Shattered Skies

The sky shattered at precisely 3:17 in the afternoon.

It began with a sound like a thousand church bells folding in on themselves, and then—cracks. Thin, glowing fissures spidered across the firmament as if the heavens were made of porcelain, not sky. People stopped in the streets, shielding their eyes from the strange light pouring through the fractures. Birds scattered in every direction, and dogs howled as if they could feel something deep and ancient breaking open above them.

No one knew what caused it. Some blamed the particle accelerators, others said it was the gods finally opening their mail. A few just shrugged and went back to their coffee. But the cracks widened with each passing day, revealing glimpses of things behind the sky: a sea of slow-moving stars, enormous shapes shifting like forgotten thoughts, and eyes—so many eyes, blinking lazily as if just now noticing the world below.

People stopped looking up after a while.

Then came the rain—not water, but fragments. Pieces of sky, jagged and humming with power, fell in silence. Where they landed, reality bent. Trees grew upside down. Rivers flowed backward. One man claimed his shadow had started speaking to him in Latin. And all the while, the cracks kept spreading, like veins of wonder and doom threading through the dome above.

When the sky finally crumbled entirely, it didn’t fall. It peeled back—like the rind of an orange—revealing the vast machinery behind everything. The world, it turned out, had never been alone. And the stars were watching, patiently waiting their turn.