STORY: "Before the End"

The morning broke with a softness, the kind of quiet dawn that seemed to embrace the world. Ethan McHale stepped out of The Beanery, the small coffee shop on the corner of Willow and Fifth, with a familiar warmth in his hand. He could feel the faintest trace of the sun's first rays on his face, delicate and cool, like the world was holding its breath before fully waking.

The crispness of fall still lingered in the air, like a final promise before winter’s colder breath arrived. As the door of the café closed behind him, he inhaled deeply. The rich aroma of freshly ground coffee mixed with the earthy scent of damp leaves underfoot, weaving together in that perfect, unspoken way that made him feel connected to the smallness of the moment. It was a simple ritual, one that had shaped his days for as long as he could remember. He loved this part of the morning. It was a sacred time—a quiet before everything picked up, before the noise of the world encroached on his thoughts.

Ethan took a long sip of his coffee, the warmth spreading through him as he adjusted his scarf - burgundy, threadbare, and well-worn by years of use. It was his favorite, a gift from his sister back when life had felt less complicated. The deep red complemented the earth tones of his jacket and jeans, making him feel like part of the world itself - connected to the colors of fall, the season of change.

The street in front of him was a typical city street - rows of cafes, a few small shops, and the occasional cyclist weaving through the foot traffic. The sound of conversation, the rhythmic tapping of shoes against the pavement, and the clink of cups and mugs in the background made everything feel cozy, familiar, as if the city were gently humming with life.

Ethan had always liked mornings. There was something about the early hours - the stillness, the anticipation - that made him feel as though he was in on some secret that the rest of the world hadn’t figured out yet. Maybe it was because he never had to rush. After all, he’d already learned a long time ago that everything in life could be savored if given time - if you were willing to slow down and truly notice the world. And he had become a master of noticing.

The occasional honk of a horn, a distant shout, the soft rustle of a car passing by. It was all part of the music of the morning.

A vibration in his pocket interrupted his thoughts, and he pulled out his phone with a smile. A text from Ana.

“Same place for lunch? 1 pm?”

He grinned at the message. Ana was always spontaneous, always managing to inject a bit of unpredictability into his routine. Her friendship had been one of the constants in his life. Without thinking, he typed back:

“You bet. See you there.”

The world was simple today. He took another sip of his coffee, breathing in the smells of autumn and the faint sweetness of the drink. For a brief moment, everything was right. Nothing was out of place.

The moment shifted with a sound - distant at first, like a soft hum that grew louder, insistent. Ethan’s footfalls slowed as he looked up, instinctively glancing toward the street. His mind registered the sound of screeching tires, but it was almost too distant, too faint for him to make sense of it.

And then the world tilted.

The car - a dark, battered sedan - shot out from an intersection, its tires screaming in protest as it hurtled toward him. Ethan’s mind couldn’t quite comprehend the speed, the way the car was coming at him as though it had no intention of stopping, not for him, not for anything. He didn’t have time to think. His body didn’t have time to react.

The thud when it struck him was like an explosion in his chest, a sudden, brutal wave of force that knocked all breath from his body. His bones seemed to buckle under the impact, each one giving way to the pressure, snapping and crumpling like fragile twigs caught in a storm. His body was flung through the air in a violent arc, and then—there was nothing.

No pain. No sound.

Just cold, deep, dark nothingness.

Ethan awoke with a shock, though it wasn’t an awakening as he had known it. It wasn’t like coming to from a deep sleep, or like regaining consciousness from a long night’s rest. This was different.

The first thing he noticed was the absence of any sound - no beeping, no murmurs from nearby hospital staff, no hum of fluorescent lights. There was only... silence. A heavy, unnerving silence that stretched out endlessly, suffocating and vast. His senses flared to life, but not in the way they should have. His limbs felt disconnected, weightless, as if they were no longer his own, and his body - his body felt distant. He wasn’t sure where he was.

Then, in the distance, there was movement.

At first, it was nothing more than a flicker, a vague shape - like a shadow drifting in the far corners of his vision. His mind latched onto it, instinctively trying to make sense of the shapes. But the shapes... they weren’t shapes at all. They were something else—something beyond form, beyond structure.

And then the presence.

A cold, unearthly presence that pressed down on him from every direction. Not a thing, not a creature, not a being in the way he understood those words, but something much older, more pervasive. It was everywhere, and nowhere. It was like the sensation of standing in a room with no walls, no floor, no ceiling - just an endless, crushing weight of infinite space.

It didn’t have a voice, but Ethan felt it in his mind. The vastness, the ancient hunger that filled it. The terrifying sensation that everything he had ever known - the streets, the people, the sun, the stars - were nothing more than fleeting illusions, distractions from something infinitely more important, more terrible.

The presence watched. No, it didn’t watch - it observed, like an ancient god staring through the veils of time and space. The scale of its being was beyond comprehension. It was so vast that trying to describe it felt like trying to hold the entire ocean in a single drop of water.

