There’s Drumming In The Clouds
PHASE I – The Arrival The photograph arrived without explanation. It showed some kind of mass. Dark grey and pulsating. It was hovering far above the North Atlantic. It resembled a cyclone but there was no eye of this storm, no rotation. Just layers. Like folds of gauze, stacked and suspended. The sky around it was eerily clear. That was the first impossibility. Dr. Mairead Finn saw the image at 6:32 a.m. It was forwarded to her personal account from an encrypted Ministry server. The subject line read only: “Come in. Immediately.” Dr. Finn arrived at the North Strand Climate Monitoring Facility before sunrise. The conference room was already full, unusual for a Wednesday. Technicians. Military liaisons. Two senior meteorologists and a man from the Department of Anomalous Phenomena — a department that, officially, didn’t exist. No one spoke for the first ten minutes. They just stared at the image projected on the main wall, a still frame from a weather satellite feed. “I’ve never seen a static formation at that altitude before,” Mairead said, her eyes locked on the impossible image. “How high is this exactly?” “Sixty eight kilometres,” one of the technicians said adjusting his glasses. She blinked. “Mesosphere.” “Correct.” “This doesn’t make any sense” she murmured to herself, irritated by confusion. One of the meteorologists stood. “It’s your job to make sense of it Dr. Finn.” “When was it first reported?” she responded, ignoring the man’s tone. “It’s been there for six hours, it just… showed up,” the military liaison cleared his throat. “Spotted by a satellite over the Atlantic. Cross-checked by a second pass. We thought it might be weapon debris. It’s not. Civil flights are already diverting. Maritime routes too.” On the monitors, numbers scrolled — temperatures, wind speeds, strange depth readings. The mass wasn’t moving. Winds tore at it hundreds of kilometres per hour, but it didn’t rotate. Didn’t shear. Just remained. Impossibly still. “It’s not a weather event,” the meteorologist declared with a shaky voice and worry in his eyes. “Then what is it?” asked the liaison. No one had an answer. By noon, the world had seen it. Footage taken by a commercial pilot had gone viral: a band of dark mist stretching from horizon to horizon, bloated and heavy, blotting out the sun. It covered a region roughly the size of North America and appeared to be growing. The shadow the cloud cast was immeasurable. On a clear day the light would dim like a solar eclipse. The sky turned a dull grey. Shadows vanished and birds fell silent. Some areas experienced perpetual dusk. The night, imposing in its darkness. People on the ground began reporting changes: strange static humming in their teeth, tension headaches and a persistent low pressure in the ears. Online forums exploded. #TheCloud trended within the hour. Dr. Finn kept working. She had trained herself to remain clinical, methodical. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the air in the lab had gone stale. Something was very wrong and not a single thinking brain on the planet could provide answers to the impossible situation. At exactly 9:43 p.m. GMT, the first sound was recorded. A low-frequency thumpthump, deep and distant. Then another. Two hours apart. Then again. And again. “Thunder?” someone offered. But the radar was clear. Not a single weather system for a thousand kilometres. The thump came again. Only minutes apart. Mairead sat perfectly still, headset on, watching the soundwave roll across the monitor. It wasn’t thunder. It wasn’t seismic. It was airborne. High above out heads. “Jesus,” whispered a young intern nearby. “It’s coming from inside the cloud.” By midnight, it had settled into a rhythm. A slow, deep, drumming sound. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. Regular. Relentless. As though something far, far above was knocking from the other side of the sky. [PROJECT CERBERUS VEIL] — FIELD JOURNAL ENTRYDr. Mairead Finn, Lead MeteorologistCLASSIFIED — LEVEL OMEGA⁃ DAY 1: 11:42pm GMT The cloud remains stationary. Its scale is beyond measurement. Its thick fog goes far beyond our atmosphere. The sound began tonight.Regular pulses, low frequency, origin unknown but triangulated within the formation.The collection of all data is incomplete at this time. Personal Note:It is not weather. It is not manmade.We don’t know what this is. PHASE II – The Sound of God By morning, the drumming was heard across the