Rohan traced the condensation trail left by his breath against the cold windowpane. Below, the familiar sprawl of Kathmandu stirred under a bruised dawn sky.
Prayer flags fluttered listlessly on a nearby rooftop, their vibrant colors muted in the pre-light gloom.
He worked guiding tourists through the Himalayas, a job that usually filled him with a quiet pride, a connection to the immense peaks surrounding his home. Lately, though, looking up brought a different feeling. A prickle of unease.
The news, when the internet connection held, spoke of anomalies. Strange signals detected from the Oort cloud, behaving erratically, not like any known object.
Scientists offered cautious theories – rogue planetoids, undocumented cometary clusters.
Rohan scrolled past the articles. He didn't need official reports to know something felt wrong. The stray dogs whined more at night. The birds seemed quieter, their usual morning chorus subdued.
His sister, Priya, called him from Pokhara yesterday. Her voice had been thin, strained. "Did you see the lights last night, Rohan? Over the lake?"
"Lights? No, it was cloudy here."
"Not like lightning. Lines. Sharp angles. They... pulsed. The water went completely still beneath them. Like glass." She'd hesitated. "It felt old."
Old. That word resonated more than 'strange' or 'anomalous'. It tapped into a deeper, more primal awareness, the kind whispered in mountain folklore, tales of beings that existed before the peaks themselves were born. He'd dismissed them as stories for children. Now, he wasn't so certain.
He pulled on a thick jacket and stepped out onto the small balcony. The air was sharp, biting. No strange lights tonight, just the familiar blanket of stars beginning to fade against the approaching sun. Yet, the silence felt different. Not peaceful, but expectant. As if the entire world held its breath.
A low thrum started, almost too deep to be heard, felt more in the bones, in the fillings of his teeth. It wasn't the usual city rumble of engines and construction. This was pervasive, seeming to emanate from the ground and sky simultaneously. Rohan gripped the cold metal railing, knuckles white.
The thrumming intensified, the concrete beneath his feet vibrating slightly. Down in the street, a vendor setting up his stall paused, looking around, bewildered. A couple of dogs started barking frantically, then suddenly fell silent, whimpering.
The sky directly overhead began to change. Not a change in color, but in texture. As if the very fabric of the blue was warping, stretching thin. A point of absolute blackness appeared, impossibly small, yet drawing the eye with hypnotic intensity. It didn't grow like an opening; it simply was.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through Rohan. This wasn't signals or lights. This was arrival.
He stumbled back inside, slamming the balcony door shut, a futile gesture. The thrumming sound climbed in pitch, becoming a disorienting drone that made his ears ache. He needed to check on his parents in Bhaktapur.
He fumbled for his phone, the screen unresponsive. Dead. He'd charged it fully last night. He tried the landline; a dead tone buzzed back. Outside, the single point of blackness duplicated. Then again. And again. A perfect, geometric lattice of voids spreading across the heavens, blotting out the rising sun, casting the city into an unnatural twilight.
The drone shifted, taking on complex, harmonic layers that scraped at the edges of sanity. It wasn't just sound; it felt like it was information, incomprehensible and vast, pouring into his mind.
He heard screaming from the street below. Not just fear, but agony. Rohan forced himself to look, peering through the window glass. People were on their knees, clutching their heads. Some writhed on the pavement.
Others stood unnervingly still, faces tilted towards the patterned sky, tears streaming down their faces, mouths open in silent screams. Their bodies seemed... wrong. Joints bent at unnatural angles, skin shimmering with oily, prismatic colors under the dim light.
He backed away from the window, heart hammering against his ribs. The apartment walls seemed to pulse faintly with the external drone. What were they? Gods? Demons? The labels felt inadequate, human constructs failing before something utterly alien. He thought of Priya's description: old. Older than mountains, older than time.
He had to get out, had to try and reach his parents. Maybe the roads were still clear. He grabbed his sturdiest backpack, stuffing it with a first-aid kit, water bottles, dried food, a flashlight. Mundane preparations against an existential threat. The absurdity almost made him laugh, a hysterical bubble rising in his throat.
Opening his apartment door, the sound washed over him, stronger now, resonating through the building's structure. The hallway was empty, thank god. He clattered down the concrete stairs, each step echoing in the oppressive silence between the pulses of the drone. The building's main entrance opened onto chaos.
The geometric pattern in the sky was denser now, a lacework of piercing darkness against the oddly lit clouds. The light wasn't from the sun, which was obscured, but seemed to bleed from the edges of the black voids themselves – a cold, violet luminescence. The air tasted metallic, like blood.
People were changing. Not all of them, but many. Their forms elongated, limbs twisting. Some developed extra joints, moving with a jerky, insectile gait.
Others seemed to melt, their features flowing like hot wax, reforming into smooth, featureless masks. Their eyes, if they still had them, glowed with the same violet light bleeding from the sky. They weren't attacking the unchanged, not yet. They simply moved with a disturbing, newfound purpose, congregating in open spaces, their transformed bodies forming strange synchronised patterns, mirroring the impossible geometry above.
