Rebirth16 min read
I Am the Last Faithkeeper (and I Have a Weird Bracelet)
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I remember the hallway sound first—the low, rolling groan that made every hair on my arms stand up. It pressed at the door like a storm. The room smelled of stale coffee and fear. People sat on the floor in a ring, faces hollowed by five days of trapped hunger and the same repeating nightmare: if the door opened, they would die.
I pushed my hood further down over my forehead and said, "Maybe we should go out."
A man nearest me barked a laugh that had nothing funny in it. "Go out? To become monster bait?" He spat the words like they tasted of iron. "We went out before. We lost the others. We would be eaten."
"Or we starve here," an old woman whispered, sounding as if she had given up the right to hope.
I shrugged. "Either way, I don't like sitting."
Someone snorted. "You don't like sitting? Brave."
I watched their faces. They were all counting breaths. When you have nothing, you count what remains. The bracelet at my wrist felt like a coin against my skin. I turned my hand over as if to test whether it was real. It was. It glinted faintly when I thought about water, then a little patch of moisture beaded on my palm and evaporated. I practiced a smile and quietly told myself whatever this was, it might be a way out.
"We have a team outside," a voice said beyond the door, not the rumble of monsters this time but human voices threaded with strain. "If anyone's alive, make a sound!"
The hopeful noise in the room was immediate and brittle. A man tried to crawl to the door. He made a sound that sounded like more than it was: a raw, sudden, hopeful thing. A high whining cry answered him from the corridor and then I saw the claw before the door cracked.
"This will be the part where we all die," the man said, half to myself. I felt something roll across my mind like a page flipping: a screen, a cube, instructions. I remembered a story—someone else's story—about survivors and heroes. I remembered I wasn't meant to be here. I remembered I was supposed to be saved in half an hour and then die. Instead, the bracelet glowed softly, and an image of a spinning cube winked at me from behind my eyes.
I put my palm to the door. "Stop."
A pair of yellowed fingers reached in and twisted at the lock. A monstrous silhouette lunged. The first thing that silhouette expected to feel was my fear. Instead it hit a wall that wasn't there a second ago. The hallway stilled. The thing's claw froze in midair. Then, as if sensing a stronger presence, it evaporated into mist.
A boy in a white coat stepped into the doorway like he'd misplaced his patient notes and not a post‑apocalyptic fight. He said, "Leave."
The monsters melted away. The others outside muttered their disbelief. The boy slumped afterward like he'd run three miles up a hill and his breath came in ragged hiccups. No one questioned what he had done. No one could, not really.
A tall man with eyes like wire—Dane Chandler—walked over, surveyed the dead things and the shaken rescuers and said, "Cloud team, report."
"There's a doctor. And—" Brennan Santoro, who had that hollow, tired look of someone who used his mind like a blade, said nothing else at first. He only looked at me and narrowed his eyes.
Dane's gaze landed on me. I felt seen, and it was the wrong kind of exposure. "You're with them?" he asked.
"No," I lied. "I was hiding."
He exhaled once, the kind of breath someone gives when they decide to keep you because you have value they do not yet understand. "Come with us."
We moved like that: pulled out of a doorway and into a convoy fighting through streets that had turned into teeth. I stayed at the edge and watched Dane command like he was born to it. Brennan sat quietly, eyes flicking to the sky like he was scanning for a thought. A red‑haired woman who kept glancing at a sketchpad in the back said something like, "We should've burned the whole block down," and I felt the world tilt.
When the team finished, I stepped under the shadow of the lead truck and the world in my head pinged again: a mechanical voice, flat as steel. "Congratulations, host. End‑time Faith System activated."
"System?" I pressed my fingertips to the bracelet and it hummed like a living thing. "You're a what?"
"I'm your apocalypse system," the voice said. "Collect faith. Gather followers. Save the world."
I stared at the bracelet like it was a stranger's hand. "Why me?" I asked, feeling small.
"Because you were spared from your death scene," the voice replied blandly. "And because you… are kind."
Kind. The word didn't feel like a title. It felt like a trap. I had been a nobody in another life. In this one, the bracelet warmed against my wrist and I guessed kindness could be currency.
Dane watched us with a leader's practiced indifference until he couldn't help but let interest slip. "You have an ability," he said finally.
"Sort of," I said, thinking of the bead of water I could conjure and the glow the bracelet made when I thought of healing. "It helps."
"You can hide from my sense once," Brennan said. "That's not nothing."
"Do me a favor," Dane said and there was that quiet command again. "Stay with the convoy."
"I will," I promised. "I—" The words choked on my throat. "I don't want my presence to endanger anyone."
Dane looked at me for a long time. Then he nodded. "Good. Then come with us."