entire northern hemisphere. It was no longer limited to the monitoring stations. People across Europe, the eastern United States, parts of western Africa, and even as far as Argentina reported hearing it — not just through the air, but through their bodies. In the base of the skull, the hollows of the chest or behind the eyes. The sound was felt just as much as it was heard. Entire cities reported the vibrations. Hospitals began to fill. Not from injury but from confusion. Migraines. Tinnitus. Bleeding noses. Some people began to lose their minds, tormented by a sound they couldn’t escape. Others seemed un-phased by the strange phenomenon. A woman in Bordeaux began convulsing and screamed, “I hear it. I hear it. I hear it.” before falling unconscious. At 01:06 a.m. GMT, Dr. Finn watched from the roof of the North Strand facility as the light changed again. Not dimmer, not quite. She struggled to name it. Shadows had lost their edges. Buildings looked slightly flattened. Colours were muted, like the world had been submerged in water. She raised her hand and stared at her palm. Veins like rivers on a map. Her skin was paler than before. The hairs on her arm stood up. The drumming continued. “Dr. Finn?” The man from the Department of Anomalous Phenomena pushed through the steel door behind her. “My name is Jonas, ma’am. I’ve been meaning to speak with you.” He paused beside her, eyes turned upward to the dreadful cloud. It swallowed the entire skyline, hiding stars and moon alike. “Quite the view,” he murmured. “What can I do for you, Jonas?” she asked, her tone clipped, unwilling to indulge small talk. “You know who I work for?” She nodded once, offering him a cigarette from a near-empty pack. “No thanks, I quit. Fresh air for me,” He laughed awkwardly as Dr. Finn lit her smoke. “They’re relocating me,” he said. “Opposite side of the world. A counterpart facility in the southern hemisphere. They want simultaneous readings, mirrored datasets. Honestly, it feels like I’m just being moved out of the blast zone.” He paused for a moment. “If this… thing is global, if it keeps growing, we need to know if it behaves the same way everywhere. Otherwise… we’re flying blind.” Finn studied him, the shadows across his face blurred and trembling in the wrong light. “So you’ll be chasing the other horizon?” “Something like that.” He gave a thin smile, but his eyes stayed locked on the sky. “I’ll send you everything I find. Maybe between the two of us, we’ll make sense of it.” Her gaze lingered on him a moment longer than she intended. Then she looked back to the cloud. “Maybe.” The drumming echoed — low, cavernous, endless. ThumpThump ThumpThump ThumpThump Neither of them spoke after that. The emergency broadcast systems went live just after noon. News anchors read pre-written statements. No questions. No speculation. “Authorities are aware of the atmospheric anomaly currently positioned over the Atlantic. Remain indoors. Limit direct observation of the phenomenon. Further information will be provided when available.” The feeds cut off after ninety seconds. Black screens revealed the concerned reactions of the population. Social media boiled over with conspiracy, prophecy and fear. A viral clip from New York showed commuters frozen in the middle of an intersection, all exiting their vehicles, all staring up at once, dozens of them, like they’d heard a voice. Then some began to cry, others fell to their knees in prayer. All united by the oppression of complete and total helplessness. Government helicopters swarmed beneath the cloud, like flies drawn to the stench of death. Another clip from a Nigerian cargo ship showed the cloud expanding, spilling outward in curling tendrils, vast sections of dark mist swirled within the cloud. Like black sand in clear water. The crew’s final log simply read: God has returned to us. At 2:42 a.m., Dr. Finn stepped into the soundproof chamber to listen to the unfiltered live feed. She sat in the centre of the small white room, strapped on the over-ear monitors, and listened. There it was: ThumpThump. