The year was 2029, in the bitter gut of January. Civil policeman Felix sat on the tram rattling toward the station where he worked. Outside, the city froze on its hinges. It was cold—colder than anything he had ever known—perhaps the coldest day Gothenburg had tasted since February second, 1966, when even the sky itself seemed to have frozen mid-breath.
Felix had armored himself in four winter coats, five pairs of pants, looking for all the world like some Finnish soldier half-returned from the Winter War of 1939, trudging forever through snowdrifts of memory. His breath spilled across his hands in white ghosts.
“God, it’s cold,” he muttered, voice half-lost in the tram’s cavern. “Wouldn’t surprise me if Gothenburg turned into a brand-new South Pole before long.”
Again he breathed on his hands, once, twice, a third time, before tucking them down into his pockets as if into graves.
The tram rocked. Moonlight lay high and white on the black January sky, the hour so early it was still half-night. The tram was nearly empty, save for two drunken boys laughing in the back like hollow bottles rolling on cobblestones. Felix eyed them but let them be. Noise wasn’t a crime.
He blew on his hands again. The fingers had gone dark blue, stiff as statues of themselves. He imagined frostbite, the surgeon’s saw, the stumps of Winter War veterans. He shuddered, clenching and unclenching his fists.
He thought of leaping off at the next stop, diving into the first Pressbyrån kiosk, basking in the cheap oven heat. But the speaker barked first, loud as the voice of God:
“NEXT STOP, BERZELIIGATAN!”
Felix shifted. Yes, Berzeliigatan. Halfway between Valand and Korsvägen. A perfect place to escape the cold, sneak into the City Library and thaw. He began to rise—
And then she boarded.
A woman. Nothing strange in that—trams are meant for strangers climbing aboard. But this woman... she drew his eyes upward with a start.
She was tall. Unnaturally tall. Two full meters, her head nearly brushing the tram’s roof. Round glasses, Harry Potter glasses, huge and ridiculous, swallowed half her face. She wore a black, fabric peplum coat that fell to her knees, black as midnight water.
What unsettled Felix most was not her height nor her glasses, but the fact she did not shiver. In this deathly cold, she was untouched, as if frost itself bowed to her.
She lowered herself onto the seat near the pole Felix clutched. Her lips were straight as a scar. Her eyebrows, thin as sewing needles, hardly moved. She seemed absent, as if her mind had gone walking elsewhere. He wondered: drugged? But then she lifted her iPhone, scrolling like any other mortal, and the thought of heroin scattered.
Felix remembered—his stop. He began walking down the narrow corridor of the tram.
Then—
TICK. TOCK.
TICK. TOCK.
TICK. TOCK.
A sound. Subtle at first, then louder. Not from the tram, not from the clock on his wrist, but from her bag—her black, black briefcase resting at her feet.
He stopped, ears straining. It wasn’t the clean tick of a wristwatch. No, this was rasping, broken, like an old alarm clock half-burned in a toaster, each note grating against his bones.
Felix’s chest tightened. He thought of terror. Of bombs. Of crowds torn apart. Was this tall woman with her owl-glasses a terrorist? Was she planning to scatter blood and glass across Gothenburg’s steel veins?
He approached. The ticking grew louder.
TICK. TOCK.
TICK. TOCK.
TICK. TOCK.
He tapped her shoulder. Nothing. She swam deeper into her phone’s glow. He tapped harder.
“Excuse me, miss. May I speak with you?”
She looked up. Her glasses swallowed her face, her eyes magnified until they seemed unearthly.
“Yes?”
“What have you got in that briefcase?” His finger pointed, steady as law itself.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t? Why not?”
“My superior forbids it. What lies inside is dangerous.”
Felix’s eyes narrowed. “A bomb? Some timed device? You’ll hand it over, if that’s the case.”
Her brow furrowed. The rebuke in her face was sharp as a knife.
“As I said, I cannot reveal it. If I disobey orders, I lose my position.”
“And who is this superior of yours?”
“That too is secret.”
Felix planted his fists on his hips. His breath clouded between them.
“My name is Felix Vinterfors. I am civil police. My duty is to protect the public from harm. If you conceal a dangerous article, you must surrender it. That is the law. Refuse, and you risk charges of defiance against an officer. Now—open the case. Show me what you hide.”
The woman sighed, long and weary.
“Very well. But know this, policemen—you are all bastards sometimes. Real bastards who can—”
“Mind your tone,” Felix snapped.
With reluctance, she opened the case. Her long arm slid inside and withdrew something that gleamed, heavy and strange.
