Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights

CHAPTER 37: Fallout

(Author's Note: Strap yourselves in, everyone. Consider this a TRIGGER WARNING for scenes of intense emotional trauma, and prepare yourselves accordingly.

Also: please be sure to check out Mirror Shards, a new Shattered Skies recursive fanfiction by Storyteller222, which follows his Precure OC Kyoko as she experiences the aftermath of Dead End's war on reality. Mirror Shards isn't strictly necessary to enjoy Shattered Skies, of course, but it's a different perspective on the story... one which has my full approval, and which I'm glad to collaborate on. You can find it here on or on his DA page at deviantart.com-slash-ArtIdiotGuy222.

Also also: no, you're NOT hallucinating, I have indeed changed the story's title. Keep reading, there is an explanation.

Also also also: Remember, comments are an author's food pellets! Share the love, and consider helping me make more stuff by donating to paypal.me/bhsdesk or to my Patreon at patreon.com/tasakeru. For the latter, you now can get your name into my YouTube videos for as little as a $2 pledge [/plugplugplug]

And with that lengthy author's note out of the way, here is the sixteenth and final chapter of Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights Act II...)

Chapter 37: Fallout

At the end of the day you're another day older

And that's all you can say for the life of the poor

It's a struggle, it's a war

And there's nothing that anyone's giving

One more day standing about

What is it for?

One day less to be living!

Crossroads

The Lighthouse

Ten minutes after the Time Crash

There was silence all around.

What was there to say? How could anyone possibly react? The magnitude of the destruction Fantine described was beyond comprehension. One timeline's planet Earth was home to roughly eight billion people, already a figure impossible to visualize. Multiply that by at least ten, and again by the untold possible futures for each Facet... There were no numbers high enough. Billions times billions times billions of lives, erased in a matter of minutes. Men, women, children, animals. Entire worlds, and all the worlds connected to those worlds. It was extinction on a scale that could not be conceived by human minds.

There was silence all around. What was there to say? How could anyone possibly react?

None of them knew how much time passed before someone made a sound. "It's—" The voice was so choked with grief that it took them all a moment to realize that it came from Nagisa Misumi, Cure Black. She shook where she stood, looking like a lost child, small and alone. "I-It's gotta be a mistake," she said. "It can't... it can't be real. It can't be."

"I'm so sorry," said Fantine again, well aware of how impotent those words were.

Black's legs buckled beneath her. They simply refused to support her weight any longer. The look in her eyes—the hollow, broken stare of someone trying and failing to make sense of an unimaginable tragedy—would linger in the minds of everyone who saw it. It was as if she could see beyond the Crossroads, beyond the Lighthouse, beyond reality itself... as if she could see each and every one of the countless victims of Joker's cruelty.