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. The drumming from the cloud. Clearer now. More spacious. More… thoughtful. There were pauses between the beats. Pauses long enough to create the illusion it had stopped — before it came again. She felt it deep in her ribcage. Her heart syncing to the arial phenomenon. The drumming had become a presence — not sound alone, but a tidal force pressing against the Earth. Every beat made her stomach lurch as if something vast was stirring within the planet itself. Then it shifted. The sound broke free of rhythm. A single, elongated groan, wet and guttural, poured from the cloud. It rippled across the atmosphere like thick, viscous liquid, sloshing into every crack or crevice it could find. The ground itself vibrating under the sonic pressure. It was enormous. Impossible. Something malignant, something so vast that its moan reshaped the sky. The pitch was almost beyond hearing, subsonic yet torturously present, low, dragging, reverberating with the weight of mass she could not comprehend. The groan slithered and pulsed, like the wet crack of muscle tearing, sinew stretching, a predator yawning across the heavens. Her chest heaved, her stomach twisted, her fingers tingled with the pressure of sound. Her mind screamed against comprehension. The noise was alive. Shapeless, yet aware. It hung in the room like a storm that could devour everything, pausing only to let its presence sink further into her bones before dragging itself back into a wet, shuddering growl. She ripped the headphones off, trembling, sweat prickling across her skin. The chamber was silent — but not really. The sound lingered, imprinted on her ribs and skull, crawling through her blood. “Was that… a voice?” The intern monitoring the signal turned to her, pale and crying. “No,” Dr. Finn whispered. “It wasn’t a voice.” He swallowed. “Then what was it?” She stood slowly and left the room without speaking another word. The drumming resumed as normal. [PROJECT CERBERUS VEIL] — FIELD JOURNAL ENTRYDr. Mairead Finn, Lead MeteorologistCLASSIFIED — LEVEL OMEGA⁃ DAY 2 03:17 a.m. GMT Cloud remains stationary. Estimated diameter now exceeds 5,000 km. Audio patterns continue. Rhythmic, biological. Possibly vocal. Global symptoms reported: neurological disruption, auditory hallucinations, emotional volatility.Mass hysteria.Thousands of casualties across different countries.Burst eardrums and internal haemorrhaging. Public unrest increasing.Governmental control deteriorating. A plan was initiated to obtain a visual of the sound’s source. Jonas’s team ran three LIDAR sweeps from orbit, from a U-2 spy plane, and from a modified weather balloon. • Orbital scan: returned no depth readings. Not zero just nothing. As if it struck open air for a thousand meters, then refused to return. • Plane scan: logged one frame of internal structure — looked like bone.A moment later, the image glitched, reloaded, and showed a perfect sphere the size of a mountain. Then static. • Balloon feed: twenty minutes of telemetry before loss of signal. Internal layers visible — fibrous, twitching. Final frame:A shape in the centre. Spindled. Elongated.Symmetrical, but wrong. Our analysts ran it through edge detection software. The results were… disturbing. It resembled a face, but only when you didn’t look at it directly. A convergence of lines, folds, and textures that formed something… odd. One technician collapsed during image review. Said she felt like it could see her. I saw it too. Just once.It didn’t scare me.It just made me feel ashamed. We’ve locked the files.Project code: Cerberus Veil.Access: visual AI systems only. No human review permitted.Effective immediately. Personal note: Jonas agrees, There’s something in there.He’s gone south, into the dark.I don’t know when I’ll see him again.I think it’s stretching. PHASE III – The Arms Dr. Finn jolted from her sleep, her phone vibrating on the steel table. She had passed out at her desk. Overworked and exhausted she grabbed her phone. The screen read Jonas – DAP. “Finn?” Jonas’s voice came sharp, urgent. “Are you seeing the latest readings?” Her pulse quickened. The cloud had been… behaving differently. The drumming was heavier, more insistent. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. “I’m watching. It’s… intense. But nothing new yet.” ThumpThump. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. “Intense?” His laugh was bitter. “Intense doesn’t cover this. The subsonic pulses, every monitoring station on every continent, they’re aligning. The underside of the cloud… It’s splitting along a straight vertical seam. The satellites caught it just before it closed again.” Dr. Finn frowned. “A seam?” ThumpThump. