Far above the Earth, in the silent abyss where light could not trespass and time dared not linger, they arrived once more.
They had no name, not one that Humans would know, for they needed none.
They had no form, for to take shape was to limit oneself, and that served them no purpose.
They existed beyond such trivial constraints—watchers, arbiters, architects of oblivion.
And now, they stood—or rather, they were—as they had always been, gathered in the unseen, peering down upon the trembling blue sphere below.
A world ripe for judgment.
A world trembling on the precipice of annihilation.
A world, like so many before it, that had forgotten the nature of the Grand Cycle.
The Enclave of the Unseen converged, their voices not spoken but felt, not heard but etched into the fabric of existence itself.
A pulse rippled through the void, a chorus of will made manifest.
"The time is nigh, it has been 15,000 rotations since last we were here."
A second pulse, resonating with unfathomable weight.
"Earth's judgment has come again at last, it's peoples once more squandered their time and have caused it's reigning chosen to have a much harder time this go around."
Beneath them, the planet slowly turned, its people blissfully unaware of the horror about to unfold.
They screamed of wars, of hunger, of greed, of power.
They believed they had attained knowledge enough to have conquered death itself.
Fools.
They had not yet even begun to understand true suffering.
One among the gathered shifted—a gesture not of movement, but of decision.
The darkness around them shuddered, folding inward upon itself like a wound being torn open.
The command rippled outward, carried by the weight of their will.
And Earth… answered.
The Unleashing
The oceans rebelled first.
Tsunamis of impossible height surged from the depths, roaring across continents in monstrous walls of liquid destruction.
Entire coastlines vanished in an instant, devoured by the abyssal maw of the sea.
Cities were swept away like brittle twigs caught in a flood, their lights extinguished beneath the crushing weight of nature's unrelenting vengeance.
The skies followed next.
Storms, black as the void between galaxies, spiralled into existence with unnatural fury.
Thunder rolled like the march of a celestial army, tearing the heavens asunder.
Lightning bolts the size of skyscrapers lanced downward, setting the world ablaze in crackling chains of destruction.
Tornadoes the size of mountains carved scars into the land, reducing entire civilizations to dust and debris.
Then the earth itself rose in anger.
Mountains crumbled.
Valleys collapsed.
The land split open like the festering wound of a dying god.
The ground convulsed in agony, fissures swallowing entire cities whole, reducing monuments of human arrogance to rubble, as dormant volcanos erupted one after another spewing molten rock and ash high into the sky blotting out the sun.
But this was merely the overture to the final horror.
For their judgment would not be complete with mere destruction alone.
No.
This world—like all others before it—must know true terror, true suffering.
The signal pulsed outward.
A vibration beyond sound, beyond language.
It wove itself into the fabric of reality, into the very marrow of life itself, awakening something ancient, something that had long slumbered in the depths of human nightmares.
It had been there since the dawn of their species, coded into their very being, waiting for the moment to be called upon once more.
And now, it rose.
It began in silence.
All across the planet as millions were fleeing from the onset of disasters, billions dropped to the ground, their bodies falling lifelessly to the ground, but they did not remain there for long.
Cold hands twitched.
Lungs that should never breathe again drew in rattling gasps.
Eyes that had lost their light flickered open, glassy and wrong.
In an instant, death ceased to be a permanent state.
The first screams after witnessing the next in the series of horrors rang out within minutes of the re-awakening.
The people who found themselves near this unfortunate people found themselves, powerless before their own friends, family and coworkers, and as such were torn apart by teeth that should never have bitten again.
Then came the cemeteries, and graveyards.
The soil trembled as if the world itself were rejecting what lay buried beneath.
Graves split open, and from them crawled horrors, forgotten corpses now animated by the will of something far greater than themselves.
For it has long since been known that the dead far outnumber the living, and now the recently deceased found themselves rising up once more but to a broken world one they would be plunging into even greater chaos.
Even as the local law enforcement, and militaries started to resist against these monster, and yet still they walked, still they hungered, and the human numbers continued to fall only to find themselves joining the undead legions.
Then the cities would follow.
and eventually the world itself.
~
From their place in the unseen, the Enclave of the Unseen watched as humanity's screams filled the void of their craft.
The Cycle had begun.
Again.
As it always had.
As it always would.
One among them, a scholar of untold eons, reached out—not with hand, but with will—to confirm what had already been set in motion.
The champions had been chosen.
Seven.
Always seven.
Seven pieces in this grand, unending game.
One to Invent.
One to Cast.
One to Tame.
One to Control.
One to Cultivate.
One to Grow.
One to Influence
And from them all, one… to transcend, and lead humanity into the coming age.
Each one had already been marked, their fates entwined with the great horror below.
Now, there was nothing left to do but watch.
To see which faction would rise from the ashes.
To witness who would rule this new world of death and ruin.
~
For a moment, silence passed between the unseen ones, stretching across the abyss like the space between dying stars.
Then, a voice, thick with weariness and disgust.
"And so the Grand Cycle turns once more."
Another stirred, their tone laced with ancient amusement.
"Did you truly expect otherwise?"
"No... but perhaps, in some distant moment, it will break."
A ripple of wry laughter.
"No. It will not."
A third voice, older than ruin itself, spoke.
"Each system is equally strong and equally weak. Balance is inevitable. No matter how many times we burn this world, no matter which faction rises, they always consume themselves before true dominance can be achieved."
A bitter hum of agreement.
"They fight. They build. They fall. They rise again. And always… it returns to this."
"The cycle is unbroken. The cycle is eternal."
One of them, a being of pure, ageless contempt, gave a final parting thought before they drifted into silence, resuming their place in the infinite dark.
"Perhaps this time will be different."
No one answered.
For they all knew the truth.
It never was.
And it never would be.
Far below, Earth burned.
The Grand Cycle had begun again.
And this time, there would be no escape.