AI art is getting better. I wrote this story with ai with me providing the foundation and guideance, and had the AI generate art for it. It is original fan fiction based very loosely with the game once human with all original characters.
Once Human: The Dawn of StarfallThe sky over the Greywater Industrial Zone had always been clear—or so Elias remembered. Golden light, filtered through perpetual industrial haze, once painted the sprawling factories in late afternoons, softening their sharp-edged silhouettes.
Freight trucks rumbled across paved roads, their tires drumming a rhythm workers felt through their boots. Turbines thrummed beneath the zone's foundations, a pulse you ignored until it stopped. The air carried its own signature: metallic tang of grease, sharp bite of ozone from the Ricci Securement Point, and beneath it all, the oddly comforting smell of hot concrete baking in the sun.
Greywater had been Nalcott's beating heart.
No longer.
The sky fractured when the rift opened three days ago. Now Greywater was a corpse.
Stardust fell in shimmering torrents from wounds torn in reality itself. The droplets chimed as they struck—beautiful and wrong. Where they touched, the world rewrote itself in languages not meant for human comprehension.
Towers that once scraped the heavens lay broken, their frames pulsing with slow, organic corruption. The river glowed with sickly light, its surface writhing as if something vast moved beneath.
"Don't stop," Elias urged, pulling Mira through the ruins. Her hand trembled in his grip, bird-bone fragile.
She's all I have left, he thought. Three days ago, he'd been thirty-two and ordinary—a shift foreman at Greywater's factories, following routines his father once oversaw. Now he stood between his nine-year-old sister and the unmaking of the world.
They stepped past bodies. Some torn apart in violence he understood. Others warped into geometries that made him look away—still moving, still breathing in ways that shouldn't exist.
Elias tightened his grip on Mira's hand and raised his arm to shield her eyes, trying to block the worst of it. She doesn't need to see this, he thought, though he knew she'd already seen too much.
The air tasted wrong. Every breath left metallic residue on his tongue. Sometimes, he swore, he could taste colors bleeding through from the rift.
Behind them, the horizon pulsed green. Whispers carried on the wind—prayers, panicked cries, and beneath them, a name that bypassed the ears and etched itself directly onto the mind: Manibus.
The word made Elias's chest constrict. For a heartbeat, immense eyes turned toward him from beyond the rift. He was being noticed the way he might notice a single cell—catalogued, dismissed, but not forgotten. The sensation suddenly passed, leaving him gasping.
"I'm tired," Mira whispered.
He looked down and froze.
Light bent around her, reality trying on different versions of who she might become. For an instant she existed in triple exposure: the girl she was, something crystalline and beautiful, and something else that made him want to weep for what was being lost.
Then she was just Mira again. Nine years old. Frightened. His.
He knelt and brushed soot from her cheek. Her skin burned fever-hot, but when he pulled away, frost crystals clung to his fingers.
"Everything's okay," Elias said. "It's just a little further."
Everything's okay. The same lie their father told when Mom's cancer came back. Everything's okay, he thought bitterly. Before the treatments. Before Rosetta's promises. Their parents—mid-fifties, too old for hope but desperate enough to cling to it—had believed they could still be strong for both their children. The eldest already grown. The youngest just beginning.
They rounded a corner and froze.
A deviation blocked their path: machinery fused with flesh in ways that mocked both. Gears jutted from its torso, spinning without purpose as Stardust pulsed through exposed veins like neon. Its face was a vortex that devoured not just light, but the very act of seeing, leaving patches of pure un-sight.
The thing's presence made his teeth ache. His fillings sang in frequencies that shouldn't exist.
Elias seized a length of rebar and shoved Mira behind him. The creature tilted its head—disturbingly human—then lunged. Not forward, but through space, folding distance like origami. Claws shredded concrete where they'd stood.
He swung with desperate strength. Reality rippled at the impact, but the creature barely staggered. Its vortex-mouth widened, and the sound that poured out was more than noise—it was intent, trying to convince his bones to become something else.
The street erupted in flames.
A deafening explosion engulfed the creature, its inhuman scream swallowed by the blast. Elias shielded Mira as debris rained down.
Through dissipating smoke, figures emerged with military precision. Two flanked the area, weapons raised, while others advanced with guns crackling Stardust energy.
"Move," barked the woman at their center.
Her name was Cinder.
She led with brutal efficiency, her armor cobbled from salvaged materials and reinforced plating, bearing scars of countless battles. The faint Rosetta brand—an 'R' in a circle—peeked from beneath her frayed sleeve.
Elias recognized it, remembering the facility near his warehouse, the hushed conversations, rumors of strange experiments, sudden disappearances.
"You're lucky," Cinder said, voice sharp. "Most don't last five minutes in Greywater."
"We're not looking for luck," Elias replied, steadier than he felt.
"Good." Her gaze lingered on a tower bleeding Stardust. "Our luck ran out three days ago."
They moved cautiously through ruins where shadows flickered at vision's edge, every corner hiding potential horror. The zone had its own weather now—sudden pockets of winter, rain falling upward, shadows moving alone. Between these impossibilities came stretches of ordinary street where they could almost pretend.
During a pause in one such space, Cinder spoke.
"Deviations are evolving. Not just random corruption anymore—they're becoming deliberate." She stepped around a puddle reflecting the wrong sky. "The rift isn't just spewing chaos. It's rewriting reality itself. Rosetta thought they could control it. Project Mayfly was their answer."