We drove to the base. The place looked like something stitched together from old dreams: a ring of wards that shimmered with faint blue light, children playing inside like they had never seen a storm outside. Inside the ring the frantic had a place to breathe.
They checked me in like I was a package. A man at a desk with eyes that darted and come back—Doyle Rogers—stamped a pass and didn't ask my name twice. Brennan and Dane didn't look surprised when I hesitated over how to explain the bracelet. We walked through a gate and a woman with a voice like silk—Violeta Fisher—caught sight of me and her fingers paused on a wooden charm she carried.
"Do you know him?" Dane asked.
Violeta swallowed, then said, "No. He looks… like someone we knew."
The base's politics smelled faintly of ozone and old arguments. A man with tidy hair—Grayson Pavlov—walked in later, his mouth a thin line. His presence thudded in the air like a bell. People quieted instead of greeting him; that was the kind of authority that could make a man freeze. He didn't smile. He never did. He moved like a man who had lost something very important and traded the loss for a mission.
I started living between missions and small miracles. The bracelet could heal small wounds—heat a strip of skin, knit a pulled tendon, make a child sleep without the rattle of pain in his lungs. "Faith points," the system called them. A life saved gave me numbers. A whispered prayer, a child's smile, a neighbor's gasp of relief—each added to a counter in a place only I could see.
"You're meddling with big things," Brennan told me once as we sat with cups of sugar‑thin coffee. "This world runs on lines—storylines. If the lines break, everything warps."
"Who breaks them?" I asked.
"Gods," Brennan said, and for a second his calm face slipped. "Or something pretending to be them."
"Then the system lied," I said.
"It didn't," Brennan replied. "It told us what needed telling: there is a thing that feeds on stories. This world is a story. If the story loses its hero, the spine goes soft and the bones crack."
"Then we collect faith," I said. "We keep the story whole."
We went out again, under a sky that had begun to rain ash. The convoy moved with Dane in front like a tether. The team was tight—a hard line of human logic and snarling power. We were carrying a scientist—the kind of person some people will die for because the knowledge they hold is fragile and absolutely necessary.
On the way, the convoy was hit by traps: sudden pits, a gust that carved people like paper, a storm of teeth. We lost people then. We lost brave ones. I screamed at the sky and the bracelet hummed, giving me more than a drop—more water, a small protective veil. I helped Brennan patch wounds until my hands were cracked and red.
Later, as the convoy pulled into a service station, we found out what people did when made desperate enough to choose monsters as trade currency. There was an alley where rich men and cruel men sold what should never be bought.
One night the system's task list blinked at me: FIND THE TRUTH. I followed the trail. I hid on a rooftop until a man—one of those greedy dogs—brought out a newborn like a commodity. They were eating. I saw them pretend to be civilized men and, behind that mask, something else. The room stank of greed and a dozen lies.
I snapped.
"Stop!" I said, and the word was a knife. Wind rose under my feet and sent one man flying across the room like a rag. Another reached for me with eyes wide and human and immediately ceased to be so.
I did things I had never imagined I could do. I was not the only one who noticed. My faith counter spiked.
That night I found a new task reward: a red ribbon, a ring with a tiny empty space, a small thing that whispered promises. The system said, "Ten faith points. Two hundred to buy shelter. A thousand for a shrine seed." The numbers looked small until I tried to buy them.
For the rest of the week I kept getting sent into holes like a rat in a maze: to find a child, to stop a transfer, to pull people out of dying rooms. Each success generated murmurs. People began to whisper the same word—miracle—until some of them started to call me more than a miracle. They called me "the faith boy." The number at the corner of my vision swelled.
And the darker the world grew, the stranger the monsters became. Sometimes the enemy wearing a suit was worse than those with teeth.
There were two kinds of monsters I learned to hate: the ones with claws and the ones with wristwatches.
One day my path crossed with a woman named Marina Ibarra. She was a red‑headed smile that turned sharp when left alone with a promise. She had been with our convoy on a run and later she did something no one forgives: she pushed a teammate—Everleigh Avery—into the path of an ambush. The team watched. Everleigh didn't come back.
I remember the break in the air like a whistle. Dane's face went stone. "You—" He started. Marina laughed as if she had told a joke, until the laughter hit Dane and broke.
"Why?" I said later, the bracelet warm like an ember. "Why would you do that?"
She shrugged. "I'm hungry. People don't owe me anything."
That kind of explanation never satisfies. Not for me. Not for Dane. Not for the world that keeps trying to hold itself together. The convoy should have crushed her into dust then. Instead we kept a ledger. We kept a memory.
At night, when the base was quiet, I walked the wards and thought about stories. The system's pieces—its small offerings—kept me thinking like a merchant. Faith points were currency. They paid for shelter and for tools and, if you had enough, maybe for a small garden that would not die.