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. “Like… it’s preparing to open and I don’t mean metaphorically.” His voice dropped, urgent. “There’s a pattern in the pulses. Rhythms building. I don’t know how else to say this. The drumming? It’s a fucking heartbeat Mariead and it’s getting faster. You need to be ready, something is happening. Whatever you do don’t go outside. Whatever happens next… It’s not just sound. It’s alive.” ThumpThump. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. She felt it in her chest before she could reply, a vibration deep in bone and blood, the wet resonance of something enormous stirring. “I… Jonas, I…” “Stay calm. Lock yourself in. Go to the bunker now! The monitors are there, you can observe. Whatever you do… do not fucking step outside.” Then the line went dead. A heartbeat later, across the northern hemisphere, a vertical fracture tore through the sky like a wound. It widened with deliberate slowness, layers of mist peeled back in fleshy folds. Shadows deepened, bending the space around it. A deafening sticky, squelch like tearing flesh echoed across the hemisphere. Behind it was a darkness that seemed to breathe, vast and unfathomable. A darkness that bent perception. No camera could capture it. No eye on the planet was built to perceive such a biblical event. Without tremor or trumpet, the cloud opened. What lay inside was not lightless, but… unknowable. Some said it was a mouth. Some said it was a wound. And from it came the sound again, louder now, clearer. Something wet and vast and pulsing. Something impossible, Not breathing. Mawing. Across the world, people looked up in unison. Some screamed. Some dropped to their knees. Others stood still and watched, transfixed, as the first of the arms descended. Long, tapering limbs like serpents, oily, black and glistening. Emerging from the wound in the sky in slow spirals. Some were miles long, others kilometres. They swam through the air like they were underwater — languid, elegant, hypnotic. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. They moved across the sky like a nest of worms poured through a funnel. Coiling. Searching. One by one, the arms reached down into the earth, slithering through cities, across oceans, over fields. It didn’t take long for the first to be taken. A man in Tokyo screamed as an arm squirmed it’s way around him. His fingers dug into the strange meat as the grip around his waist tightened, pulling him skyward. His cries split the morning air. In a European city, a young couple ran through the streets hand in hand. The woman tripped, an arm twisted around her ankle. Her boyfriend tried to pull her free. The arm retracted, twisting her upward with such force that his hands tore away from hers. He fell on his back, begging, only for the arm to return for him. In a Venezuelan village, a mother was snatched from her courtyard. Her young daughter clung desperately to her leg, screaming for her mother to come back down. Her tiny hands gripped her mother’s ankle in desperation to save her, but the child’s fingers could not hold. They were ripped upward hundreds of feet in a matter of seconds. Her mother’s body ascended, twisting elegantly like a dancer in midair, but gravity did not forgive the child. She fell, limbs flailing, hair whipping across her face, colliding with the unforgiving earth. The sickening thump echoed across the village. Some were taken screaming. Others laughed, lifted as if ascending into a dark ecstasy. Cultists, convinced of divine favour, threw themselves toward the putrid appendages, arms outstretched, their voices raised in hymns or chants of joy, begging for rapture. The arms took only a few of them with the same cold precision, pulling them upward as their ecstasy transformed into terror mid-flight. Across continents, people fought, clawed, resisted—but it was futile. Each arm performed the same ritual: one human at a time, spiralling upward toward the yawning darkness, then returning to the earth for its next selection. Cities became theatres of chaos. Streets emptied in seconds. Traffic snarled and stalled. Windows rattled under the roar of thousands being drawn skyward as humanity unleashed below. Parents clawed for their children. Children screamed for their parents. People tried to leap from balconies, bridges, and rooftops, only to be grabbed mid-fall, their last moments a tangled dance of limbs and terror. In remote fields, farmers and herders watched as the arms swept across the horizon. Livestock scattered, terrified, the ground shaking under the thrumming resonance of the arms. One farmer caught a glimpse of his wife being