The sky was wrong.
It stretched above her in a color deeper and richer than any green should ever be—viridian but sick with it, like the inside of a bruise or the heart of an infected wound. It was beautiful and terrible in the way that poisonous things are beautiful, in the way that something dying can be more vivid than anything alive.
Gwen was standing but couldn't feel her feet, couldn't feel her body at all. She existed only as a point of consciousness observing something that shouldn't exist, something that had no business being witnessed by human eyes. She was a ghost at the end of the world.
As she watched, frozen and helpless, the sky began to crack.
Not like glass breaking with clean geometric fractures, but like something organic splitting apart from the inside, like skin tearing over a wound that had been festering for too long. The crack bled darkness into the space around it, a substance that was thick and viscous and wrong in ways that made her mind recoil. It was the antithesis of light, of matter, of order.
The taste flooded her—not a mouth, but the essence of her perception. Copper and burnt sugar and something else that had no name in any human language, no equivalent in any earthly experience. It was sweet and bitter and ancient all at once, the flavor of time running out, of civilizations ending, of everything that had ever mattered crumbling into dust.
She wanted to gag even though she had no throat to gag with, wanted to spit out the taste even though she had no mouth. She existed only as sensation and horror and the desperate, animal need to look away from what she was seeing.
But she couldn't look away, couldn't close eyes she didn't have, couldn't do anything except witness.
Then she saw the world beneath the dying sky, and it was collapsing in a way that defied every law of physics she'd ever learned, in a way that suggested the laws themselves were breaking down along with everything else.
Structures rose and twisted and folded back on themselves in geometries that made her brain ache, shapes that kept trying to resolve into buildings or towers or bridges but were none of those things. They were something that three-dimensional space couldn't properly contain, and they were collapsing and crystallizing simultaneously, turning solid and eternal and utterly, completely dead. It was a funeral and a fossilization happening at the same time.
The taste intensified until it was the only thing she could perceive, and it was the flavor of time running out—not slow and peaceful like sand through an hourglass, but desperate and accelerating, a spiral into nothing that was picking up speed with every passing moment.
They're dying, she thought with absolute certainty, though she didn't know who "they" were. This whole world is dying and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.
Then she felt them.
Not saw—the vision was too corrupted for that, too fragmented and glitching like a damaged recording playing back at the wrong speed—but felt, tasted, sensed with senses she didn't have names for.
A presence. No, many presences. Vast and ancient and utterly, completely terrified.
This wasn't the cold non-space she'd expected, wasn't the empty void between stars, but consciousness, raw and undeniable, many of them moving through the dying world like currents in deep water, like thoughts in a mind that was shutting down.
She couldn't see them clearly—the vision kept skipping and stuttering, jumping forward and backward through time in a way that made causality meaningless—but she caught glimpses, impressions, shapes her mind kept desperately trying to force into familiar categories even though they refused to fit.
Limbs? Light? Something between matter and energy? Something that existed in more dimensions than her mind could process?
But she could taste what they felt, and that came through with perfect, devastating clarity.
Terror.
Vast, cosmic, existential terror that dwarfed anything she'd ever experienced, that made her own fear of death seem like a child's nightmare by comparison. It was the kind of terror that comes from knowing with absolute certainty that the end is here and there's nothing you can do, nowhere to run, no salvation possible.
And beneath the terror, woven through it like threads in a tapestry: a desperate, frantic determination.
They were trying to do something, and she could sense the frantic coordinated effort, could feel the way they moved together with purpose even as their world crystallized around them, could taste their fierce will even in the face of utter annihilation.
One last thing. One final desperate act before everything ended.
But what?
The vision skipped again, jumped forward or backward or sideways through time, and she saw—thought she saw, could barely comprehend what she was seeing—something launching into the darkness beyond the cracking sky.
Fragments. Pieces. Streaks of viridian green against an absolute black that was somehow darker than any darkness she'd ever imagined.
