The grey sky hung low over the city, as if it were about to collapse onto the rooftops and crush the people beneath, weighed down by routine. It wasn't raining, but the air was thick with moisture, clinging to the skin, seeping into clothes. Everything felt muted—colors, sounds, emotions. As if the world had forgotten how to breathe.
Alex walked slowly, hands in the pockets of his jacket, tired, absent. Behind him was a long day in a place that didn't even deserve to be called a job. An office without windows. Coworkers without names. A life that repeated itself daily, like a jammed tape stuck on loop.
He didn't have the strength to take the main street back. He turned into a side alley he remembered from childhood—cobbled, abandoned, overgrown. There were no streetlights. No people. Only shadow and silence.
Instead of asphalt—stone. Instead of light—black silhouettes of trees that shouldn't have been there. And that unnatural silence, as if something was holding the air perfectly still.
The city fell silent behind him.
At the edge of a forgotten square stood an oak tree. Not an ordinary tree—an oak as if from another time, another world. Huge, solitary, unreal. Its branches reached the height of tenement roofs, and its roots spread across the ground like fingers searching for feeling.
The trunk was cracked, rough, covered in loops and lines—not like natural bark, but as if someone had carved a map of something older than memory into it. The leaves trembled without wind, as if they were listening to his steps.
He stopped. Stared at it for a long moment. Something pushed him—maybe exhaustion, maybe curiosity, maybe simply that he'd had enough of everything that day.
He stepped closer and touched the bark.
It was warm. Soft. It pulsed.
As if it were alive.
And then... everything disappeared.
His body froze. His heart stopped beating. Time spilled, like ink on wet paper. The earth swallowed him without a sound. He wasn't falling. He wasn't rising. He felt nothing. He was like a seed thrown into darkness.
Then he heard a voice.
Feminine in tone, but too ancient, too deep to belong to any human. As if the forest itself were speaking—a forest that remembered the birth of time. As if the earth itself had spoken his name.
"This world does not deserve you. The other one... needs you."
There was no light. No body. Only thought. And her.
"The world you knew... could not save you. The one you're going to... has not yet fallen."
"The earth bleeds. The forest dies. Monsters rule."
"And I... the last of the old, still watching... I give you a spark. It's all I can offer."
The voice wrapped around him like mist. It didn't warm. It didn't chill. It was like the heartbeat of the forest—unyielding, irreversible, foreign.
"You are not chosen. You are... the last."
And then...
The world collapsed into green.
Alex wanted to scream, but no sound left his throat.