Humanity spent centuries calculating its own extinction. They mapped out their doom like a chain; connected and inevitable. They thought that if they could predict the catastrophes, they could control them.

  Before their doom arrived, humanity had already failed evolution. Conflict was their only solution to decline. They watched the climate rot and did nothing, while wars raged, their detonations becoming the heartbeat of a dying world.

  Then, the true chain reaction began. It wasn't war; it was eradication. Life was wiped from a single point, rippling outward. Continents shattered. Varied explosions ruptured the surface, forcing the survivors underground until the depths, too, became a tomb.

  A primordial force emerged, disseminating through the bedrock and changing the very soil. Humans were forced back to the decrepit world above to survive. But the terror followed. The subterranean contagion infected the open air, haunting its original inhabitants and producing new ones.

  The era of the Human was over. The era of the Nevarids had begun.

  At that specific fracture in space and time, an opposing group rose, despised by the old world and the new. Who were they? Where were they? Only at separate points in time could the group answer any question.

  And it was still not the fourth.

  ***

  Green and black ancient trees held no sound but a quiet whisper, their lifelong inhabitants out for a battle they had lost hours ago.

  Black sky, muted with gray air, shrouded the darkness over the charred field. Flames licked at the destruction, illuminating the blood slicked across the ruins.

  Cynomdus drove his jade-white, formed hand into the concrete rubble. He clawed strenuously, trying to drag himself out of the ruins to escape the writhing mass of black tentacles that had replaced the Earth’s solid ground.

  His eyes, hidden behind a sleek black mask, pierced the misty atmosphere. The flames reflected in his lenses, making the world look like it was burning from the inside out. Everything seemed to slow down. Through the cacophony of wails, he watched the tapestry of black flesh weave itself over friend and foe alike. Those who climbed the crumbling towers found no escape; soaring flames engulfed them, scattering their ash into the wind.

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  “Argh!” Cynomdus felt the black flesh finally reach his maimed leg, piercing it and spreading through his flesh. He had no energy left.

  With a trembling white tendril, he tore off his mask. Shaggy raven hair, slick with sweat, whipped in the hot wind. His silver eyes crinkled at the corners, a dazed smirk spreading across his tanned face as he spotted it: a hulking obsidian mass with white edges, galloping on all tentacles, dodging the pillars of earth rising to crush him.

  “Cynomdus!” Rono shrieked. The Companion lunged, his tendrils grasping to free his host from the cage of rubble.

  The man kept smirking. He watched the monster—his monster—fighting the ground itself with detached amusement, ignoring the pain coursing through every inch in his body.

  “There’s no point, Rono.”

  “There is a point!”

  Rono’s tentacles carved Cynomdus out of the ruins, hauling him upright. But the thick black flesh clinging to the man's leg didn't let go. It pulled, the vicious black liquid advancing upon his body in an instant.

  His Companion held tight.

  “Rono, it’s over… They’re all dead.”

  “Cyn—!”

  The host didn't hesitate. Cynomdus slashed his formed arm through Rono’s tentacles in a blur of jade light.

  “Good luck!” Cynomdus yelled, grinning widely, his silver eyes flashing one last time as he offered a final, grim wave.

  Then, the ruins and the black flesh swallowed him.

  Rono’s hulking mass staggered back, reeling from the sudden loss of weight. The rubble crashed down, sealing the tomb. Rono turned, instinct overriding grief, and rushed away through the destruction.

  Fire clung to his skin. Hands reached out from the smoke, begging, pleading, but their cries washed away in the silent, hollow emptiness expanding inside him. Hundreds, even thousands, died beneath his senses. He felt them all. He felt the monsters, too. Ones he recognized.

  A deep, resonant wail tore from him, ringing through the ground like a leviathan drowning in the earth. Rono ran through the apocalypse with no aim, no tether, and no direction, fleeing into the gray.