A single day passed and citizens of Greyston City learned they were not alone in their tragedy.

Megalopolises. Towns. Farms. Small communities. Mountain villages. Ocean liners. Lost tribes. In the country and beyond.

Disappearing people wasn't an attack on the nation, no. A natural disaster akin to the black plague hit the world. While a relative number of missing people was small, just a fraction of a percent, it was millions of people overall. Millions of people – either genocide or statistic, depending on point of view. Mostly, it was young people who vanished, ages varying from mid-adolescence to early twenties. 

The tragedy was inevitable but indiscriminate it was not. The USA, Canada, and Mexico were hit the worst as if an epicenter. Other continents were struck twice, or even trice as weaker. Moreover, there were two very geographically contained exceptions with no such cases at all.

In Russia, a bright light coming from the sky of Syberia was reported on that day. A giant skyscraper-sized object, a flaming UFO roared above a small town and crashed in the nearby forest, provoking a small-scaled fire.

In China, millions of tai chi and qigong practitioners¹In China, it's part of the morning exercises for many people felt inflow of warm air into their bodies and experienced the awakening of inner strength.

Three events with different scales and long-term consequences, all in one day. Others soon followed.

September 5

A woman had once decided that she was a witch. History was in her family just that: history. Old books, old legends. The woman lacked guidance and care when she needed them. Once she believed in the old books nothing could change that. Insane most would say and would be right – the woman was certainly beyond their definition of sanity.

Then certain things had happened. Strange things. The woman spoke with ghosts and learned their secrets, cured diseases with her strange, kinky rituals. Coincidences most would say and would be right. Nothing the woman had done went beyond common reasons. But she had gathered some momentarily lost souls around herself, or maybe simple doubters in common reasons.

Time passed and the once young and beautiful woman turned into an old woman with long white hair and dignified looks. A mother had come to her, mother with a baby boy so sick modern medicine had given him only ten years of life. A young mother desperate enough to seek a witch.

The old woman was asked to heal that time, which was fortunate since she never shied away from curses. She believed in being a witch, after all. Not good, not bad. There was no Wicca covens for hundreds of miles around, no one to label her. The old woman agreed to the young mother's request, gathered her grasses, a tongue of a frog, the blood of a virgin and who knows what else. She drew symbols of power in a circle, lit up candles, placed the baby inside, fed him with a witchcraft potion. She summoned winds, washed the boy with spring water. 

The world had changed. Soon the mother was crying happily, hugging her son.

The witch was looking at the sky with a strange smile and fires in her old saw-this-all eyes. Crackling silently.

She felt young again.

September 6

A fishing ship was cutting into waves of the Atlantic ocean, a shore of Iceland just two hundred meters behind the starboard. The captain intended to circle the island from the north-east, having picked a routine route. The weather was sunny and almost cloudless, in one word nice, and so the sailors' mood. No one on board had their relatives missing. The world's problems hardly mattered to working men who had to feed their families.

The ocean's turmoil and rocking water, therefore, caught them completely unprepared. It came suddenly, without howls of wind and torrents of rain, smashed into the port board, tilted the ship hard. Only years of experience saved the team from losing anyone to hostile depths.

Among hasty commands, swearings came up in abundance. The sailors were more surprised than scared and the ship scooped enough water to keep them occupied since no hatches were closed. The ocean turmoil didn't end there either, although not as strong anymore as at first, it was still trowing the ship up and down.

That they didn't notice at first was nothing strange.

Or that they didn't believe their eyes when they did notice.

The ocean was running away from the shores of Iceland, exposing rocks and sands that hadn't breathed the air for thousands of years. Shells were covering the naked bottom of the ocean, shells and occasional unlucky fish. The lowest tide of them all? Such a thought was an obvious one until one sailor didn't scream "The island is rising!" and indeed it was so.

Not only up. It was moving, visually turning around before the sailors' very eyes while their ship was escaping from the ocean floor with its fastest speed under a timely captain's command.

September 8

Not many were obvious to the world's changes in the past days. One of them, a bearded mountain climber exhaled cold rarefied air and glanced ahead. Myticas, the highest peak of Olympus, was awaiting for him to overcome the last two, maybe three hundreds of meters. In good weather, the mountain was friendly even to tourists who lacked special training, but he wasn't one of them.

This climber had lost his wife just a month ago. Faithless as he was, there was no deep meaning in him choosing mountain Olympus. Yet still, this ascent was not goalless. It was his spiritual journey in a sense so he had chosen no easy tourist path.

The man continued to climb up dully. A meter after a meter, one steady step followed by another.

The breeze pushed into his back. The climber ignored, but the wind got stronger fast and he frowned. The direction felt wrong. Upwards? And then, abruptly, the scenery altered entirely.

There was light.

Golden and lofty.

The peak disappeared in it; the man froze, overwhelmed. No, not just overwhelmed. The light had weight, hardness. It stopped all movements without any pressure, gently yet irresistible like a mother's embrace. The light eclipsed Myticas, shined onto surrounding lands.

The ground shifted and the climber subconsciously lowered his eyes. A staircase unnoticeably appeared, built from myriads of marble tiles. The light purged all shadows and dust. Far ahead, behind the brilliant but not blinding golden curtains, he distantly saw pure white outlines.

Walls of a temple? Palace? Or even town? No matter how hard he looked, the climber couldn't discern anything and felt desperate. Somehow, he knew: what he was seeing was going to change everything. His life or even...

A soft sigh entered his ears.

It swept over the world.

What had been lost long.

Erased and forgotten.

To the Earth's core and to the farthest stars.

What was dead, remained unliving.

Who was sleeping, saw new dreams,

Lingering through heartless time...