Sitting on a stolen throne in a place called Tartarus, a crown that wasn't his yet digging into his skull and a mountain of his own corpses sloping away into the dark below, Nhilly would try to remember the exact moment he'd agreed to disappear. He never could.
Some people had grand turning points. Blinding lights. Trumpets. Destiny arriving in a voice that shook the sky.
Nhilly had a cold beach, a cracked phone, and a bored call-centre worker on the other end of 444.
Maybe that was the funniest part.
The Constellations would say the story started much earlier—an asteroid, a portal, a world behind the sky. Historians would point to dates and charts. Philosophers would argue about fate.
But if you asked Nhilly, if you cut through the battles and crowns and monsters, he would tell you:
It began on a miserable morning when the world didn't bother to look at him at all.
Chapter 1 – Nhilly
A bitterly cold morning greeted the world, the kind of grey, vindictive chill that made normal people stay in bed, pull their duvets up to their noses and pretend hot cocoa could solve structural problems.
It was not, by any reasonable measure, beach weather.
And yet there he was.
A young man sat hunched in the sand, shoes off, socks stuffed into his coat pocket, toes going numb where the seawater occasionally reached too far. His face carried stress lines he hadn't earned the usual way—no mortgage, no children, no decades of office work—just the kind carved by sleepless nights and bad news that never stopped getting worse. Dark half-moons clung under his eyes like bruises that had decided to settle down.
He looked like the sea had washed him up, taken one good look, and decided it had enough problems.
He had come to the beach to disappear.
The thought had been circling for days. Not in the dramatic way people imagined—no last letters, no rooftop edges. Just a quiet, practical conclusion. Dissapants didn't get funerals. They didn't get long goodbyes. They just… went.
He pulled a battered phone from his pocket, the screen's glass a spiderweb of fractures. It showed the colourless sky and a bent strip of shoreline, but not him.
Appropriate, he thought.
He thumbed in three digits: 4-4-4.
The emergency line.
The one you called when you thought you were about to stop existing.
"I suppose going out this way is better than wasting away in a hospital, waiting," he muttered, mostly to the wind. It stole the words and tossed them aside.
While the tone rang, he let his free hand trail through the sand. Grains clung to his fingers, then slipped away as another wave rushed up, smudging the marks he'd made without even noticing they were there.
Even the beach refuses to hold onto me, he thought. Fitting.
Some lives ended in noise and fire. Some ended under white hospital lights, surrounded by family. His would end in silence, in a place where strangers walked their dogs and checked the weather app, unnoticed—like a breath swallowed by the wind.
The line clicked.
"Hello, Lloyd from the Dissapant Emergency Service speaking." The voice on the other end sounded tired in a practiced, professional way. "Please state your name, date of birth, location, and reason for calling."
There it was. The formality. The script.
"Uh. Nihilus Major," he said. The old name felt strange in his mouth, but it was still the one on the records. "Sixth of March, 2143. I'm twenty-two. I'm at Parkinson Beach. And I'm calling because I'm showing symptoms of becoming a Dissapant."
His voice surprised him. It sounded heavier than he felt. Or maybe he just felt nothing and the heaviness was all that was left.
"Are you sure?" Lloyd asked.
There it was again—that line between scepticism and concern. Ever since the disappearances had become a permanent part of the news cycle, people had been calling in over every stray migraine and bad dream. It was the kind of job that would make anyone suspicious by reflex.
"I'm sure," Nhilly said.
His reflection was gone. That was the thing you couldn't explain away with stress or paranoia. First it had faded around the edges, like someone was erasing him with a bad tool. Then one morning he'd stood in front of the bathroom mirror and there had been nothing there but tiles and toothbrushes and the towel he never remembered to fold.
One of the unmistakable signs. Final stages.
"Which symptoms are you experiencing?" Lloyd's voice shifted, registering something in Nihilus's tone. "Has a doctor confirmed—"
"My reflection's gone," Nhilly cut in. "Mirrors. Windows. Camera on this stupid phone. Nothing. It started three days ago. It's… pretty much gone now."
The only time he saw himself clearly anymore was in his head, and even there the image was starting to blur.
On the line, Lloyd exhaled. The lightness in his voice dropped away, replaced by something flatter, more careful.
"I see," he said. Keys clicked faintly in the background. "All right, Mr… Nihilus. We'll send an officer to retrieve you."