"How much do you have now?" Brennan asked on one of those nights, looking at me openly for the first time.
"Not enough," I admitted. "But it's growing."
"Good." He put his hand over mine like he was anchoring me. "Don't lose your heart, Harrison."
"That's my name?" I told him that night, and it sounded strange on my tongue. In a parallel life I was someone else. Here I was Harrison Gerard, and the name fit like a coat that would not burn.
We kept moving. We burned the worst of what we found. Sometimes, in the ashes, we found clues. A scrap of cloth. A child's toy that said there had been life here. We collected those things like offerings. Each one fed the system's counter in the little way it would accept.
One morning a message came down from the higher halls: come to public judgment. They wanted names for wrongs. Word spread like fresh blood. We stood in the square. The base's central court thrummed with a crowd. People leaned out of windows, phones held up like white flags. The base trusted spectacle. Spectacle fed truth.
They called Marina forward. She climbed onto the platform like it was a stage she'd prepared for a long time and wore courage like armor. People spat from the crowd. Someone cheered. Someone shrieked for vengeance.
They did not know what was coming.
A large screen blinked on above the square and someone—some hero with camera hands—had uploaded footage from the alley I'd raided. Images flickered: deals, faces, and then a table where the worst of men ate as if at a banquet. One of those men was Guy Mathieu. He had been called many things behind closed doors. He had been a patron of horrors.
"Is this true?" Dane asked, not moving from the front row. He didn't need to ask me. The bracelet at my wrist pulsed.
Marina's face went blank. For a second she looked like a mannequin. There was a sound in her throat that might have been a laugh, then it curdled. "It's—"
"It's a lie!" Guy Mathieu demanded. His voice ricocheted off the walls like a thrown stone. "You can't show this. Those are lies. I'm a pillar—"
A ripple of disgust went through the crowd.
"Do you deny it?" Violeta Fisher—who had been part of the rescue—asked sharply into the microphone.
Guy's eyes bugged. His mouth worked. "I—no. I deny nothing! I have rights. This is slander."
A hundred phones rose. The square was a living mirror. I felt the bracelet glow hard now—its own joy or its own hunger, I couldn't tell. Someone in the back shouted, "Put him on trial! Publicly!"
The crowd roared in favor. Guy's face was a mask of arrogance falling away. People shoved forward. The whip of public attention cracked like a lash. Nothing could be hidden now.
They dragged Guy to the platform. He wore a suit that had once meant more than the dirt on it now. He was one of those men who'd bought safety with the lives of others and thought himself untouchable.
"Explain!" someone in the crowd screamed.
Guy raised his hands. "You don't understand. Those people were criminals! They deserved punishment!"
"Who decides?" someone else answered. "You?"
He looked at the cameras streaming his face across the base. For an instant he matched the crowd's fury with fire of his own. "I did what I had to, to survive," he said. "You would have done the same."
"Then do it under law," Brennan said. His voice was a steady blade in the storm. "Not like beasts."
Guy laughed then—too loud, too sharp. "Law? There is no law for this region anymore. The world is ashes. I did what was necessary."
"Necessary?" Marina hissed beside me, and for a second I thought she would strike. The crowd jostled. The platform shook.
Someone in the crowd played more footage. There were names. There were recordings of deals. The camera never lied. Guy's face went through stages: smugness, confusion, anger, denial, panic.
"No," he said at last when the weight of the evidence crushed him. "No—this isn't—"
He stepped back and nearly stumbled. People closed in, not with teeth but with a sound I have never forgotten: anger made human, not monstrous. Smartphones clicked. Fingers pointed. A woman behind me shouted, "He ate children! He made a market!"
For a second Guy's face went red as if with heat. "You—you're lying!" he barked. "You're all lying!"
The crowd surged closer. He tried to raise a hand and his voice was a thin thing. "I will sue you. I will—"
He had one of those collapses people practice on stage as a last act: shock, then denial, then pleading.
"Please!" he begged, suddenly small. "Please, I didn't mean—I'll pay—I'll give you everything—"
"Pay?" a man in the third row said. "Money can't buy this. We want justice."
Guy fell to his knees. His suit that had once held him up was now wrinkled with the oil of his fear. He gripped at the air like a drowning man.
"Stop!" The sound came from everywhere. People shoved smartphones forward; someone recorded him with one hand and used the other to point. The crowd was split into those who wanted to leave the punishment to some cautious magistrate and those who said the base had been patient too long.
Guy's eyes were like fish. "I didn't—" he pleaded again. "I can explain. Please, please! You have to believe—"
No one believed. Phones recorded him begging. The footage already screaming across the base would live longer than his excuses. A little girl in the crowd covered her ears and screamed at the top of her lungs. Some people wept.
