THE FIRST ASHEN
The sky lit green.
It wasn't subtle.
It was global — a wave of luminous
energy that rolled through the clouds, across oceans, over mountaintops. Planes
dipped. Traffic stopped. Children pointed. Dogs howled. Entire cities paused
mid-breath as the flash streaked across the atmosphere like a second aurora,
sharp and slow and wrong.
But nothing happened.
No fires. No collapse. No screams.
Just a beautiful, brilliant shimmer
that lasted all of fourteen seconds.
And then it was gone.
The world resumed.
Riverside Hospital, Westside Maternity
Ward — fourteen seconds before the flash:
"Push, love. One more. You're right
there."
Marienne Nacht was bleeding, but
smiling. The kind of smile that looked less like joy and more like survival.
Her hands gripped the hospital bed, her body arched like something ancient was
leaving her.
"I'm not letting him cry alone," she
whispered.
The nurses thought she was talking
nonsense. But they didn't know Marienne the way she'd known herself — fiercely
alone, stubborn to the bone, brave in quiet ways no one ever gave her credit
for.
She bore down one last time.
Then came the flash.
It passed through the hospital
windows, ignoring the blinds. It lit the ceiling tiles with a green shimmer and
made the fluorescents buzz like confused bees.
People saw it. The maternity nurse —
Danae, barely twenty-two, still shaking off med school nerves — turned toward
the light and squinted.
"What the hell was that?"
Monitors flickered. Some reset. But
nothing exploded. No one screamed. No one died.
Not yet.
Marienne gasped — not from pain, but
from peace. Her body went still. The child had arrived.
He did not cry right away.
The silence was terrifying.
Then, with a sharp inhale, the
newborn's lungs opened like a door slamming against wind.
Flare Nacht screamed his first scream.
It echoed through the ward like
something ancient remembering how to live.
Danae held him, blinking through the
adrenaline rush, and passed him to Marienne.
She took him like she'd always known
what to do. Like the world hadn't ended outside.
"My Flare," she whispered, pressing
her lips to his forehead. "My light. You don't know what you've done just by
being here."
Flare blinked.
A nurse down the hall chuckled.
"Another one. That makes seven today. Full moon, huh?"
Then the beeping stopped.
Just one monitor. Just one heart.
The nurse walked back into the room to
check on Marienne.
She was pale. Too pale. Her hands
trembled — and not from exhaustion.
"Marienne?"
No answer.
The silence was growing now, like
something pulling the walls in tighter.
Marienne looked down at Flare, still
in her arms.
Then her head tilted back — slowly,
almost peacefully — and her mouth fell open.
And kept opening.
Her spine cracked.
Her skin started to dry — not decay,
not rot, but as if the life inside her was burning from the soul outward. A
heatless combustion. Her hair lifted. Her teeth lengthened.
And her eyes — once full of love —
turned black, pupil-less, and wrong.
She had died.
And something else had taken her
place.
The first Ashen.
Danae screamed.
Instinct overrode training.
She didn't call security. She didn't
hit the alarm. She grabbed the child — still silent now, watching — and ran.
Marienne's body lunged.
Claws where fingers should be. Tendons
snapping like piano wires. Her face collapsed inward like a skull stretching
too tight. A mouth that didn't scream — just hissed, vibrating low and
guttural, like hate made sound.
Danae sprinted down the hall.
A patient was coughing in one room.
Another had just flatlined. Nurses were running. Orderlies dropped trays. And
down by the end of the corridor, a janitor collapsed from a brain hemorrhage.
Another death.
Another change.
More screams.
Danae ducked into a supply room,
slammed the door, pressed her back to it.
Flare didn't cry.
Not once.
She looked down at him. His eyes were
open. Calm. The green shimmer from the flash had long since faded, but
something in the room still glowed — faint and unseen.
Something inside him.
She whispered, "You're just a baby."
But the truth had already rooted
itself inside her:
This child didn't break the world.
The world broke because it was waiting
for him.
The Day After
Riverside Hospital: Ground Zero.
The structure collapsed from within
during the night. Emergency crews found no signs of conventional explosives. No
fires. No virus. No gas leaks. Just shattered walls, twisted hallways, and
corpses—some still twitching, hours after death.
Only one survivor.
A child.
Found wrapped in a bloodied blue
blanket inside a sealed medical fridge — unharmed, healthy, silent.
The body of the nurse was never found.
The world moved on — confused, but not
yet afraid. They told stories. News anchors speculated about "the green sky."
Hashtags formed. Memes were made.
Then it happened again.
And again.
Week One: Global Spread
It started as coincidences.
A car crash in Brazil. Only one victim. When
responders arrived, they were slaughtered by something that looked like a
spider made of rusted steel and flesh.
A suicide in Tokyo. The woman's family tried to
cremate her. She rose from the fire, blackened, screaming with a dozen
mouths.
An old man's heart gave out in Brooklyn. His family
tried to revive him. His corpse bit through the paramedic's arm.
And from then on… it was undeniable.
Every death became a nightmare.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Each dead transformed into a creature
shaped by their own fear — distorted, grotesque, ravenous. Creatures that
should not exist. Creatures that burned from the inside, spewing ash and sorrow
in equal measure.
The Ashen.
The New Normal
Governments fell into silence, then
panic, then control.
Systems were built. Monitoring began.
Deaths were tracked with an urgency that bordered on religious. Assisted
suicide was legalized and ritualized. Secure containment centers were
constructed.
When someone was about to die — they
were moved.
Quickly.
Quietly.
Better to burn them in a chamber than
let them turn where others might fall.
The world didn't end overnight.
But it remembered the day it started
to.
That day?
The day the sky turned green.
The day the first Ashen was born
holding her son against her chest.