lifted, screaming, crying his name. He tried to run. The arm retracted, and she was gone, leaving him kneeling in mud, screaming into the indifferent sky. Over the first twelve hours, over forty million were gone, more than the entire population of Canada. By forty-eight hours, estimates climbed past ninety million, entire nations devoured by the sky. Children. The elderly. The healthy. The sick. Criminals. Priests. Lovers. The lost. The arms moved like a living tide, slow but inexorable, elegant in motion but grotesque in function. Each human was treated as a singular prize, twisted upward toward the infinite, the process horrifyingly meticulous. Dr. Finn watched from the bunker as the monitors flared with the streams of abductions. Faces contorted in panic, joy, or disbelief. She could hear them through the cameras: screams and prayer that layered upon one another like a living symphony of terror. The arms paused briefly over cities, observing, coiling and uncoiling. Their thick veins pulsate. They seemed to savour the fear. Then, with chilling patience, they selected again, dragging the living toward the maw. Over the 57 hours, the northern hemisphere emptied in a relentless, mechanical, almost ritualistic harvest. Every arm returned repeatedly to the sky’s wound, each human plucked and lifted, until the air was thick with echoes of terror and awe. By the final hour, Dr. Finn could only stare at the screens, numb. The arms paused at last, holding their harvests aloft for a long, silent moment, as if counting, observing, savouring. Then they began the slow, deliberate retreat, one by one, carrying their captives toward the unknowable darkness that had given them form. Over four hours, the sky had closed and survivors emerged from false shelters. The world was left in silence. Only the sound of the drums remained. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. ThumpThump. [PROJECT CERBERUS VEIL] — FIELD JOURNAL ENTRYDr. Mairead Finn, Lead MeteorologistCLASSIFIED — LEVEL OMEGADAY 3 – 11:11 p.m. GMT The formation opened. An aperture. Estimated diameter is 3000km across.Arms — tongues? — emerged. Thousands.Movement suggests intelligence.Not random.Selection appears non-biological.We can’t predict it.I watched them be taken.God forgive me.We tried everything. Interference. Signal jamming. Sonic weapons.Russia sent a nuke, to hell with the aftermath of that. It didn’t go off, it was just swallowed by the cloud.The arms are not affected. The world is hollow. The monitors lie dead, their screens frozen with faces I will never forget. Even the saved recordings fail to convey the scale of what happened. The arms. The screams. The silence that followed. Entire populations—taken with the precision of a surgeon, the cruelty of a predator, the indifference of an animal. Ninety million, more. Perhaps a hundred million. I can’t be certain. The northern hemisphere is a graveyard with no corpses and yet, the sky is calm. Deceptively calm.The wound has closed. The drum… it continues. Always beneath everything, a low, insistent pulse that will not be ignored. Personal Note: I… I don’t know what to do next.Every theory, every model, every calculation is meaningless against this. We are observers of an event. We are its remnants. Survivors only in a technical sense. In every other way, we are gone. There is nothing to fight. Nothing to flee. Only to record. Only to bear witness.And I will. Till the end. What else is there to do? PHASE IV – The Belch One month and fourteen days passed. No arms. No movement from the sky. The cloud remained, hanging impossibly still above the Atlantic like a wound that refused to heal. Most nations had abandoned any attempt to engage with it. Some still broadcast official statements, hollow, robotic reassurances but no one listened. The world had been held in place. Breathless. Afraid to look up. Held hostage by our new god. Cities went dark. Markets crashed. Faiths fractured. People starved. Millions gathered in open fields, begging to be taken. Millions took their own lives in the face of the inevitable. Others locked their doors and prayed to be forgotten. Dr. Mairead Finn stayed. She slept inside the bunker beneath the North Strand Climate Facility. She hadn’t left in weeks. The others were gone, some taken when the arms descended, some fled, some too broken to continue. She kept her notes. Her logs. Her rituals of data and control but every day it grew harder to believe that any of it