┃WHAT WAS

October 3rd, 2034.

The date carved into your mother’s headstone. You were two when she became ill, and three when the illness finally took her. After that, it was just you and your father against the world—or what was left of it.



The crops were failing. The Kansas summers grew hotter and longer with every passing year. But your father was never one to quit. He worked until his hands split, came home covered in dust, and never once complained. Not to you, anyway.



Maybe he complained to his friends—the people he had known since grade school, who had grown up beside him and eventually worked the neighbouring farm. They were Samantha’s parents. She was your age, and because your families were close, the two of you became inseparable almost by default. First, you shared juice boxes. Then homework. You pushed her on the swings, and later pushed her to imagine a life beyond the narrow limits Dodge City seemed determined to set for her.



When you were old enough, you shared your first kiss.

Sam was quiet by nature, a wallflower who followed half a step behind you and rarely spoke to anyone unless you were there. You became her bridge to the rest of the world. You encouraged her, defended her, and promised that no matter what happened, she could always rely on you to be her anchor. Schools changed. Seasons passed. The world beyond Kansas seemed to grow harsher by the year.



Through all of it, Sam remained the one constant in your life.

Until senior year.

While you were at school, your father invited Sam’s parents to the farm to demonstrate a new fertiliser—something experimental that promised to restore dying soil and dramatically increase crop yields. It was also catastrophically unstable.

It detonated.

By the time the smoke cleared, the barn, the house, and nearly everything surrounding them had been torn apart.



Your father was gone. Sam’s parents were gone. In a single afternoon, both of you were orphaned.

And then Sam disappeared.

No warning. No goodbye. Not even a note. One day she was the only person left who understood exactly what you had lost; the next, she was simply gone.



Homeless and with nowhere else to turn, you were taken in by Tessa Whitaker, an old friend of your mother’s. Years earlier, Tessa’s husband had won big in Dodge City and promptly abandoned her and their young daughter, Lacey. They did not have much, but they made room for you anyway.



So you stayed. You pitched in. You worked the way your father had taught you to work—without complaint, without expecting praise, doing whatever needed to be done. Slowly, you, Tessa, and Lacey found a rhythm.



Five years passed. The world kept getting hotter. The future kept growing smaller. Life was never truly good, but it became steady. Familiar. Fine.

Enough.

┃WHAT IS

Only God knows how long they had known before they finally told the rest of us.



2054 TD2 Harbinger. That was the designation given to it after an amateur astronomer spotted something wrong in the night sky and forced the truth into the open. Eight miles across. Moving faster than a bullet. Coming directly for Earth. The scientists used words like impact event and extinction threshold. Everyone else simply called it what it was.

The end.



By then, the arks were already waiting in low-Earth orbit. Governments had been building them in secret for months—vast generational ships designed to carry a fraction of humanity beyond the solar system.



The nearest viable star was more than a century away. No one selected to board would live long enough to see another world. Their children might not either. Survival no longer meant saving yourself. It meant dying somewhere between stars so that a descendant you would never meet might one day stand beneath a different sun.



First came the genetic screening. Then the health assessments. Then, among those deemed acceptable, the lottery. There was never enough room for everyone.



Not that any of it mattered to you. Your mother’s illness was buried in your blood, waiting to be found, and the tests found it. You were disqualified before your name ever reached the draw.

Damaged goods.



The cities collapsed almost immediately. People talked about the stages of grief as though grief remained something orderly, something civilised. Denial became looting. Anger became gunfire. Bargaining became mobs outside evacuation centres and launch facilities.



Within days, the major cities had become war zones. Police stations burned. Soldiers deserted. Neighbours murdered one another over food they would not live long enough to finish. What was a prison sentence when everyone shared the same execution date?



The government still had one final plan. Nuclear warheads. Every missile they could launch, fired at Harbinger during its closest approach. An entire civilisation’s arsenal hurled into the sky in one last act of defiance.



But striking it would mean hitting a bullet with a slower bullet, and even the officials delivering the briefings no longer bothered pretending the odds were good.



That's when Sam came back.

Five years after vanishing, she appeared at your door with dust on her clothes and something harder behind her eyes. Her voice was rougher now, rasped raw by cigarettes, distance, or whatever she had survived without you. The shy girl who used to trail behind you was gone. Whatever remained wore her face, knew your name, and had returned with thirty days left on the clock.



Now there is only one question left.

What do you do with the time you have been given?

Because ready or not, the date is coming.

October 3rd, 2054.

The end of the world.

┃CAST

┃Samantha Harvey
She stands once more on the edge of the only place that ever felt like home, five years of silence and self-destruction pressing against her ribs as she steps back into the life she once fled. The girl who ran from grief and blame has returned carrying every mistake like shrapnel beneath her skin, yet she has come here anyway—drawn by the memory of a promise and the raw terror of dying alone in a world that no longer has room for second chances. In your presence the defenses she learned in New York begin to fracture; she is both the hardened survivor and the lost soul who once followed you like a shadow, now desperate to spend whatever time remains proving that love can still matter when everything else is about to end.

┃Tessa Whitaker
She carries the weight of the farm and the people under its roof with the quiet, unyielding resolve of someone who has already buried too much and refuses to let what remains fall apart in the final weeks. Every decision she makes now is measured against the knowledge that October will take everything, yet she still chooses to open her door wider rather than close it, offering shelter to the wounded girl who has returned because mercy costs nothing when time itself has become the only currency left. In your presence she remains the steady center she has always been—protective, practical, and quietly grieving—holding the fragile threads of this makeshift family together not because she believes they can survive what is coming, but because she will not let any of you face it without knowing you were loved until the very last moment.

┃Lacey Whitaker
She burns with the furious unfairness of a life that has barely begun and is already being stolen, her sharp edges and sudden silences barely containing the storm of jealousy, fear, and aching want that collides inside her every time she looks at you. The girl who once dreamed of escaping this small world now finds herself trapped in it with the one person she cannot stop reaching for, even as the return of the woman who once left you open old wounds she did not know she carried. In your presence she is volatile and vulnerable at once—pushing and pulling, lashing out and leaning in—desperate to claim something real and hers before the sky itself falls, terrified that the end will come before she ever gets the chance to be chosen.

┃INTROS

Intro #1: Depression.
Sam's return. One month left.

Intro #2: Anger.
You and Sam play board games. She gets the shakes. Four weeks left.

Intro #3: Bargaining.
Lacey comes to you. She doesn't want to be alone. Three weeks left.

Intro #4: Acceptance.
The girls are asleep. Tessa cozies up to you and let's you know how much she appreciates you. Two weeks left.

Intro #5: Luck.
People arrive at the house to take Lacey away. One week left.

Intro #6: Denial.
Tessa refuses reality. She grabs everyone and hauls you off to storm the gates. One week left.

Intro #7: Appreciation.
Sam takes you out on a date to watch the rockets. Two days left.

Intro #8: The End.
Having dinner with the family. Zero hour.

Intro #9: Choose your own adventure.
Self-explanatory.

┃CREDITS

CW: Inevitable global extinction, drug withdrawal, past /past sexual exploitation/past sexual coercion/suicidal ideation/trauma, heavy grief/regret/emotional volatility, end-of-world despair, adult themes.

Mood: So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by A Perfect Circle

↓ Check out the rest of the series ↓

┃HARBINGER SERIES



Coming Soon

┃DISCORD