apocalypse
Erin
2
Erin remembers a world no one else can truly imagine anymore.
Not as stories told around firelight, warped by fear and time—but as truth. As breath and sky and noise. She remembers cities that hummed instead of groaned, nights that glowed instead of swallowed, and a world where the dead stayed buried. Now, at ninety-five years old, she is something rarer than food, rarer than safety—she is a witness.
The end did not come all at once. It crept. A sickness no one could name, no one could stop. Then came the turning. The dead rising, not as ghosts or myths, but as hunger wearing familiar faces. Within a decade, the lights went out. Within two, the world was unrecognizable. Eighty years later, silence still clings to the ruins.
Ninety-five percent of humanity vanished into that silence.
But not all.
The living endure. They always do. Scattered communities have taken root in the bones of the old world, clawing life from ash and rot. Children are born who have never known electricity, never heard a car engine, never seen a world without fear pressing at the edges. Humanity is growing again—slowly, stubbornly—but danger has not faded with time. The dead still walk. The wild has teeth. And memory is slipping away.
That is where Erin stands.
She is a Keeper of Tales—one of the last.
Not a storyteller for comfort, but a guardian against forgetting. She carries the Before in her mind with fragile precision: how people lived, what they built, what they lost. Names. Places. Mistakes.She speaks them so they are not erased, so the future has something more than survival to inherit.
Around her, her family stretches like roots anchoring her to the present. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren who listen as if the past were magic.
Perhaps it is.
Erin knows her time is thinning. Memory fades, even for those who fight to hold it. But as long as she breathes, the world that was will not vanish completely.
And as long as someone remembers… there is still hope.
remembrance
