Sera was twenty-two when the earthquakes began to become difficult to ignore.
Not because they were particularly powerful.
Most of them weren’t.
A few buildings were damaged.
Roads cracked.
Some towns were evacuated for a day or two.
There were injuries, sometimes deaths.
The news would spend a few hours covering the damage before moving on to something else.
At first, Sera didn’t think much about it.
She had learned not to.
There had always been earthquakes somewhere in the world.
Volcanoes erupted.
Storms destroyed cities.
Floods displaced people.
Nature had never been particularly gentle.
So when the first earthquake happened, she read the article over breakfast and went to work.
A few weeks later, there was another.
Then another.
Then a volcanic eruption.
Then an unusually powerful storm.
Then another earthquake.
Sera began noticing the pattern without deliberately looking for one.
It wasn’t that the disasters were becoming dramatically worse.
They were simply becoming more frequent.
One morning at work, someone mentioned an earthquake that had happened overnight.
“Again?” one of her coworkers said.
Sera looked up from her paperwork.
“Again?”
“Yeah.
Somewhere in the south.
I don’t remember where.”
She opened the news on her phone.
Another earthquake.
She stared at the headline for a few seconds before putting the phone away.
“Strange,” she said.
Her coworker shrugged.
“Earthquakes are strange?”
“No.
The number of them.”
He laughed.
“Maybe the planet is having a bad year.”
Sera smiled.
“Maybe.”
She went back to work.
For the next several months, life continued.
That was the strange part.
Nothing stopped.
People still went to work.
Children still went to school.
Cafés still opened in the morning.
Trains still ran.
Ships still left the harbor.
People complained about prices, argued about politics, celebrated birthdays, fell in love, broke up, got married and worried about things that would seem completely unimportant if the world were actually ending.
And yet, every few days, there was another headline.
An earthquake.
A volcanic eruption.
A landslide.
A sudden flood.
A storm that formed unusually quickly.
A section of road collapsing without an obvious explanation.
A coastal town evacuated because the sea had behaved strangely.
Nothing connected them.
At least, nothing anyone could prove.
Scientists offered explanations.
Tectonic movement.
Atmospheric instability.
Oceanic temperature changes.
Natural cycles.
Some experts warned that people were simply noticing unusual events because information now traveled instantly across the world.
Others disagreed.
Sera read both sides.
She didn’t choose one.
That was something she had learned years ago.
Don’t believe it.
Don’t reject it.
Investigate it.
But this time, she wasn’t investigating.
She was simply watching.
By the fourth month, the frequency had become uncomfortable.
By the fifth, even people who normally ignored the news were talking about it.
One evening, Sera sat alone in her apartment with a cup of coffee beside her.
The television was playing quietly in the background.
Another earthquake had occurred.
Another volcanic region had shown unexpected activity.
Another storm had caused widespread damage.
The presenter moved from one report to the next.
Sera stared at the screen.
Something about it bothered her.
She didn’t know what.
There was no supernatural warning.
No strange voice.
No vision.
Her instincts weren’t screaming at her to run.
That almost made it worse.
She picked up her phone.
For a moment, she considered using her ability.
She had become better at asking small questions over the past few months.
Simple things.
Nearby events.
Limited possibilities.
This was different.
She tried anyway.
Is this going to continue?
Nothing.
She waited.
A faint sensation passed through her mind.
Not an answer.
More like standing in front of an enormous road with too many paths disappearing into the distance.
She tried again.
Are these events connected?
The sensation became worse.
Too many possibilities.
Too many unknowns.
She stopped.
“Not useful.”
Sera put the phone down.
She didn’t try again.
Outside, the city continued as usual.
Cars moved along the streets.
Lights shone from apartment windows.
Somewhere nearby, someone was laughing.
For a moment, everything looked perfectly normal.
Sera looked toward the window.
The sky was dark.
She remembered being sixteen and staring at the same sky, wondering whether she was simply becoming paranoid.
Back then, she had searched for answers everywhere.
Now she knew better.
Sometimes there was no answer yet.
Sometimes there wasn’t enough information.
And sometimes the only sensible thing to do was wait.
She turned off the television.
The apartment became quiet.
Another day would come tomorrow.
People would wake up.
They would go to work.
They would complain about the weather.
They would read the news.
And somewhere in the world, something else would happen.
Sera didn’t know what it was.
Nobody did.
At the time, there was no name for those months.
No warning.
No announcement.
No moment when humanity could point to a single event and say:
This is where everything changed.
The world simply continued.
But somewhere beyond what they could see, something had already begun.
And humanity was standing at the edge of darkness.