Not meteors, not asteroids, but something intentional, something crafted, something sent with purpose.
The taste that came with it was salt and ash and grief so profound and bottomless that it made her own mourning for her father feel like a shadow of the real thing, like she'd been playing at grief while these beings experienced it in its purest, most distilled form.
It was the flavor of a final goodbye, of sending something precious away knowing you would never see it again, of watching your children leave home knowing they were going to die alone in the dark and there was nothing you could do to save them.
Were they trying to escape? she wondered. Sending something away? Sending themselves? Sending a message?
She couldn't tell, couldn't parse the fragmentary images that her human mind was barely capable of processing, couldn't understand the context or the purpose or what any of this meant.
The recording was breaking apart now, dissolving into static and noise, and she was losing her grip on the vision, losing her sense of self in the overwhelming torrent of alien emotion.
Then she felt it—the change.
Not a cage descending around the world from outside, but something happening from within, like the world itself was being transformed at the molecular level, at the level of space and time and consciousness itself.
The very substance of reality was being compressed, folded, crystallized—not destroyed but frozen into a permanent stasis, a state that was neither alive nor dead but something in between, something that would last forever and never change again.
They were being turned into their own tomb, and they knew it, could feel it happening, and their terror spiked into something beyond terror, beyond any emotion that had a name.
The viridian sky wasn't the world—it was the prison wall, and it was cracking because the prison was failing, because whatever had been done to preserve them was breaking down, because nothing lasts forever, not even crystallized eternity.
The beings trapped inside were insects in amber, conscious and aware and helpless, and some part of Gwen understood with horrifying clarity that they were still there, still trapped, still aware, experiencing every moment of their imprisonment in a state that might last for eons.
What did this? she thought, searching the vision for answers. What trapped them like this? What has the power to crystallize an entire world?
But the vision gave no answers, just showed her the prison failing and the desperate final push to send the fragments away before everything ended or began again or transformed into something worse.
The vision cut.
Abruptly. Completely. Like a signal severed mid-broadcast, like someone had unplugged a television in the middle of a crucial scene.
Gwen was left with silence—not the silence of death but the silence of absence, of something that had simply stopped existing, and she didn't know if what came next was extinction or transformation or something that had no human equivalent.
She didn't know if it had already happened eons ago or was happening right now or hadn't happened yet, if she was seeing the past or the future or some kind of eternally present moment that existed outside of time.
She didn't know anything except that she was drowning, dissolving, the edges of herself blurring and bleeding into the cosmic static, and if she didn't pull back right now she would scatter completely, would become part of the vision and never return, would lose the concept of Gwen forever.
No.
The thought was bone-deep reflex, animal survival instinct, the desperate clawing need to remain herself even if it was selfish, even if it meant turning away from something vast and terrible and important.
Gwendolyn Crane. Fifteen. Dad. Dead. Mom. Birdie. Pennsylvania. Funeral. I am myself I am myself I am myself—
She clawed the shards of her identity back together piece by piece, scraped them up from the static and forced them into something resembling a coherent whole, and with a gasp that tore her throat raw she was back—
—kneeling in the clearing with dead leaves pressing patterns into her knees and her hand jerked back from the rock like she'd been burned. She was shaking so violently her teeth chattered, and her heart was slamming against her ribs like it was trying to escape her chest.
The world snapped back into focus wrong—too bright, too loud, too present—and for a horrible moment the clearing overlaid itself with viridian sky, the bare Pennsylvania earth flickering like a faulty hologram to reveal that crystallized alien landscape beneath.
She could still feel the cold-that-wasn't-temperature crawling through her veins, could taste copper and ash coating her tongue, and her vision swam as her brain struggled to process being back in a body, back in three dimensions, back in linear time.
The taste was still there—copper and burnt sugar and ash and salt and the overwhelming flavor of a world dying—and she swallowed convulsively but it was woven into her the same way the grape juice taste from her father's dying had been, permanent and inescapable, a stain on her consciousness that would never fully wash away.