Felix caught his breath.
It was an hourglass. But no ordinary hourglass.
A ball of iron, round as a bowling sphere, latticed with buttons that glowed faintly. Inside, the sand was not sand at all, but gravel, black and jagged, falling grain by grain. And it ticked. Louder now.
TICK. TOCK. TICK. TOCK. TICK. TOCK.
“What in God’s name is that?” Felix whispered.
“An hourglass.”
“I can see that!” Felix barked, angered by the obvious. “But what sort of hourglass?”
She leaned in. Her voice dropped low.
“Not a harmless one. This hourglass is very, very dangerous.”
Felix laughed—short, sharp, nervous. “Dangerous? That? Why, it’s a toy! A contraption!”
She did not laugh. Her eyes burned.
“My name is Sofia Drakholm. I work for an organization tasked with infiltrating the darkest of criminal networks. Arms dealers. Terror cells. Killers who would sell fire to devils. My duty: slip inside their dens, discover their creations, steal them, destroy them before they burn the world. This is one such weapon.”
Felix’s laughter faltered.
“So that—thing—is a weapon?”
She nodded. Her mouth was a thin blade.
“If this hourglass touches stone, brick, concrete—anything solid—it detonates. And the blast will not only erase you and me. It will erase the world. This, officer, is the most dangerous weapon since Hiroshima’s fire.”
“And you know this how?”
“I heard it with my own ears, hiding in the manufacturer’s lair. Their workers spoke of it. Said it was the perfect tool to wipe out mankind. I struck them down, took the device, fled.”
“Who were these men? Who was their leader?”
She hesitated. “They looked human. Dressed human. But their eyes—no pupils, shifting color every third second. Not men at all, perhaps. Aliens, officer. Aliens.”
Felix recoiled. Suspicion curdled to anger. His pulse hammered.
“You expect me to believe that fairy tale? Hourglass-bombs, alien chemists, shadow organizations?” He sneered. “You’ve got no identification, no proof. All I see is a woman with a ticking iron ball. A threat.”
He reached. “I’ll take it. Now.”
Sofia twisted, clutching the sphere to her chest.
“You mustn’t! If it drops, if it breaks—everything ends!”
“Spare me your theatrics!” Felix roared. “You sound exactly like a terrorist.”
He lunged, seizing her bag. She fought back—stronger than he’d guessed. They grappled in the aisle, bodies crashing against the seats as the tram swayed. The hourglass slipped, fell, struck the floor.
TICK. TOCK. TICK. TOCK. TICK. TOCK.
And then—
BOOM.
But it was no ordinary explosion.
The hourglass did not merely burst. It unstitched the universe.
A roar shook Gothenburg to its bones. Then came the light—not white, not fire-orange, not blood-red, but a gray so absolute it ate color from the world. Time itself cracked.
A wave rolled outward. Houses folded like paper. Cars shriveled into knots of metal. People froze mid-step, mid-breath, and disintegrated into shadows of ash. Bridges bent, trees shrieked, the Göta Älv Bridge snapped like a toy.
And in the sky, the first black hole yawned open.
Above Avenyn, a swirling maw rimmed with electric blue tore reality as a saw tears wood. The heavens shattered. More holes bloomed—eyes opening in the fabric of the world.
The sun iced over. Oceans were swallowed. Earth’s guts were torn through, spewed back out as vapor.
Felix saw it all.
Or rather, his soul did. His body lay broken on the tram floor, but his mind floated free, dragged upward to witness apocalypse. He saw colleagues, friends, faces from childhood—snatched away into eternal night. He saw earth itself fold inward, swallowed.
Then silence.
Not silence of sound, but silence of existence. The silence before creation.
No stars. No time. Only void.
Yet something remained.
Felix. Or what was left of him.
His awareness drifted, bodiless, eternal, condemned to float in a vacuum of nothing. No life, no death, no escape.
And others drifted too. Thousands of souls, weightless, ruined echoes of humanity.
Then—her voice.
“I hope you’re satisfied.”
He turned. Sofia Drakholm hovered before him, her eyes shards of judgment.
“Because you would not listen, because you chose pride over reason, you ended everything. Tell me, Felix—how does it feel? To know you destroyed the world?”
Felix’s mouth opened. No words came. No breath. He was nothing, yet still alive enough to ache.
The worst was not the destruction.
The worst was not the ash of billions.
The worst was knowing the end had worn his own fingerprints.
Felix Vinterfors had ended the world.
And that knowledge was heavier than eternity itself91Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXawTiVKacb
and then Add to home screen.