And there was hunger - cold, unyielding hunger. But it wasn’t the kind of hunger Ethan had known. It wasn’t a hunger for food, for flesh. It was the hunger of something far older, something that consumed not just bodies, but time, and energy, and reality itself.

Ethan’s chest tightened as an image - a thought - began to form in his mind.

He saw the vast, dark ocean of space, and then it wasn’t space at all. It was a vast expanse of empty nothingness, stretching on infinitely. And in that endless black, the presence fed. It fed on the very essence of existence. And what it fed on were... people - souls, minds, energy. Each of them living their tiny lives in what they thought was reality, when in truth, they were nothing more than a source of food for this vast, cosmic entity.

Ethan knew it. He could feel it deep in his bones. He could feel the horror of it, the sheer depth of it, and he realized, with a gut-wrenching clarity, that everything—the stars, the galaxies, the people - was a feeding ground, a pasture for this creature. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever felt.

And then, as if to punctuate the horror, he was shown something even more unimaginable. A glimpse into the true reality. Beyond the simulated world he had always known, beyond everything he thought he understood.

Nothing mattered. Time, space, existence - it was all just a fabric woven by the entity, a distraction to keep humanity docile while it consumed.

It was real.

When Ethan finally awoke, it was as if he were emerging from a long, dark tunnel, the edges of his perception still blurry and fragmented. His body felt sluggish, as if each limb were submerged in cold, thick water, and every movement took a monumental effort. He blinked slowly, trying to bring his surroundings into focus, but everything seemed muted, distant, out of place. The sterile white walls of the hospital room seemed to pulse, fading in and out of his vision, as if they were a reflection of his fractured consciousness.

The hum of machines filled the air - monitors beeping rhythmically, the steady pulse of his heartbeat reassuring yet strange in its monotony. He felt his chest rise and fall with each labored breath, the air thick in his lungs. It was only when his gaze shifted to the figure standing beside his bed - his doctor - that he realized he was no longer alone.

The doctor was watching him closely, his face a mixture of curiosity and concern, as though unsure how to approach the fragile mental state of the man before him. His hands were steady, though, betraying no sign of the unease that must have stirred in him as he observed Ethan’s wild, unblinking eyes. The longer he looked, the more disquieting it became. Ethan’s stare was almost vacant, distant, yet tinged with an undeniable intensity, as if he were seeing something far beyond the doctor’s reach.

Ethan opened his mouth, and his voice came out in a strained whisper. His tongue felt dry, like it no longer belonged to him. “We’re cattle...” His breath hitched, and his hand twitched as if reaching for something invisible. “We’re food. This... this is just a feeding pen.”

The doctor’s brow furrowed, and he leaned in, his voice soft but firm. “What do you mean, Ethan? What are you talking about?”

Ethan’s eyes darted around, as if the room itself had become a strange, foreign place. His chest tightened with an unspoken urgency, and his words tumbled out in a flood of panic and conviction. “There’s something... out there...” His breath became erratic. “It’s bigger than galaxies... than everything you’ve ever known. It’s... it’s... everywhere, and it’s feeding. It keeps us distracted - distracted while it feeds.”

The doctor’s face shifted, his confusion deepening. He straightened slightly, his fingers twitching around the pen in his pocket. He’d heard of patients in altered mental states, experiencing delusions or hallucinations. But Ethan’s words were... different. They weren’t just the incoherent ramblings of a man suffering from head trauma or a broken mind—they were sharp, deliberate, like a man who had just been awakened from something ancient and horrifying.

The doctor took a step closer, his voice lowered, almost cautionary. “Ethan, what exactly do you mean by ‘feeding’? And who is out there, feeding on us?”

Ethan’s eyes glazed for a moment as he gazed upward, as if lost in the depths of his own thoughts. He didn’t speak for a long time. The room fell into an eerie silence, broken only by the hum of the machines. Then, as if forced to drag himself from some distant abyss, Ethan’s voice returned - low, trembling, but tinged with an undeniable sense of truth that made the doctor’s skin prickle.

“I felt it,” Ethan said, his eyes wide, his lips trembling. “I was... there. Beyond this place. Beyond all of it.” He blinked rapidly, as though trying to clear away a fog that clouded his mind. “It was... massive. So old - older than the universe. Older than time. I saw it. I saw everything. It was like...” He stopped, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. “It was like the universe was just... a glimpse - a fake. A simulation. A distraction to keep us in the dark while this thing... this thing feeds on us.”

The doctor’s grip on his pen tightened, but he said nothing, watching Ethan closely. There was an unsettling calm to the way he spoke, as if the reality of what he was saying was something Ethan had already accepted.