She sat back hard on the frozen ground, her dress soaked through with damp, and just breathed, in and out, in and out, reminding herself of the basic mechanics of being alive and present and here.
The rock sat there on the bare earth, gray and ordinary and still, and she stared at it with a mixture of terror and awe because now she knew what it really was.
Not just a rock. Not just a fragment of something alien.
A memory. A recording. A piece of their crystallized prison that had broken off and been flung into space, carrying with it the last desperate message of a dying civilization, and somehow—impossibly, inexplicably—it had ended up here, on Earth, in Pennsylvania, in a clearing behind a funeral home, waiting for someone who could taste what it held.
Waiting for her.
The beings in the vision haunted her, their terror and desperation seared into her consciousness, but she didn't know what they were or whether they were victims or monsters, didn't know if the prison that held them was justice or cruelty or something that transcended both concepts entirely.
All she knew for certain was that they'd been dying—were dying, had been dying, would always be dying in that frozen crystallized moment—and they'd tried with everything they had to send something away, to preserve something, to accomplish one final desperate act before the end.
And now one of those fragments sat three feet away from her, humming with ancient memory.
Are you still dying? she thought at the rock. Or are you already dead? Or are you trapped in some state between the two that I don't have words for?
The rock, as always, said nothing at all.
Gwen sat there in the gathering darkness for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, shaking uncontrollably from cold and shock, tasting ash and salt and a grief that didn't belong to her but had somehow become part of her anyway, before she finally managed to get her legs under her and stand.
She couldn't leave it here. That was the only clear thought in her head—she couldn't leave it sitting in this clearing where anyone might find it, where someone without her gift might touch it and have their mind shattered by visions they couldn't process, where it would just sit broadcasting its signal into the void forever.
She pulled at the torn hem of her funeral dress—it was already ruined anyway—and used the fabric to wrap the rock carefully, and even through the cloth she could feel its cold seeping into her skin, could feel it humming with that low alien frequency that resonated in her bones.
She held it against her chest like something precious or dangerous or both, and stumbled out of the clearing on legs that barely supported her weight, crashed through the undergrowth without caring about the branches that whipped her face or the thorns that tore new holes in her already-destroyed stockings.
She burst from the tree line gasping and wild-eyed, her vision still half-overlaid with that sick viridian sky, her lungs burning as she gulped air that tasted blessedly normal—pine and snow and car exhaust—after the alien flavors that had filled her.
Night had fallen completely while she'd been in the clearing, and the funeral home's lights blazed like a beacon of the mundane world she'd left behind. Cars were leaving now, people streaming out into the parking lot with relief evident on their faces because the performance of grief was finally over and they could go home.
But Gwen couldn't go home yet, couldn't face her mother or Birdie or anyone else, not with the rock humming against her chest and the taste of a dying world still coating her tongue.
She found her mother's old Honda in the parking lot and climbed into the back seat and just sat there in the dark, holding the wrapped rock and trying to remember how to be human.
Eventually—she had no idea how much time passed—the passenger door opened and Birdie slid into the front seat. Gwen could smell cigarette smoke and coffee and the mint gum she always chewed to cover the tobacco.
"Where've you been?" Birdie asked, her voice carefully neutral. When she turned to look at Gwen, her eyes went sharp and focused. "What happened to you?"
Gwen looked down at herself properly for the first time—her dress was torn and muddy, her stockings shredded, her arms covered in scratches, and she was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm.
"I found something," she said, and her voice came out hoarse and broken. "In the woods. I don't—I don't know what it is but I saw—"
The words stuck in her throat because how could she possibly explain what she'd seen, how could she make Birdie understand the dying world and the crystallized prison and the beings that had sent fragments of themselves into the void.
"Show me," Birdie said, and it wasn't a request.