Her fingers brushed hidden scars beneath her sleeve. "But they opened a door. Now something's coming through—piece by piece, rule by rule."
"Manibus," Elias said quietly.
Cinder's voice faltered. "You've felt it. That weight. Like being studied by something that sees in dimensions we can't imagine." She shook her head. "It's patient. Every deviation—every corruption—is just one of its fingers, learning how our world works."
Finally, Haven's squat silhouette appeared—an old processing plant transformed into fortress. Its walls bristled with makeshift defenses, automated turrets glowing faintly with repurposed Stardust energy.
Inside, survivors clustered at wary distances. Trust was dangerous when Stardust could change someone between heartbeats. The air reeked of unwashed bodies and fear—mercifully familiar.
Elias and Mira found a corner with threadbare blankets. For a moment, they simply breathed in a space that mostly obeyed physics. He tucked the blanket around her shoulders, though he knew it offered little warmth. She needs to feel safe, he thought, even if it's pretend.
"Do you think Mom and Dad made it?" Mira asked. New harmonics threaded her voice, crystallizing the air.
Elias hesitated. Their parents had been at Ricci when the rift opened. He'd seen the footage—the complex folding inward like origami made of architecture and screams. But Mira had been at school. She hadn't seen.
"They're strong," he lied again. "They'll be okay."
She nodded, but her eyes—already flecked with green—said she heard the lie.
The attack came in deep night, when human rhythms dipped lowest and reality's grip went slack.
Darkness roared with shrieking stone as a massive deviation breached the defenses, claws spreading Stardust corruption that turned concrete into crystalline growths singing alien frequencies.
"Tunnels! Now!" Cinder's voice cut through chaos.
She and her squad traded their lives for time, covering the survivors' retreat.
Elias half-carried Mira toward the maintenance hatch. Her skin burned against him, and where her feet touched ground, tiny flowers of crystallized light bloomed and crumbled.
As the last survivor disappeared below, Elias shouted: "Cinder! Get down here!"
She fired until the last possible moment, then dove. Elias dragged her through and slammed the hatch as claws—that were also hunger—shattered stone above.
The tunnels reeked of mold and stagnant water. After the chaos above, the stench felt like sanctuary.
They caught their breath in dripping darkness. Cinder checked her weapon; Elias held Mira close. Even here, she shimmered. Sparks danced between her fingers. Puddles near her reflected skies that didn't exist.
"What's happening to her?" Elias whispered, though part of him already knew. Rosetta had promised transformation before. Promised cures. Delivered horrors.
Cinder studied Mira with weary recognition. "Stardust exposure. Some die. Some become—" she gestured sharply upward, toward where the massive deviant had breached their defenses, "—those things." Almost as if to punctuate her statement, a heavy thud echoed through the tunnel, causing tendrils of dust to cascade down in the dim light.
"But some adapt differently," she continued, not even glancing up. "Rosetta called them Mayflies."
"Mayflies?" Elias asked.
"They can manipulate Stardust. Bend reality in small ways. See through its lies." She met his eyes, her expression unable to hide her pain at having to deliver what amounted to yet another death sentence. "But they burn bright and fast. She might last weeks." Taking a deep breath, she continued, "If she's strong and lucky, maybe a few months."
The words struck like physical blows. Elias pulled Mira tighter.
"But Mayflies aren't just victims," Cinder continued. "They're bridges. Your sister might understand what's happening in ways we can't. She might be the key to surviving this. Or ending it."
From the darkness, Mira's voice drifted—humming a melody that made tunnel walls resonate, shadows dancing to rhythms from elsewhere.
"I can hear them," she said softly, her voice echoing from impossible directions. "The stars. They're not falling. They're reaching. Trying to teach us a new way to be."
She turned to Elias, and for a moment looked ancient—something wearing a nine-year-old's face but seeing through eternities.
"Don't be scared. I'm still me. Just... more now." Her small hand found his, burning and freezing at once. "I can feel it watching—Manibus. It's curious about us. About what we might become."
Elias held her—his baby sister, his last family, now becoming something beyond comprehension. He thought of their parents, desperate enough to trust Rosetta's lies. Of his father teaching him the factory floor. Of his mother singing Mira to sleep. All of it belonged to a world already gone.
Above them, beyond the fractured sky, Manibus stirred—not a being but a concept learning to wear reality like a mask. Testing humanity the way a child tests a toy: seeing what bends, what breaks, what can be reshaped.
But in the tunnels beneath Greywater, a nine-year-old girl's hands sparked with stolen starlight, and her brother felt the first stirrings of something beyond defiance.
Understanding.
They would survive. They would adapt. And perhaps—if they were willing to pay the price written in Mira's veins—they could write a few rules of their own. Not to restore the old world—it was dead—but to shape what comes next.
—
In the tunnels beneath Greywater, a brother clings to his sister, a survivor bears the scars of betrayal, and a child burns with starlight that is both gift and curse. Their story is ours, echoed in every desperate stand and fleeting victory. For in this broken world, reality itself is the enemy—rewriting flesh, stone, and soul. Yet still, we fight. Season after season, we rise again, scavenging meaning from chaos, carving havens from ruin, daring to shape a future the stars themselves would deny us. We are the metahumans, Mayflies who live a brief but unyielding life, extracting hope from the ruins created by the dawn of Starfall.