Rohan ducked into an alleyway, nausea churning in his stomach. He saw a group of the changed figures surrounding a whimpering man huddled against a wall.
They weren't hurting him. They were… observing. Tilting their fluid heads, their movements perfectly synchronised, like reflections in a shattered mirror. The man sobbed, unable to look away from their blank faces.
He forced himself to move, keeping to the shadows, pressing himself against damp brickwork. The drone was constant, inescapable. It felt like it was rewriting the world, starting with the sky and now seeping into flesh and bone. He needed to get out of the city center, towards the ring road, hope the chaos hadn't completely overwhelmed the routes leading out.
He saw flashes of futile resistance. A police officer firing his pistol at one of the elongated figures. The bullets struck with wet thuds, leaving small punctures in the shimmering skin, but the creature didn't even flinch. It turned its smooth head slowly, regarding the officer with an unnerving lack of malice, more like curiosity.
Then, it simply reached out, its multi-jointed fingers extending impossibly far, and touched the policeman's forehead. The officer screamed, a short, choked sound, before his own body began to contort, bones snapping audibly as he was reshaped into one of them.
Terror gave Rohan speed. He ran, dodging debris and the strangely passive, transformed figures. He risked a glance upwards. The black lattice was complete, a terrifying mosaic covering the entire visible sky.
And within the voids, things were moving. Shapes that defied Euclidean understanding, colossal forms shifting in the darkness, their outlines hinted at by the way they occluded the cold violet light. They weren't just holes in the sky; they were windows. Windows into somewhere else. Or perhaps, they were the entities themselves, their true forms incomprehensible to the human eye.
He finally reached the edge of the denser city blocks, where the streets widened slightly. Fewer people here, but the sense of wrongness was perhaps even stronger. The familiar landscape felt alien under the violet sky-pattern.
Trees seemed to droop, their leaves curling inward, turning brittle and black. The very stones of the road looked… porous.
He saw a motorbike lying on its side, keys still in the ignition. Its owner was nearby, one of the transformed, standing utterly still, facing a wall, its elongated fingers tracing patterns on the brick. Rohan hesitated for only a second. He needed transportation. He righted the bike, the engine surprisingly catching on the first try, a familiar roar that sounded painfully loud in the altered soundscape.
He swung onto the seat, twisting the throttle. The transformed figure didn't react as he sped away. It remained engrossed in its silent communion with the wall.
Driving was a nightmare. The drone made concentration difficult, blurring his vision at the edges. Changed figures wandered unpredictably. He swerved to avoid one that stepped directly into his path, its featureless face turning towards the sound of the engine with agonizing slowness. He pushed the bike faster, heading east towards Bhaktapur.
The transformation seemed less prevalent outside the city center, but the effects were still visible. Livestock stood frozen in fields, coated in a strange, crystalline frost despite the mild temperature. Patches of ground shimmered with the same oily iridescence he'd seen on the skin of the changed. The world was being subtly, yet fundamentally, altered.
He thought of his parents. His father, stubborn and traditional. His mother, her quiet strength a constant anchor. Would they be safe? Would they even be… them? The uncertainty was a physical ache.
As he neared the familiar turn-off for Bhaktapur, he saw a roadblock. Not military, not police. It was constructed from rubble, broken furniture, and pieces of vehicles.
Figures stood atop it, silhouetted against the violet-patterned sky. They weren't the transformed. They were human. Armed with makeshift weapons – pipes, knives, heavy wrenches. Their faces were grim, fearful, suspicious.
Rohan slowed the bike, cutting the engine, letting it coast the last few meters. "Hello?" he called out, his voice hoarse. "I'm trying to get to Bhaktapur. My parents live there."
A man with a hard face and a length of rebar stepped forward. "Nobody goes through. City's lost. These things… they're everywhere."
"My parents…" Rohan started.
"If they're not changed already, they're better off where they are," another man spat, hefting a cricket bat studded with nails. "We're holding this point. Keeping… that… from spreading further out."
Rohan looked past them, towards the ancient city. He could almost imagine the familiar brick temples, the carved wooden windows. Could they really be 'lost'? "Please, I just need to check on them."
"Turn back," the first man said, his voice flat. "We don't know who's been… touched. Who might change. You could be one of them, just waiting." The suspicion in their eyes was palpable. In this new reality, humanity was turning on itself, fear eclipsing reason.
Frustration and despair warred within him. He couldn't fight these men. He couldn't force his way through. He looked back towards Kathmandu, a hellscape under an alien sky. He looked towards Bhaktapur, now potentially just as lost, guarded by terrified survivors. He was trapped between two impossible situations.
Then, he noticed something. One of the men at the barricade, younger than the others, kept glancing nervously towards the sky. His hand trembled slightly where it gripped a rusted machete.
Rohan saw a faint shimmer on the man's exposed forearm, like oil on water. The man quickly pulled his sleeve down, but Rohan had seen it.
He didn't say anything. What good would it do? Pointing it out would likely get the young man killed by his own group, and it wouldn't get Rohan any closer to his parents. The transformation was insidious, perhaps even unconscious at first.