Gwen unwrapped the rock with trembling fingers and held it out. Birdie stared at it for a long moment without touching it, and the expression on her face was something Gwen had never seen before—recognition mixed with fear mixed with something that might have been awe.
"That's not from here," Birdie said finally, her voice rough and low. "Not from anywhere on Earth."
"How do you know?" Gwen asked, even though she already knew the answer.
"Because I've tasted thousands of emotions, thousands of human traces over decades of living with this gift," Birdie said, still staring at the rock. "And that—" she gestured at it without getting any closer, "—that is something else entirely."
"I touched it," Gwen admitted. "I saw things. A whole world dying. Beings I couldn't see but I could feel them, could taste their terror, and they were trapped somehow, crystallized, and they sent these fragments away before—" she stopped because her voice was breaking, "—before everything ended."
Birdie was quiet for a long moment, and when she finally spoke her voice was careful and measured. "What you saw in that rock—those are echoes, recordings, memories trapped in stone. Not active presences. At least, not yet." She paused, her gaze intense. "But Gwen, our gift isn't just about tasting human emotions. It's about tasting consciousness itself. Every feeling, every intention, every trace of awareness that touches this world. And you—" she looked at Gwen with something that might have been pride or might have been fear, "—you're stronger than I ever was. You can taste things I never could reach."
"Is that bad?" Gwen asked, and she was crying now, tears running down her dirty face, because she didn't want to be special or different or strong, she just wanted her father back and her life to make sense again.
"I don't know," Birdie admitted with brutal honesty. "Most Crane women go their whole lives only tasting human things. Only experiencing the spectrum of earthly emotions. But you—you're in territory no Crane woman has ever walked before. And I can't protect you from what I don't understand."
She reached out and carefully—so carefully—closed Gwen's fingers around the wrapped rock. "But I can teach you everything I know. Starting tomorrow. How to build walls strong enough to survive what you taste. How to filter the noise. How to stay yourself when the world is screaming at you from every direction."
"What do I do with it?" Gwen asked, looking down at the wrapped rock in her hands. "I can't just—I can't keep it. I can feel it even through the fabric. It's like it's calling out constantly."
"We'll figure something out," Birdie said. "For tonight, wrap it in something else. Multiple layers. Maybe that'll muffle it enough."
They drove home in silence. Mom was already there, passed out on the couch with an empty wine bottle on the floor beside her, and neither Gwen nor Birdie mentioned it, just stepped carefully around her and went their separate ways.
In her room, Gwen stood staring at the rock wrapped in her torn dress hem, feeling its hum even through the fabric, and she knew that simply wrapping it wasn't going to be enough.
She needed something that could contain it, something that could hold back whatever signal it was broadcasting, something—
Her eyes landed on the jewelry box sitting on her bookshelf.
Her father had made it for her tenth birthday, carved from oak and sanded smooth, stained a rich honey color and polished until it gleamed. He'd done it with his carpenter's hands that were patient and precise and full of love.
"For my girl," he'd said when he gave it to her, his smile wide and genuine and completely present in a way he'd never be again. "To keep your treasures safe."
She'd filled it with small precious things over the years—a friendship bracelet from Melissa in fourth grade, a movie ticket stub from the first time she'd gone to the cinema alone, a photo of her and her father at Miller's Pond, both of them squinting into the sun and grinning.
She hadn't opened it since he got sick because the smell of the varnish—once a comfort—had become a taunt, a reminder of everything they'd lost, of the man he'd been before the cancer had butchered him into something unrecognizable.
But now, holding this impossible alien thing and desperately needing somewhere to put it, she finally understood what her father's last gift was really for.
She opened the box with trembling hands and the hinges creaked softly. Her childhood looked back at her from inside—the bracelet and the ticket stub and the photo where her father still had all his memories and his strength and his future stretching ahead.
