I have spent my professional life arguing that myths persist because they are mnemonic containers for fear—portable, repeatable warnings. Tonight, in the red fog, that thesis feels less academic and more like a confession.
The fog has weight. It presses against the eyes as if trying to be seen through me rather than by me. Visibility is a few meters at best, but sound travels in peculiar ways: a footstep blooms into a corridor; a whisper fractures into a crowd. I know the census numbers because I helped compile the emergency brief before the brief became a relic. Out of ten million in my sector, nine and a half are gone. Not confirmed dead. Missing. As if the land itself inhaled.
I am Dr. Tyler Patrick. I studied mythological apocalypses—the Floods, the Ragnaröks, the Kaliyugas—and taught my students that endings are rarely about annihilation. They are about conversion. About being changed into something else.
That is when I hear them.
They do not move like animals. Animals have urgency. These things have patience. The sound is a dry synchronization, a chorus of joints deciding to agree. When I speak—when I make the mistake of speaking—the sound stops.
“Hello?” My voice cracks, and the fog seems to thicken, as if pleased.
A reply comes back wrong. Not distorted—wrong. The cadence is mine, borrowed and returned with a subtle cruelty, like a joke told by someone who hates you.
“Doctor,” it says. “You called us minions.”
My mouth tastes like old copper. The old texts warned about true names, about address as invocation. I taught that as metaphor.
“I studied you,” I say, because scholars default to honesty even when honesty is a liability. “Or… things like you.”
There is movement now, silhouettes extruding from the fog as if sketched by a shaking hand. Limbs do not attach so much as negotiate. Faces exist only long enough to suggest that they could be faces if they wished. When they speak, it is not through mouths. The fog does it for them.
“We studied you back,” they say, and the plural carries a grin. “You made us small in your books.”
A figure steps closer. I can see the suggestion of eyes—too many possibilities competing in the same space. It tilts its head, performing curiosity with academic precision.
“You thought the Great Ending was a story,” it continues. “You taught that endings are metaphors.”
I think of the clay tablets, the marginalia, the apocrypha dismissed because it was inconvenient. The line I underlined in graduate school: The fog that eats the world listens before it takes.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“To finish the sentence,” they answer. “You left it incomplete.”
Something brushes my sleeve. Not a hand—an intent. My skin prickles as if my body is trying to remember how to be prey. I realize then that the missing are not gone in the way we mean. They are distributed. Diluted. Reassigned.
“You can still choose,” the fog says kindly. “You can describe us accurately.”
The terror is not that they will kill me. It is that they want a citation. That they want me to participate, to refine the myth so it will survive what comes next. I understand, with a scholar’s clarity, that the Great Ending is not an end at all. It is peer review.
I close my notebook. Not out of defiance. Out of fear that if I keep writing, I will get it right—and then there will be nothing left to argue with.