mattered. Finn’s console crackled to life at 03:58 a.m. GMT. The signal was faint, washed in static, but the voice on the other end was unmistakable. “Finn,” Jonas said, quick and hushed, like he was afraid the sound itself might carry. “Tell me you’re awake.” “I’m awake.” Her voice was brittle, the syllables clipped. She had been awake for days. “What is it?” “I’ve been tracking something,” he said. “Pressure readings from the South Atlantic buoy network. They’re tanking. Not a storm. Not a current shift. It’s like the air itself is… leaking.” “You’ve said that before.” “This is different.” His breathing was uneven, shaky. “The drop isn’t local, it’s global. Everything is bleeding toward the cloud. Not winds, everything. It’s pulling like… like it’s—” He stopped himself, then said it anyway. “Like it’s inhaling.” Finn exhaled through her nose. “We don’t know that’s what it’s doing.” “I do know,” Jonas shot back, voice tightening. “It’s hungry. And it’s been patient, but—” A low laugh broke out that wasn’t joy. “Christ, I can’t believe we’re still pretending this is about data.” “This is about survival, Jonas,” she said, doubting her own words. “Is it?” Jonas snapped. There was a pause before he spoke again. “We’re all dead anyway. It’s just a matter of time before it gets hungry again. And when it does…” He trailed off, static filling the gap. “You’ve seen the fields. You’ve seen the ones begging for it to take them. That’s not living. That’s meat waiting to be picked up.” “Stop.” “Why?” His voice cracked. “You want the truth, Mairead? There’s no stopping it. There’s no bargaining. We’re not even ants to it, ants get noticed before they’re stepped on. This thing—” He stopped abruptly, the next sound a sharp hiss in the line. “Jonas?” Silence. She waited another three seconds, then set the receiver down, her fingers trembling against the console. She clasped her hands together, lowered her head and for the first time in her life, she began to pray. She waited. Nothing. At exactly 04:17 a.m. GMT, one month and fourteen days since the cloud arrived, the sky opened again. No warning. No signal. Just a sudden shifting of the cloud’s centre, folds drawing back, parting like lips peeled open by invisible hands. The drumming was constant but this time something new came. The sound began low. Wet. Rolling. Like a cauldron of bile tipping somewhere beyond the stratosphere. The pressure dropped. The wind died. Then came a vast, guttural exhalation that seemed to surge from the planet’s core and shatter the sky above. A noise like the entire sky dry-heaving. Viscous and phlegm-soaked. The kind of sound that makes the stomach knot before the ears understand. A single, cataclysmic, guttural bellow that cracked windows on every continent and shattered the upper atmosphere. The ground shook, tides recoiled, and birds fell from the sky. It wasn’t just sound. It was force. A pressure wave of wet breath and raw heat, like an open furnace filled with rotting flesh. It swept the globe within minutes. People clutched their heads and screamed as their ears bled. Animals bolted and dropped dead mid-run. Birds fell in flocks. Machines died. Satellites blinked out. Those at the epicentre could only scream as the force burst them into nothingness. And the smell. A stench so vast, so cellular, it soaked through walls. It crawled into lungs and stayed there, a taste of spoiled meat and copper. People vomited. Others tore at their flesh, trying to escape it. Most were dead in seconds. And then came the blood. From deep within the beast, beyond the gauze and folds of mist, something ruptured. A pressure valve? A gullet? A wound? No one knows. A tidal wave of thick, arterial blood, expelled with such volume and speed that it fell like monsoon rain over half the globe. Red soaked the ocean and rivers. Red splashed across rooftops and deserts and jungles. Half the Earth painted in blood. It steamed where it landed, hot and thick, and it reeked of iron and something sweet. Something wrong. Some said they heard whispers in the rain. The clouds peeled back, and for the first and only time, the being was seen. Truly seen. For exactly ninety-three seconds, the sky was clear. Not in fragments. Not distorted. It filled the sky. It was the sky. Its shape defied thought. Impossibly symmetrical, yet shifting as though the universe itself was trying—and failing—to remember it. Its surface was a chaos of textures: pinkish-grey membranes that pulsed with a rhythm