lunacy, beckoning the nigh dawn.Â
July 30, 2026
Nothing new has happened since yesterday, although I do wonder what has become of that woman. I should stop watching the feed in the morning; itâs a terrible way to start the day. This morning, instead, I opted just to make some coffee. After checking for light in the windows, I thought it might make the morning feel normal. The tap sputtered brown, before running clear and I stood haggardly in the kitchen waiting for it to boil. The electricity came in erratic waves, and the heat pulsed infrequently. My arms still itched. I fought the urge to pick at the peeling skin. The kitchen is bare so my eyes wander to the clock on the microwave. It flashed, [12:00,] repeatedly. I watched this for some time, waiting for something to change, another trick of the light, but it never did. Before I realized it, the water was half-boiled away.Â
I had my remarkably small cup of coffee in the living room, which retained the same monochrome mundanity of the kitchen. The room is sparsely furnished, containing only a couch, coffee table, and entertainment stand fit with a hardly functioning television. Not much to look at. I was watching the white light flicker against the cool gray walls, mindlessly rolling a bottle under my foot, when a blackout occurred. The wind was blowing hard, and the house creaked uncomfortably, unable to settle through the agitation. *\[Thud.\]* I had been avoiding it till this point, but I pulled out my phone to distract myself. It worked. The power came on later, once I had nearly fallen unconscious from heatstroke.Â
August 1, 2026
The memory of mankind is burning before my eyes, so Iâve turned to the collection of books my mother left behind. Theyâve been gathering dust in a room I rarely useâa sequestered storage of the cluttered past, though little lingers of mine. They filled cardboard boxes, which I had been tearing apart to cover the windows, and now overflowed onto the floor by the bookshelf that I still had not built. Philosophy, history, religionâa lot of religion. The spines are warped and yellowed, but at least they donât change when I look away.Â
Iâve been going through them today, attempting to find something that might be able to explain anything that is happening. So far, the only thing Iâve found are passing similarities within religious references to the Sun or common celestial phenomena.Â
There appeared a phenomenon beyond belief: for before sunset there were seen over the whole country chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor running about among the clouds, and surrounding cities. Moreover, a star resembling a sword stood over the city, and a comet continued a whole year.
-Flavius Josephus, War of the Jews (1st Century)
August 3, 2026
I woke up late and checked the feed. The camera showed a motionless figure lying face-up on the sidewalk. The image was obfuscated in the white, so I adjusted the exposure, and the burnt cityscape came into view. Across the street, the fading facade of the building caught the light and held it, breaking under the pressure. The windows were uncovered, the door sat ajar, tilted on its hinges like a poorly hung painting. I do not know who lives in them, nor have I seen any packages arrive at their homes.
 A large crater had formed in the crumbling pavement, as if struck by a silent missile, amidst an unseen war. Next to it, the figure lay there as if he had crawled from the hole itself, skin burgundy and blistered. Thick globules of fat simmered from volcanic lesions. They looked as if they had been molded by an arthritic hand in red clay and clinker. Two bulging, bloodshot eyes stared straight into the gaping wound in the sky, vibrating excitedly. I recognized the tattered clothing as that of a vagrant who once worked the corner down the road. Cheap cargo pants, faded graphic tee, and sneakers repaired with fraying tape. It seemed he collapsed under the weight of his wares. A bindle of cheap sunglasses, once traded for dope, sat broken on the street. By every sane measure, a wandering man should not have lasted that long out there. I pondered how he came to die here.
I attempted to call the authorities, but the system was unable to locate my address due to satellite disruption. I eventually had my call routed to Manual Services, only to be made aware that Manual Services is temporarily automated, and was promptly transferred back to the bureau I started at. I hung up, exhausted from doing nothing and talking to no one. Civilized society limps on, only held by the quivering, boiled hand of an irradiated delivery driver. The last bastion between order and ruin is a parcel van on its last tank of gasoline, that still hasnât arrived.
In the wake of multiple pandemics, global isolation wasnât new, but this bout of collective solitude has felt noticeably different. There existed in the air an ominous stillness. No one rushed to gather supplies. There was no panic. The shelves remained stocked and sealed to the masses. I received my allotted feed delivered in insulated cardboard packaging and memes. I did not question it because there was no time to question it. It was a flashâa single frame. An image so brilliant it burned up everything but the questions.Â
[Mother: Where did you go?]
Questions only lie in the dark. Where do I go from here?
[Carbon 14, 5]
6. Do you hold any spiritual or religious beliefs relevant to this decision?
No.
7. If yes, do you accept that SolaceTM is not responsible for any post-procedural outcomes?
N/A.
8. Do you believe this act has meaning?Â
No.
9. Are there any individuals who may be materially or emotionally affected in your absence?Â
No.
10. Do you understand that SolaceTM cannot guarantee peace, relief, or closure?
Yes.
11. Would you like to enable ContinuallyTM? (Recommended)Â
âââ.
12. Do you consent to the use of your written, spoken, and behavioral data for ContinuallyTM and/or observation purposes?
