The ground trembled. Henrik, all of twenty-four and fresh off the boat from Denmark, felt it first in his boots. A nervous tickle that spread upward, turning his coffee to ripples in his mug. The sky, that constant, gray Scandinavian blanket he'd grown up under, took on a shade he'd never seen.
A dirty yellow, tainted with streaks of something that looked a lot like rust.
People in the street stopped. Cars stalled. Even the wind, perpetually howling through the Copenhagen canals, stilled its breath. Something massive was taking place, something that threw off the normal equilibrium.
"What the devil…?" he heard someone mutter near him. Henrik wished he had an answer. He just watched, mouth agape, as a hairline fracture webbed its way across the sky.
The cracking accelerated with alarming quickness. The rusty streaks thickened, grew into veins pulsating with fiery light. It wasn't just a visual trick. The crack vibrated in his teeth, made the fillings ache.
Panic started, slow at first. A whimper from a child, the sharp intake of breath from an older woman.
Then, someone screamed.
The scream, animal and raw, opened the floodgates. The calm shattered into shards of sheer fright. People ran. They clawed, kicked, and shoved, each body acting solely on instinct. The survival variety.
Henrik didn't move. He couldn't. The sky had come undone, and a primitive part of him understood this to be his final moment. A spectacle beyond comprehension.
The sound became a roar, a tearing apart of fabric and bone. The ground beneath him bucked. Buildings groaned. The crack became a chasm. It expanded, devouring the horizon, until the sky was in two. Two monstrous halves being torn asunder by unseen forces.
Then came the tipping. The tilting. The sickening sensation of free fall, except the whole world fell with him. Buildings crumbled, sliding away into the ever-widening gap. The earth grumbled and spasmed.
He closed his eyes, expecting oblivion. Instead, there was only a sickening jolt, then stillness. Heavy, absolute stillness.
Henrik opened his eyes. He was alive. But the world he knew was very much gone.
Above him, another world. Where half a sky should have been, a duplicate earth hung. Inverted, yes, but clearly land. Ridges of mountains jutted downward, mirroring the landscape around him. Clouds drifted sideways between the two worlds. An impossible landscape.
Around him, chaos was slowly giving way to disbelief. Survivors emerged from the rubble, dusted themselves off, and pointed upward. Silent, horrified conversations began. Questions without answers.
"Is… is that real?" a girl no older than ten asked, gripping her mother's hand tightly.
The mother could only shake her head, tears streaking down her face.
The sun, now halved, cast an anemic light on the ruins. Darkness gathered quickly, and the terror mounted again, worse than before. What horrors lurked in the upside-down world above? Would they fall? Or would something come down from them?
The days that followed became a struggle to exist. Resources were extremely limited. Scavenging parties braved the ruined city, trying to secure food, water, anything that could help them get by.
The upper world remained an enigma. Sometimes, Henrik would see flickers of light up there. Construction? Destruction? He couldn't be sure.
One night, huddled around a weak bonfire, an old professor cleared his throat. Professor Jensen, a respected expert on ancient civilizations before... this.
"I... I think I have a theory," Jensen said, his aged voice shaky. "I spent my career researching the old myths, the stories dismissed as fable. Some spoke of a twin earth. A mirror world existing parallel to our own, held at a balance. Perhaps..." He trailed off, hesitant.
"Perhaps what, Professor?" someone pushed.
Jensen took a breath. "Perhaps our actions, our wars, our... excesses tipped that balance. Fractured the planet itself. And what we see above... is the other half. Its people are a product of this catastrophic event too."
His words did little to ease anyone's unease. Another civilization. But if they too were scarred by the planet split in two, what did that entail? Could the people of that world exist without their side colliding with the earth's surviving life on this side of the split?
Days bled into weeks. Society started anew. Order formed organically out of desperation. The remaining humans pulled together into communities, trying to rebuild and rediscover meaning. All below an upturned landscape and fractured atmosphere.