older than time, bone-plate ridges spiralling in geometries our minds could not hold, and spindled nerves that writhed like lightning frozen mid-strike. Each wrinkle, each twitch, seemed to hum with awareness, as if the cosmos itself had been stitched into its flesh. Its face, or what passed for one, stared down through a million lidless, goat-like eyes. Some were as vast as mountains, some flickered like dying stars, all simultaneously seeing and knowing. Our thoughts recoiled, our vision trembled, and yet we could not look away. And then it did something impossible. It smiled. No teeth. No lips. No gesture that humans could recognise. Just a slow, dreadful unfurling of facial tissue, an imitation of something it had only ever observed in our species, a suggestion of amusement aimed at the futility of existence. The motion folded in on itself in ways that should have torn it apart, yet held. We felt it not just in our eyes, but in our blood, in our marrow, in the corners of thought we didn’t know existed. And then the sky swallowed itself once more. But the memory lingered. Shapes impossible to describe etched themselves into our minds. Geometry that should not exist haunted our dreams, and the faint, impossible smile echoed in every shadow we ever crossed again. Silence fell. Not peace but silence. And then… nothing. No arms. No sound. Just the repetition of fear felt through the drum of the cloud. The wind, returning at last. The stench never faded, never fully gone. The red rain soaked into everything. No government spoke publicly again after that. People stopped going outside. Entire towns were found empty. Dead. Others worshipped. Others killed themselves. The world… waited. [PROJECT CERBERUS VEIL] — FIELD JOURNAL ENTRYDr. Mairead Finn, Lead MeteorologistCLASSIFIED — LEVEL OMEGADAY 45 – 07:02 a.m. GMT It belched.I don’t know how else to describe it. It expelled something vast and foul into our atmosphere. Not an attack. Not a gesture of dominance. A function.A bodily function.Like it forgot we were here. The sound… I cannot put into words. I felt it in the roots of my teeth. In the gaps between cells. It broke something in the sky. And the smell… the smell is still here, clinging to the vents. To my skin. It’s soaked its way into the bunker.The blood is everywhere. We’ve confirmed it’s organic. Human and… something else. For ninety-three seconds, it let us see it.I don’t think we were supposed to.I don’t think it cares. I haven’t slept since. I don’t believe anyone is left to read this, but I’m still writing. There’s no scientific language left for what’s happening. This is not an anomaly.This is a presence.This is an extinction event. PHASE V – Afterbirth It began to harden. Not all at once — but gradually, day by day, as the blood congealed under heat and rain. The bright red stains that had covered oceans, cities, forests… darkened. Thickened with reddish clots. Then, it began to bond. What had first been described as organic blood now revealed itself to be something more — a precursor. A fluid waiting to become. On the fifteenth day after the belch, the first major surface scan from what remained of the LEO satellites returned images of a continuous sheet forming across the Atlantic Basin — fibrous, pale, ridged in places, like cooled wax spread over the surface of the Earth. At first, it seemed like sediment, or Ice. But it flexed. Beneath solar radiation, it tightened. Beneath lunar light, it swelled. Seismic equipment registered subtle movement: microscopic contractions, as if breathing through the crust. The red had become pink-grey. The pink-grey was becoming skin. A skin that now stretched, uninterrupted, from Portugal to the eastern edge of the Caribbean. The scientists who remained debated this transformation in hushed, mechanical tones. No conclusions were reached. There was no baseline. No comparative models. But Dr. Mairead Finn understood. This was not an invasion. This was not a divine punishment. This was gestation. Earth, or what remained of it, was being blanketed in something alive. Not absorbed. Not consumed. Prepared. And then, at 08:46 p.m. GMT, on the 46th day — the cloud moved. It shifted without sound, without storm, without effort. Not blown. Not carried. Not pulled by gravity. It simply… drifted. As if an unseen cord had been cut. As if the process in the West had reached some threshold. It took six hours to traverse the ocean. Six hours of silence. People in Asia and Australia