He backed the bike away slowly. "Alright. I understand." He turned the machine around, the hope that had fueled his frantic journey draining away, leaving behind a cold emptiness. He couldn't go forward. He couldn't go back.
He drove aimlessly for a while, avoiding the main roads, following smaller tracks that wound through harvested fields and sparse woodland. The drone was a constant companion, a vibrational hum that seemed to sink deeper into his awareness.
He found himself absently humming fragments of it, complex, non-tonal sequences that felt both repellent and strangely familiar. He shook his head violently, trying to clear the sound.
He stopped the bike near a small, deserted shrine overlooking a valley. The violet light cast long, distorted shadows. The lattice in the sky pulsed faintly. He sat on the cold stone, the backpack feeling heavy and useless beside him. He was alone. Utterly, completely alone in a world that was no longer his.
He pulled out a crumpled photo from his wallet. Himself, Priya, his parents, smiling during Dasain last year. A relic from a world that had ceased to exist only hours ago. His mother's smile, his father's proud stance, Priya teasing him about something. Tears welled, hot and useless. Grief felt like a luxury he couldn't afford, yet it consumed him.
A subtle shift in the drone drew his attention. A new element, a high-pitched, piercing frequency that resonated specifically within his skull. It wasn't just ambient anymore. It felt directed. Focused.
He looked up. One of the black voids in the sky seemed… closer. Or perhaps, his perception of it was changing. Within the darkness, he could perceive movement more clearly now. Not shapes, exactly, but flows of immense power, currents of thought that felt like gravity wells. They were aware. Not just of Earth, but of him.
The piercing frequency intensified. Information flooded his mind, not in words or images, but in raw concepts, alien geometries of logic, the history of cycles, arrivals, transformations spanning millennia across countless worlds. It was the history of the 'gods', the beings now draped across his sky.
They weren't deities in any human sense. They were weavers, restructuring reality according to patterns incomprehensible, seeding themselves, changing life into resonant forms that amplified their own existence. Humanity wasn't being conquered; it was being tuned. Repurposed.
The knowledge was agony. It stretched his mind, fracturing his sense of self, his understanding of reality. He saw the transformations not as horror, but as integration, a necessary step in the pattern. He felt the pull, the allure of joining that vast, cosmic resonance, of shedding the limitations of his human form.
"No," he whispered, clutching his head. The photo slipped from his fingers, fluttering to the dusty ground.
The focused frequency lessened slightly, replaced by a feeling. Not an emotion, but a pure, conceptual state beamed directly into his consciousness: Selection.
He understood. The roadblock, the changed figures ignoring him, the bike starting so easily. He hadn't just been lucky. He wasn't meant to be transformed like the others, melted down and recast. He'd been chosen for something else.
He looked at his hands. They felt distant, tools he vaguely recalled how to operate. The skin seemed too tight over his bones. He felt the echo of the drone within his own cellular structure, a sympathetic vibration starting deep inside. He wasn't just hearing the song; he was becoming part of the instrument.
Why him? Was it his connection to the mountains, places where the veil between worlds was supposedly thin? Was it some latent sensitivity he never knew he possessed? The reasons didn't matter. The selection was made.
The piercing note returned, softer this time, almost inviting. It showed him his purpose. He wouldn't be physically changed, not like the others. His alteration would be internal. He was to be a nexus, a point of translation.
The overwhelming alien consciousness needed anchors in the new reality, minds capable of bridging the conceptual gap, of processing the transition, of feeling the restructuring of a world and relaying that intricate sensory data back to the weavers. He would become a living sensor, his mind a canvas upon which the death of his world and the birth of the new one would be painted in excruciating detail, moment by moment.
He would retain his memories, his sense of self, his love for his family, his connection to his home. That was the point. The contrast was necessary for the data the weavers sought. The pain, the loss, the grief – these weren't unfortunate side effects; they were integral parts of the process he would embody.
He looked down at the photo of his smiling family. That life was gone, irretrievable. Bhaktapur was lost. Pokhara was lost. Kathmandu was lost. Nepal was lost. Earth was lost.
And he, Rohan, was chosen not to survive, but to eternally witness and feel its remaking, his individual consciousness preserved only to appreciate the full depth of the horror.
He didn't scream. The sound died in his throat, choked by an understanding too vast and terrible for human expression.
The drone seeped into him, the piercing note embedding itself in his core. He could feel the thoughts of the weavers now, brushing against his own like sandpaper on silk.
He felt the planet's slow transformation, the shifting of rock, the alteration of biological life down to the microbial level. He felt the fear and agony of billions, transmuted into data points.
He remained sitting by the shrine as the violet twilight deepened, the patterned sky pulsing with cold, geometric light. He was still Rohan, the guide from Kathmandu, son, brother. But he was also becoming something else – a tiny, sentient node in an ancient, indifferent cosmic network.
His unique sadness wasn't just loss; it was the permanent, conscious experience of that loss, magnified and processed for eternity. His own mind, the repository of everything he ever was or loved, had become his eternal prison, a viewpoint for the end of his world.