The world began to break.

Time began to warp in random pockets, slowing and speeding in small degrees at first, almost unnoticeable, then growing in intensity. Cars paused, then sped out of control, crashing into buildings, other cars, people. Birds seemed to freeze in mid-air, their wings moving ever so slowly, above madly rushing crowds. Collisions happened in excruciating slow-motion - people watched as drivers and passengers and pedestrians were crushed and broken in stages that stopped and started.

The screaming began.

Anything terrestrial with sentience of any kind - people, animals, trees - one of God's favorite inventions which everyone seemed to underestimate - began to forget what they were doing and why they were doing it.

They began to forget who they were.

Or how they were.

And finally, they began to forget what they were.

Margaret, a elementary teacher in a small town along the coast of north Cornwall, stopped in the middle of her class, finger raised in order to make a very important point.

She forgot the point.

She forgot her name.

She forgot how to stand.

Margaret fell to the floor and made strange, guttural noises as her body jerked and rolled, no longer familiar with the standard expression of the human form.

When figures circled her, with large heads, huge staring orbs, and small colorful limbs with thin protuberances stretched out in aid, she began to scream.

One of the forms echoed her scream, as others moaned and cried and laughed, and they stepped on her face and throat until she stopped screaming.

And stopped being.

Five hundred people, enjoying a concert in Madrid, ceased to exist in the middle of the third song, as the band, drunk on their first stadium gig, played with increasing intensity - an intensity that surpassed the bounds of regular time and began to eclipse the speed of sound. The percussive explosiveness of their motions blew out the lungs of everyone in the first four rows of seats, and more audience members died gasping, surrounded by air.

The band did not notice.

A surfer, enjoying the best wave of his life on the Gold Coast of Australia, fell off of his board, into the water.

He sank, staring at his new, blurry world, as a shark swam past his writhing form and beached itself vigorously on the soft sand.

They both tried to breathe what they couldn't, and died in confusion and disappointment.

The time warping began to cause earthquakes as accelerated sections of earth slammed into crawling patches, and a fifty square mile patch of African savanna liquefied completely - swallowing villages, animals, and tourists in the space of fifteen minutes.

Several airplanes crashed when the pilots and half the cabin crew started shrieking at everything in sight - the controls, their hands, their skin, and the other creatures making terrible sounds around them. Another four were rescued with frantic calls to control towers by flight attendants, pilots in training, and in one, by a young man named Brett, who used to fly an old crop duster on his dad's farm.

Air patterns, accelerated and slowed drastically, shifted weather in extremes all over the globe. Cannonball-sized hail fell on a four-block section of a suburb of Topeka, destroying every house within, as a tornado touched down in the middle of New York City, devouring a single sky scraper on 55th Street between 6th and 7th Avenue before the skies cleared, then thickened, then dumped two feet of snow, which quickly froze solid.

The blending began.

A stripper in a club in Chicago, writhing before the early crowd, felt herself as the three men enjoying the view. They in turn felt themselves as the performer, exposing themselves suggestively for their own entertainment. They worried about their child at home, their wives at work and the divorce that was going through that Friday, and wondered if their next paycheck would be the one that would finally pull them out of this shithole, away from their own desperate gazes, and onto better things. Their thoughts began to echo, endlessly, between their blended souls, and they jerked and danced and screamed until one of the men's heart went into arrest, and they all collapsed dead.

Azrael was groaning, her being stretched thin, ferrying souls to Heaven or Hell from growing clusters all over the Earth as she flew with her brother to intercept the Third.

The signature of the god was evasive, dragging them back and forth as she struggled to focus on the task while drowning under so many others.

The disruption was tearing her apart. The unnaturalness of the world's breaking was breaking her.

The true horror were the souls that simply dissipated as she enveloped them - their substance loosening to such a degree that they fell apart with no memory, no name, no future or past. They became nothing at all. She was left holding onto her own memory of them, burning it into her being as a desperate attempt to hold onto something of what they were.

Brother she moaned in a sound of shattering discordant tones, I can no longer fly

Samael drew her in, and his broad wings stretched out against the air as they soared above an empty plain, where the Third clearly was not. Where now, sister?

Back, she whispered. Back to the city. He is playing with us.

He twisted effortlessly and they sped back the way they had come. She let herself go, stretching herself out further, enveloping the Earth as it shed so many souls from its back, and the smallest part of her stayed corporeal with her brother, waiting to pass on the final place she knew the Third would be.

When she finally had it, it made terrible sense.

He wasn't teasing them away any more, which meant he was finally ready for them.

Which meant everything she was a part of was about to end.

Whispering the location to Samael with tears in her eyes, she studied his face for one single startling moment, burning his beautiful essence into herself for what she felt sure would be the last time.

Then she fell through his arms and shifted into her true form, that no one but her Creator could see.

And ferried the ever-growing dead.

Hello! I realize that a little apocalypse isn't the most welcome thing in the middle of a pandemic. But it's happening in the story and I'm not sure how I can downplay it.

I have just finished writing the big confrontation, and a wonderful moment just after. I can't wait to get to it and share it.

Please note, that things are about to get pretty dire. But, please also know that this is NOT a tragedy. Having gotten to the other side myself, I'm smiling :)

Not completely finished though. Lots of little wrap up chapters and moments, like I usually do. But I should be done this weekend. Thank God. I hope to post much more frequently now.

Thanks for reading, I hope you'll see it through, and if you have a moment, please leave a comment. Take care, everyone.