watched it approach — the spiralling gauze blotting out the sky, as if it was swallowing it whole. They had seen the videos. They knew what would come. Still, they watched. Some hoped it would pass. It didn’t. At 02:17 local time, the cloud settled above the Indian Ocean. The sky began to open again and the arms began their terrible descent. [PROJECT CERBERUS VEIL] — FIELD JOURNAL ENTRYDr. Mairead Finn, Lead MeteorologistCLASSIFIED — LEVEL OMEGA DAY 46 — 11:44pm GMTCerberus Veil – Final Transmission The blood is not inert. It is a matrix — a forming tissue. Something between placenta and a cocoon. Still soft in parts, but solidifying. Already three-quarters of the Atlantic seafloor is covered in a single sheet. Our instruments can’t pierce it. It’s warm.It pulses every seven minutes.It is alive. The cloud has moved to the Indian Ocean. Initial signs suggest the process is starting again. The same pattern. Same altitude. Same shape. Same silence. I believe this is reproductive behaviour. A life cycle. This thing — or system, or entity — is using the atmosphere to sow itself. It does not see us. It does not hear us. It does not need us. We were not chosen.We were not rejected.We were incidentally present. What we thought was an anomaly was a phase. A part of something older, larger. Maybe a million years old. Maybe eternal. It doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s being left behind. A blanket. A membrane. A womb stretched across the Earth. There is no rescue coming. There is no top of the food chain. There is only the shape behind the clouds, and what it leaves in its wake. I am writing this from a world already half-covered in skin. Already half-dead Tomorrow, I will step outside and feel it for myself. I want to know if it responds.I want to know if it knows I’m here. End Log. Phase VI: Final Breath The surface of the planet is no longer visible. A thick, swirling fog blankets every inhospitable continent, every ocean, rising miles into the sky. It doesn’t move with the wind. It ignores the weather. It simply clings, dense, luminous, and unnaturally still. Satellite feeds — what few remain — show the same impossible formations above Earth’s surface: layered mist, spiralling but unmoving. No rotation. No eye. Just folds. Just gauze, stacked and suspended. Jonas no longer checks the time. He hasn’t for days. His oxygen mask hisses its final shallow breaths, each one thinner than the last. The generators have gone silent. The lights burn only in intermittent flickers, casting the facility in a pulse of dim, ghostlike hues. Every room is empty. Everyone else is dead. Jonas lies flat on the cold concrete floor, cheek pressed against it, one hand spread wide as if to hold the Earth steady. His lips move, forming soundless words, but he stops. He doesn’t need words. He only needs to listen. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. A heartbeat. It was in the cloud. It was in the sky. Now it’s here. Beneath his bones. Inside the crust. Deep in the dark belly of the world. Jonas let out a broken laugh that cracked into a sob. His eyes glisten, unfocused, staring at the ceiling as if he could see through it to the sky above. “There are two of them now,” he whispers, barely audible. The fog outside pulses with a faint, internal light, not lightning, not fire. Something vascular. Something alive. His throat tightens. His chest is heavy. The hiss of his mask is a thin trickle of air, barely enough to maintain hope. He pulls it away, lets it fall beside him. The silence rushes in. He smiles, weak and delirious, teeth streaked with blood from biting his tongue raw in his sleep. “We were the womb.” Jonas had never been a religious man. He used to scoff at prayer, at ritual. But now, on the floor of a dying world, the last man standing, a gun trembling in his hand, he mouths the words anyway. Fragments of hymns. Half-remembered psalms. Apologies to no one. He turns the gun on himself, comforted by the realisation it will all be over soon. The fog above glows brighter, its folds pulsing with rhythm. Like veins. Like lungs. Jonas closes his eyes, the weight of suffocation pressing him into the floor. His last thought is not of escape. Not of resistance. Only awe. Far beyond Earth, in the silence of space, the first cloud drifts on. Searching for the next world. The Earth exhales its final breath and becomes something new. Credit: PitifulScream97 Reddit Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.