Date: April 22, 2025
Author: Rowan Fitzgerald
The sky is low, the sun won’t rise. The end is near.
I felt it first in the quiet hours before dawn. The air, thick with a haze of smoke, had a heaviness to it, like the world was holding its breath. I stared out my window, waiting for the first light to break, but it never came. The sun, it seemed, had forgotten how to rise. As if it too had grown tired, disillusioned with a world that was slowly rotting beneath it.
The sky is low, the sun won’t rise, Smoke in my lungs, blood in my eyes. The rivers cough, the oceans boil, The moon turns black, the ground is spoiled.
The signs were everywhere. The world was suffocating—every breath felt like I was inhaling the end. The rivers that once shimmered with life were now thick with something darker, something sickening. The oceans, which should have been endless and blue, now churned with a furious heat, a bubbling rage beneath their surface. The moon hung overhead, but it wasn’t the same. It was black, like a burnt-out ember, swallowed by the very darkness it once illuminated. And the earth… the earth felt like it was dying beneath my feet, as if the ground itself had turned against us.
The locusts came, they stung my chest, I haven’t slept, I can’t find rest. A beast climbed out the hole last night— It spoke my name. It spoke it right.
Sleep had become a forgotten luxury, stolen from me by the dread creeping into my bones. The locusts arrived like a plague, their wings buzzing in the night air, stinging my skin with their venomous whispers. I could feel them inside me, gnawing at my soul. The buzzing never stopped, not even when I closed my eyes.
And then it happened. In the dead of night, when everything else was still, I saw it. A shadow, impossibly large, rising from the pit that had opened in the earth. It wasn’t like any creature I had ever seen—it was ancient, a force of nature, something that belonged to a time long past. It stood taller than the tallest trees, its eyes glowing with an otherworldly fire. And it spoke.
It spoke my name.
I couldn’t look away, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. It knew me, knew my soul in ways I didn’t understand. In that moment, I realized something. The end wasn’t coming—it had already arrived.
The world had given up. And now, all that remained was the silence before the storm, the calm before the final breath. The earth, the sky, the oceans, and the stars—all of it was collapsing into the darkness. The beast had spoken, and in that whisper, I knew the world was no longer ours to save.
And with that realization, I accepted the truth: this was the end.
The sky is low, the sun won’t rise. The end is near.