"Retrieve," Nhilly repeated, tasting the word. Not save. Not help. Retrieve. Like lost luggage.
"Standard procedure," Lloyd added quickly, as if he'd heard the thought. "They'll take you to an observation facility. You won't be alone."
That was supposed to sound comforting.
It didn't.
"Sure," Nhilly said. "I'll be here."
"As close to the water as you are now?" There was a hint of worry again. People did strange things, facing the end.
"Don't worry," Nhilly said. "I'm not going to walk in. I'm not that poetic."
A beat of silence.
"If you experience any… acceleration of symptoms, call back immediately," Lloyd said. "Someone will be on their way shortly."
The line went dead.
Nhilly lowered the phone and let it rest on his knee.
Shortly.
Time had stopped meaning anything sensible the day the doctor had told him what the fading reflection meant. Final Stage Dissapant. No known cure. No known pattern. The best anyone could offer was a bed in a white room and a slow countdown to a day nobody could circle on a calendar.
He preferred the beach.
He tucked the phone back into his pocket and tilted his head, watching the horizon. The sea rolled on, indifferent and patient, as if waiting to see whether this particular piece of flotsam stayed or vanished.
He was just one more name, one more entry in a database the world had been forced to build.
One more ripple in a tide that had started long before him.
To understand why a twenty-two-year-old sat on a freezing beach, waiting to be erased, you had to look back—past the cracked phone, past the empty reflection, past the quiet bureaucratic voice on 444—to the first time a star fell and refused to leave politely.
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In 2032, a small asteroid struck Earth.
It wasn't the apocalyptic kind from old disaster movies. No tidal waves swallowing continents, no dinosaurs to kill a second time. It hit in the middle of nowhere, burning up most of its fury in the atmosphere before the remainder punched a crater into a nameless stretch of desert.
Scientists descended on it in droves. A specialised team of astronomers and physicists set up camp around the impact site, intent on unravelling its mysteries. The news cycle called it "the most exciting rock in a generation" for about three days.
Then, one by one, the people who had come into contact with the asteroid began to disappear.
No bodies. No blood. No signs of struggle. They were simply… gone. One moment you were discussing readings over bad coffee; the next, your colleague's chair was empty and their mug was cooling beside an open notebook. Security footage showed nothing but static in the seconds it took for lives to erase themselves.
At first, it was contained to the research site. A tragic anomaly. An unexplained disaster. Governments argued over jurisdiction and funding. Conspiracy theories bloomed in the dark corners of the net.
Then it spread.
Technicians who had handled the samples vanished at home. Doctors who had examined early patients followed. Families of the missing, friends, anyone who had shared enough space and time with them began to go. The phenomenon pasted over borders, religions, languages, income brackets. It did not care who you were, only that you had been near the wrong person at the wrong time.
By 2042, the number of missing individuals had climbed past statistics and into horror.
Four hundred and ninety-seven million people vanished.
No graves. No certainty. Just lists.
They were given a name to make the numbers feel smaller, more manageable: Dissapants. A neat, clinical term that looked better in reports than "the almost-dead but not quite."
The world adapted in the way it always did when reality refused to make sense. New laws. New departments. New emergency numbers. Posters on buses explaining early symptoms. Insurance policies no one wanted to think about. Support groups for families who would never get to hold funerals.
Then, thirteen years after the first disappearance, a colossal, wormhole-like portal tore itself open in the sky above the Pacific.
It hung there for three days, a vast dark wound in the blue, shimmering at the edges like heat over asphalt. Every telescope on Earth swung toward it. Every news channel looped the same footage.
On the third day, something fell out.
A man.
He hit the ocean hard enough to break every bone in his body and survived anyway. He was fished out by a research vessel sent to study the anomaly. Once the doctors had cleaned the salt from his eyes and wired the fractures in place, they realised he was one of the missing—recorded as a Dissapant nine years earlier.
He hadn't aged a day.
His skin was whole. His hair the same length it had been in his last photo. But his eyes—
His eyes looked like he had watched the world end a few times and taken notes.
He refused to speak about where he'd been.
Reporters called him "the Returned." Governments called him "a security concern." Families of Dissapants called him hope.
The portal closed without explanation.
More would open.
More people would fall.
And one day, on a cold beach with bad weather and worse coffee, a young man named Nihilus would call 444 and find out exactly what kind of hell waited on the other side of vanishing.