Henrik found a purpose of his own. With his engineering knowledge, he started to assist in structuring more efficient shelters. Trying to ward off both the environment and the ever-existing existential doom looming over the world's inhabitants. He worked with a young woman called Freya, a sharp-witted medic. They developed a close bond, forged in shared struggle and uncertainty.
"Do you ever wonder about them?" Freya asked one evening, gesturing up toward the world beyond their split-atmosphere.
Henrik followed her pointed index finger. He'd done his best not to brood over it. Try to survive in the now, but she had voiced the sentiment on the minds of almost every living soul at this side of their cataclysm. "All the time," he admitted. "Are they hostile? Are they even like us?"
Freya watched it carefully. "Maybe they're asking the same things," she murmured.
They were the words that ushered their fate.
A low vibration began.
The sound escalated with each passing moment. Like tectonic plates grinding. Like reality tearing. Above, chunks of the mirror earth began to flake off. First small pebbles, then chunks the dimensions of automobiles, then larger and larger parts plummeted downward through the split sky.
Screams.
The chaos that time felt amplified ten times over. No one was safe, neither from the impact or the debris from either world breaking free. A constant barrage. The communities started their desperate dash to somewhere — anywhere — safer than where they'd lived and suffered, so to where they would likely breathe their final breaths.
Henrik grabbed Freya's hand. "We need to move. Now!"
They ran. Between buildings half-flattened from that initial disaster, they found ways out, always below. They headed away from the populated regions, wishing and hoping to find an abandoned subway in solid structure where the initial survivors might reside in shelter.
They knew full well they had no real idea, but their only intention was not to remain stagnant where more and more death and wreckage started to arrive at a more rapid rate.
But the barrage continued, unstopping and unceasing. Then the large bit struck and the noise deafened them - a structure they could see ahead of them had simply ceased from view after that collision, dust billowing where it stood, with some solid parts crashing past them on either side.
A building collapsed next to them, trapping them beneath its rubble. Henrik cried in pain. A piece of rebar, previously buried in solid concrete, drove down, through his thigh, anchoring him to the very floor. A second piece pinned down Freya a handful of feet from them. She cried out from her abdomen and his body filled with fear.
"Freya!" he shouted, reaching. Uselessly reaching. She tried to free herself, with growing panic, before the rubble subsided more, bringing debris toward them both. "Hang on, Freya! I'll get you out!" He attempted, uselessly, to free the piece of reinforced rod in his leg but to no avail.
More material shook from their impact's epicenter overhead and trickled around. Dust clouded. Light waned. Her expression was terror and dread.
Then it struck.
A falling slab crushed her completely, silencing her scream as it caved her in beneath the destruction of the building. She could not utter another expression. She was gone from Henrik's vision in seconds, as so many other lives did too.
"No!" Henrik roared, tears streaming down his dusty face. The futility of it all, the awful nature of their fresh world crashing down about them...
The tremors died down, although the hail of broken landscape rained on from that moment. The upper civilization started whatever its people were going to perform.
It meant that there'd be no safe space ever to go and to take shelter in that fractured version of Denmark. Of the entire globe as they would recognize the design before the earth got halved.
He attempted in order to dislodge himself once, then one other time, after that the blood pouring out soaked throughout his trousers.
Then weakness started at his extremity before running to his upper trunk area. Sepsis or shock will undoubtedly come for the worst of mankind to face it, one more victim amidst lots of.
As the rubble settled completely and the endless sky above revealed his horrible end, Henrik realized he wouldn't make it. The bleeding was too heavy. The bar through his leg too deep. The weight on his heart was all he'd known on that foreign world.
He was dying beneath the remnants of two civilizations that had failed. Failed to coexist. Failed to warn others from one another about that upcoming collision course before being in real time.
He closed his eyes. Not with fear, but with resignation. He'd found something within this broken new world; some little peace; affection perhaps. It, that thing, got stolen from his own two days following from that end to reality.
His globe and her had just ended too rapidly to even take in what could come and go from his tragic and temporary life.
The sky opened up and showered rock at that point. His soul flew after the first destruction. He did nothing other than find a means as an instrument.