“I saw it,” Ethan repeated, his voice becoming more desperate, more fractured. “It’s... it’s so big. It’s not a god, not like anything we understand. It doesn’t care about us—not in the way we think we matter. We’re just...” He trailed off, his eyes flickering as if he could see something the doctor couldn’t.

Ethan’s breathing quickened, his chest rising and falling in sharp, jagged motions. He grabbed the edge of the bed, his fingers digging into the sheets as if to ground himself in something, anything. “I begged it. I begged it to bring me back.” His voice cracked with the weight of the memory. “I couldn’t bear it. The truth of it. I saw... I saw everything. I saw beyond everything. It’s the horror of knowing. It’s... it’s not just life. It’s not just... stars and planets and people. We’re food. We’re cattle. We... we exist to feed it.”

The doctor’s pen slipped from his hand, the soft click of it hitting the floor snapping him out of his stunned trance. He reached for the chart at the foot of Ethan’s bed, his fingers shaking slightly as he flipped through the pages, his eyes scanning the notes from earlier. His mind raced - Ethan’s brain activity had been inconsistent during his coma. At times, it had shown patterns of deep, restorative sleep, and at other moments, it had spiked in activity far beyond what was considered normal for a coma patient.

The monitor beside Ethan had beeped steadily during this outburst, though his heart rate was slightly elevated, it was still within acceptable parameters. The doctor’s eyes flicked back to the patient, who was staring at him now with an intensity that sent a chill down his spine.

“You... you’re not making sense, Ethan,” the doctor said softly, though doubt gnawed at him. “This doesn’t - none of this makes sense. It’s not real. You’re still recovering, your brain... it’s... it’s adjusting. This isn’t...”

But Ethan’s eyes didn’t shift. They didn’t falter. They were locked onto the doctor’s, as if he were staring straight through him.

“It’s real,” Ethan whispered, his voice low but certain. “I felt it. It’s out there. It’s so much bigger than us. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t... not after I saw it. The truth. I begged it, Doctor. I begged it to bring me back to this, to this... little life. To this world. Because I couldn’t bear the scope of it. The horror.”

The doctor’s eyes darted to the monitors again, trying to ground himself in some semblance of normalcy, but he couldn’t shake the cold sweat forming on the back of his neck. Everything about Ethan’s words felt too real, too raw. The charts, the activity, the sheer intensity of Ethan’s conviction - it didn’t add up.

His mind wavered between skepticism and a deeper, uneasier understanding. Was this some kind of post-traumatic shock, some delusion born from the impact of the car crash? Or was it something more? Was Ethan experiencing something beyond comprehension? Something the doctor wasn’t prepared to accept?

The question lingered in the air, heavy and suffocating. And all the while, Ethan just stared at him, his expression filled with that unsettling, all-knowing certainty.

“Doctor,” Ethan whispered, voice barely audible now, “you have to understand... it’s real. It wasnt a dream. We’re being kept here. For it.”

The doctor hesitated, staring at the man in front of him, trying to process the words. He opened his mouth to speak again, but nothing came out. Instead, the silence filled the room, deeper and darker than before.

 Four months later, Ethan McHale vanished without a trace.

It happened on a crisp, quiet night - one of those nights when the world feels suspended, as if it’s holding its breath. Around 3:27 AM, the security cameras in the Target parking lot picked up the first signs of movement. The footage was grainy, but unmistakable: Ethan, walking alone, moving slowly through the empty lot. 

He walked with a strange, unnatural calm, his gaze fixed upward, as if he were looking at something the cameras couldn’t capture. As he passed through the frame, his expression seemed to change, a shift almost imperceptible at first. For several minutes, he stood still, gazing upward, a strange look on his face - like he had just come to some realization, some terrible truth. His eyes widened, his mouth slackened, and his body seemed to relax as if he had come to a profound realization. There was no panic, no fear - just a deep, unsettling serenity.

In that final frame, his face held an eerie recognition. It was as if he had seen something, something that only he could understand. Something that made the vast emptiness of the parking lot seem insignificant.

And then the camera fickered with static - just a brief blink, but long enough to distort his image, to make his presence in the frame feel... wrong. When the image cleared, Ethan McHale was gone. The footage was examined again and again. At first, the investigators thought it was some kind of malfunction. But no one could explain it. No one could account for his sudden disappearance. The cameras hadn’t captured him walking away, nor was there any sign of him leaving the parking lot. The area around the lot was empty, still, and silent. There were no footsteps leading away, no trace of him. It was as if he had simply been erased from existence.

And that serene recognition on his face? It haunted them. It was the kind of calmness that didn’t belong in this world - like someone who had accepted something far darker, far more terrifying than anyone could comprehend. Something other.

As the hours passed, the footage was replayed, zoomed in, slowed down, but nothing made sense. One moment he was there, and the next - he was gone.

Security couldn’t explain it. The investigators were left with nothing but the unsettling image of Ethan McHale’s last moments: walking alone, staring into the abyss of a reality no one else could see.

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