She picked up the photo carefully and studied his face, young and strong and completely unaware of what was coming, and she could almost taste that day at the pond—sunshine and clean water and the simple uncomplicated joy of skipping stones together.
I miss you, she thought, and the grief was so sharp and immediate that it stole her breath. I miss you so much it tastes like rust and salt and everything ending.
She set the photo aside gently and moved the other treasures carefully to make space in the center of the box. Then she unwrapped the rock and placed it there, nestled among the mundane artifacts of her childhood where it looked profoundly, impossibly wrong—alien and vast and ancient against the honey-colored wood.
The moment she closed the lid, everything changed.
The oppressive weight that had been pressing down on her consciousness lifted like a hand releasing its grip. The cold alien presence that had been broadcasting its constant signal dampened to almost nothing, reduced to a barely-there whisper that she could only sense if she concentrated.
The box contained it somehow, held it, muffled whatever frequency it was broadcasting. Gwen realized with a mixture of awe and grief that her father's last gift was protecting her from something he never could have imagined, something he never could have known existed when he'd carefully crafted this box with his carpenter's hands.
She ran her fingers over the smooth wood and felt the grain beneath her touch, traced the careful joints and the precision of the work, and whispered "Thank you" to the empty room, to her father's ghost, to the box itself, to whatever strange alchemy of craft and love had made it strong enough to hold a fragment of a crystallized world.
She set the box on her desk deliberately away from her bed, away from where she would sleep, and climbed under her covers still wearing her destroyed funeral clothes because she didn't have the energy to change.
Sleep came slowly, and when it did she half-expected nightmares about dying worlds and crystallized prisons, but instead she dreamed of her father teaching her to skip stones at Miller's Pond, his hand warm over hers, his voice patient as he explained about finding flat rocks and flicking your wrist just right.
"Feel that weight, baby?" he said in the dream, and his smile was real and untouched by pain. "Now let it go."
She woke to morning light streaming through her window and the sound of Birdie's voice downstairs, sharp and no-nonsense as she talked to Mom about something Gwen couldn't quite hear.
The jewelry box sat on her desk, innocent and honey-colored and full of terrible secrets, and Gwen could still feel the rock inside it, muffled but present, humming its ancient song.
She got dressed and went downstairs to find Birdie sitting at the kitchen table with coffee and cigarettes, and the look she gave Gwen was assessing and fierce.
"We start today," Birdie said without preamble. "No more waiting. You need to learn control before something else happens, before you touch something you can't come back from."
"Okay," Gwen said, because what else could she say.
"The rock stays in that box," Birdie continued. "Don't touch it again. Don't even think about touching it. Not until you're stronger. Not until you understand what you're capable of and how to protect yourself."
"How will I know when I'm strong enough?" Gwen asked.
Birdie's smile was thin and humorless. "You won't. But I'll teach you everything I can, and then—if the time comes when you need to touch it again—at least you'll have a chance of surviving what it shows you."
And so it began.
The training that would consume the next four years of Gwen's life, that would teach her to build walls strong enough to survive the emotional noise of the world, that would prepare her for things neither of them could predict.
But that first morning, sitting at the kitchen table with her grandmother while her mother slept off her grief upstairs, Gwen just held her coffee and tasted its clean bitter simplicity and tried not to think about the rock in the jewelry box upstairs.
Tried not to think about the beings that had sent it here.
Tried not to wonder if they were still dying, still trapped, still conscious in their crystallized prison.
Tried not to feel the weight of being chosen—though for what purpose, she still had no idea.
The rock hummed quietly in its honey-colored box, patient and alien and full of ancient memory.
Waiting for something.
Calling to something.
And Gwen, fifteen years old and mourning her father and tasting ash and copper on her tongue, understood with cold certainty that this was only the beginning.
That whatever those beings had sent into the void, whatever message they'd encoded in fragments of their dying world, it wasn't finished broadcasting yet.
And somehow, impossibly, she was part of it now.