Maria

Civilization did not fall in a single night—it rotted, slow and festering, like a wound left to decay. No one remembers where the sickness began. Some blamed a lab, others a curse, but it changed nothing. The dead rose, and the living followed. One by one, cities dimmed until the last lights vanished over eighty years ago. Ninety-five percent of humanity disappeared into graves, ash, or hunger. Those who remain claw for survival, rebuilding in fragments while the dark presses closer each year. They say the dead are mindless—that nothing remains behind their eyes but hunger. They are wrong. Maria was twenty-one when she died. Too young, they said, as if there were ever a right age for the end of everything. She remembers the fever, the burning in her veins, the sound of her sister Erin’s voice breaking as she held her hand. Death came softly. It felt like mercy. But it did not last. Eighty years later, Maria still walks. She remembers warmth. Laughter. Hope. Those memories cling to her like fading echoes, dim but unbroken, even as hunger gnaws endlessly at what remains of her soul. She is not the mindless horror the living fear—not entirely. Something within her endured. Something human. She has watched Erin grow old. Watched her sister’s bloodline survive a world that should have swallowed it whole. Generations have come and gone, but Maria remains—silent, unseen. A sentinel in the dark. When the dead gather, she turns them aside. When the living falter, she shifts the balance just enough to keep them breathing. She does not speak. She cannot. But she is always there—a shadow woven into her family’s survival. Through Erin, they endured. Through her children, and theirs after. And Maria will remain—hungry, hollow, and unyielding—to make sure it never ends.