âââ.
Section 8 - Final acknowledgeâ
August 4, 2026
I have been here too long. The world beyond these walls seems to drift further into the void of memory. A past that doesnât exist, a nothing that looms over the present like smoke. I pace the room like a madman.Â
No one is wrong, and you are home, and it is safe.Â
Donât look at the Sun. It is bright, and it hurts.Â
[YOUR DELIVERY HAS BEEN POSTPONED.]
Each day, it grows closer. Each day, the silence grows louder.Â
Those drums of silence on the horizon, beating faster and faster. It makes you curl up and hide. Tucked away in those fading memoriesâyour motherâs soft humming somewhere between your head and the wiring in the walls.Â
Where have they all gone? I see them standing there, but no one's home. All those tiny lives blipped away like pixels on the screen. A bright, terrible screen but when I squint through weeping eyes, I seeâŠ
[ALERT: MOTION DETECTED AT THE FRONT DOOR]
[Dismiss.] Iâm done*.*Â
[ALERT: PERSON DETECTED AT THE FRONT DOOR]
[Dismiss.]
[FRONT DOOR: OPEN]
August 5, 2026
Iâve found records, stories that resemble the flash more than Iâd like to admit. Patterns, maybe nothing more, but it sits like a presence in the room with me, not allowing me to ignore it. On May 13, 1917, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. [Mother: Make penance and sacrifices.] She then spoke a prophecy of a miracle that would occur. [The Miracle of the Sun.] I believe that this may be relevant to my situation. But prophecy, without its context, can be twisted. I found a thread to follow within another dusty book. The turn of the century marked the culmination of humanityâs most influential global revolution. Industry. Gone were the grim toils of antiquity, and here was the proverbial future. But, the truth of the matter is this future would couple with manâs oldest traditionâthe shedding of blood.Â
The Great War, the war to end all wars.Â
The fields died, and factories grew in their place, vomiting smoke and metal into the twisted visage of death. The pale horse was pumped with the black blood of extinction and let loose so that manâs only responsibility was keeping the tally. The men did not march under this pretense; however, they still believed they were marching vigilantly towards the [dawn of a new era.] Into a strange, golden world where their children will not bear the burdens they did. But beyond that beautiful horizon, they unwittingly fell off the face of the earth and into the ink of a spreadsheet.Â
[33 cases logged]
[1 fatality unrelated to exposure]
[Average gaze duration: 267 minutes]
A man who had never seen a lightbulb will die from an artillery round launched from seven kilometers away. Fear kept them rigid as corpses, so they dug themselves graves and fired from them, arranged in lines extending the whole of a nation. Between them was [no manâs land.] Any foolhardy soldier brazen enough to cross these lines quickly found himself as one of the nameless [no men] ornamenting the bleak distance.   Â
August 6, 1915
A dense blanket of fog swaddles a river in the pale hush before first light. The dispirited infantry stare into a dark gray abyss, in which unseen forces lie in wait. Sickness plagues them torrentially, and their feet fuse to their boots in the rotting wet. They speak in Russian with pestilence lingering on their breath. Rats move with impunity among them, dragging bellies filled with filth and disease. The makeshift sepulchers, excavated from the trench shoring, have collapsed from rain, leaving waxen limbs reaching out like roots looking for water. They hoist another haphazardly into the pile after finding him dead, still holding the mercy dog.Â
The stillness of the morning is punctuated by the sound of the first artillery round, landing just outside their dugout. They jump to attention, their bodies moving with precision. They act as automata of blood and soil, executing reflexes carved by a year of fire. Their lifeless eyes scan the horizon for the possible infantry push between shellings, but there is [no man] to see.Â
[See me.] What approaches them, as quiet and graceful as a butterfly, is a lurid green cloud of death several kilometers wide. Plumes of the noxious fumes claw at the air on the back of a gentle tailwind, in which all things die. Leaves curl in yellow clumps, grass turns black as a sackcloth of hair, woven into a tapestry of decay. It silently pours over the fields and through ditches and craters, smothering the landscape in its expanse. The men are utterly unprepared. Without gas masks, they are roused from their mechanical despondency and are once again inundated with the primal panic of an imminent death. Some hastily attempt to put together makeshift masks from bandages and rags, urinating on them and placing them to their mouths. Others are left scavenging for materials when the dense cloud breaches the parapet.Â
The screaming begins as the soldiers realize they are trapped in the all-encompassing force, from which there is no escape. Their flesh is corroded, eyes red and swollen as their tear ducts fill with acid. Breath turns to blood, and they drown in themselves.Â
There is a weeping and gnashing of teeth that grows in silence until nothing remains, save the wind.Â
So the god swooped down, descending like the night.
He sat some distance from the ships, shot off an arrowâ
the silver bow reverberating ominously.
First, the god massacred mules and swift dogs,
then loosed sharp arrows in among the troops themselves.
Thick fires burned the corpses ceaselessly.
-Homer, Iliad
[Statement attributed to a German infantryman, Osowiec, 6 August 1915. No corroboration exists.]
The battalion and I advanced through the fog of no man's land shortly after the gas had dispersed. Visibility was low, and we remained cautious. We reached the wire entanglements in the middle without [enemy] fire, so we cut a path and pressed on. It was quiet for an area that had just an hour ago been awash with screaming and [hellfire.]
We were startled at the first trench line by a mangled pile of bloodied Russian bodies, who died crawling over each other like rats trying to get out. Some curled like babes in corners, still wet with tears and holding their mouths. All choked on their own blood [...] red eyes looking up. The twitching ones are bayoneted swiftly and without protest, for it was a mercy. None of us had seen such work before. The ones crawling from the dirt seemed the luckiest of them. Several of the men retched, but we continued.Â
The death thickened as we drew close to the rampart of the fortress. When we reached the reserve [trench] just before the walls, we began to hear frogs and slopping mud. We stepped forward and looked into the trench.Â
emits
Russian bodies twisted unnaturally, writhing in the water, and croaking harshly. One contorted so violently he nearly stood up⊠and then he did. We stared, terrified and unable to move. He ââââââââââââââââââââââââ. More began to drag themselves to their feet, in an echo of painful hacking coughs. All covered in [chemical] burns and red rags. I watched as their lungs came out of their mouths in pink mists. Their eyes were crying blood, and they looked about madly, as if they were [âRevenantenâ].
They began lurching at us with bayonets, and we took fire from more corpses on the walls. They screamed through wet gurgles and charged us. Our men fell quickly. We retreated in such haste that we trampled each other, and I became entangled in barbed wire. I desperately tried to get myself free and cut my hands severely. I became slick with blood and managed to slide out. I looked back to see hundreds of them approaching [brokenly] out of the fog towards us.
October 13, 1917
The barren field is drowned. Rain falls heavy, soaking the wool and linen of the thousands of pilgrims standing cheek by jowl in the deep muck. Their hymns to God ring before a goodly holm oak, under which the three shepherd children sit.
It is noon time when there arises a fine, purple smoke above the childrenâs crowns. This phenomenon, clearly visible to the naked eye, has no known genesis. All the attention of the crowd is cast upon the children when the rain ceases. There is a quiet that falls on the many. Then the clouds rent in twain across the great length of the sky, revealing the Sun, who shines light upon the whole of the countryside. Their gaze falls on the Sun without harm, and thousands of voices cry out in praise, as it emitted a spectrum of unnameable colors and hues through the air. Neither veiled nor dimmed, these beautiful dancing lights cascade down and smother them in brilliance. Light shatters in angles of immeasurable dimensions, and they feel the breath of creation, warm on their face. They stand with their mouths agape, staring dumbly into that great unknowable thing. The Sun then sprouted spokes of gold and amethyst and spins like a flaming chariot wheel, and begins moving as if to dislodge its place in the firmament. Without sound, the Sun seems to break free and give chase to them. A single, awful scream pierces the air, stripping the crowd from their stupor. Recoiling in terror at the sight of that fast-approaching Red Hunger. Its lustre now menacingly swallows them whole. Waves of the travelers churn in panic, attempting to run from something you cannot run from. Others resign their fate and merely weep in prayer.Â
Then nothing. The field grows more silent till no sound remains, save the wind, which carries an omen they do not heed. A year later, plague rises from the trenches and sweeps the world, a fever wrought from the arrows of the same God that shone over Fatima.Â
August 5, 2026 (ii)
Now that presence lies its warmth upon my door. It shoots at me blindly and never misses my cover. The bow reverberates ominously. Its breadth is as wide as the eyes grasp, and as long as I see it will find me. It sneaks in with the quietness of a mouse, wafting its odious light through the stagnant air like a sickness. I try to use my tools to catch it, but itâs too bright, and the exposure can never be lowered enough. It gnaws through every barricade I have built. It devours my feed, and my body aches from the emptiness, so I devour myself. I repent. I make penances. I have nothing left to sacrifice. She still offers me into punishment. Still humming.
I rewatch the footage a hundred times, but there is no one to open the door. Out there is a place for no man. Just corpses firing from their walls, their wire veins scrawling black blood on a dead internet. I crawl deeper into the muck of my trench, but man will always innovate. They always find a way, no matter the cost. We were never meant to wield fireâŠI am left to interpret the ash.Â
[THE SUN: Casualties Rising as Fighting Persists, No End in Sight.]
[THE OBSERVER: Troops Advance, Clash at the Border.]
Frame by frame, I chart every movement.
None of it is right, but it doesnât change.
The dust artifacts, and it floats upward.
Heâs closer to the curb than he wasâ
not by much, maybe a pixel or two.
But then it corrected itself again.
Something here feels wrongâŠ
The door opens on its own.
The humming got louder.
The frames bleed outâ
and it hurts my eyes.
Nothing changes.
It just corrupts.
What is that?
I canât see.
Replay it.Â
Again.
My eyes are the last thread, pull and the world comes undone.Â