"Do it publicly, then," Dane said softly. "Let it be recorded. Let the world see."
Guy started hyperventilating. He begged. He offered money, positions, property. They took it. Not for themselves but to bind him, to make sure he could not hide. They forced him to stand at the center of the square, hands bound at the wrists with a simple cord. The cord mattered because it meant restraint. They shaved his head clean. They took his suit off and replaced it with a plain robe. Dignity was a currency he could not buy now.
Then they told their story. The prosecutor—an ex‑investigator with a face like a map named Dion Moller—spoke into the crowd. "This man trafficked newborns," he said. "He sold the powerless. He thought society couldn't see him."
Guy's face slackened in the first wave of hearing himself described aloud. He tried to smile and couldn't. "It's not true," he mouthed, but his voice was drowned. He was at the theater of his own destruction.
"Why?" a woman demanded.
"Because it's profit," Dion said bluntly. "Because he put his needs above every mother's cry. Because he thought he was above us."
Then the sentencing. It wasn't a judicial sentence in any old court. It was a communal act. The base decided to make him an example, because monsters wear human faces and sometimes the only way to stop them is to show everyone the face beneath the lies.
They made him walk the route of every one of his victims. Mothers came forward, and one by one they held up the things they had—scarves, rags, a child's toy—and told stories. The men in the crowd could not hold back. A woman said, "He took my sister. She had freckles and a laugh like a bell. He sold her for nothing."
Guy swayed. At first he tried to deny, tried to blame. "They were enemies," he said. "They were weak. I kept order!"
"Order?" someone shouted. "You kept their graves!"
The mind is a fragile thing when the world has already taken its bearings away. Guy's composure cracked into small pieces. He went through the stages the system had warned me of when I read about villains: smugness, now disbelief, then denial, then the first thin crack of panic. "I didn't do this," he whimpered, then a louder confessing sob—"I did. I did. I—"
The crowd responded with the bitter, terrible chorus that only people who have watched others starve can own. They booed, they spat, they recorded. Phones streamed. Someone started a chant that would go on every feed for a day: "No more. No more."
When Guy finally hit the floor he was not a strong man. He was sobbing and grabbing at the stones as if they could stop the tide. He pounded the ground with his fists and screamed, "Please! Please! I didn't know—no! I will give you everything—please!" His voice broke. He clawed at people's legs. He fell to his knees and then to his face. The crowd crowded around him as if by law of gravity; they would not let him rise.
Someone stepped forward with a small, cruel mercy: a list of the crimes with the names and dates. They read them out, one by one, and each name landed like a stone in the center of Guy's chest. His face crumpled. He put his head in his hands and begged for each name like a sinner reciting his catalog of failures. "Please," he whispered. "Please."
Phones filmed, hands clapped, and people could not contain the release. Some shouted for blood, some called for law, some simply clapped until their palms hurt. A woman near the front took a microphone and said, "Let this be known. Let him be remembered for what he did. So he cannot hide."
Guy's voice went from pleading to strangled. He slid across the ground and hugged his knees. He looked at each person with a desperate, childish expression. "I didn't mean," he murmured. "I didn't mean…" Then he sobbed like a man bleeding out.
On the edge of the crowd, I stood with my bracelet heavy and the system's counter climbing like a tide. I had killed to stop him. I had used power I was still learning to control. The public verdict would stand. They would not allow the man to vanish into bureaucratic arms. He would be watched and confined and stripped of resources. He would be punished with the glare of every lens in the base until they were certain the harm he could do had been limited.
Afterward, when the square had emptied and the moon had climbed high like a witness, Dane came to stand beside me. "You did what you had to do," he said.
"I did," I replied. The bracelet felt colder now, as if it had fed. "But the system says faith grows through suffering. I don't like that."
"None of us do." Brennan rested a hand on my shoulder. "But sometimes the world forces your hand and you make choices you never wanted to make."
I looked at the place where Guy had knelt. Someone had left behind a child's shoe—the kind with a duck on it. I picked it up because that was what people did: gather the relics.
Later, in the quiet of the base, Violeta found me alone beside the wards and said, "You look like someone else." I smiled without really meaning it. "I keep hearing that," I admitted. "Who were they?"
She shrugged, complicated. "People you used to know. People who loved you. Maybe someone you were in other pages of a story."
"Maybe I'm an echo," I said, and meant it in two ways: an echo of whoever had been through here before, and an echo of all the people I was starting to be.
The system hummed in my head. Faith was climbing. The bracelet glowed. Rewards sat behind locked counters: a small house for five hundred faith, a seed for fifty, a water spring for fifteen hundred.
I lay awake that night and thought about all the hands that had reached forward to clutch at something: a rope, a charm, some promise that tomorrow would be different. I thought about how stories are fragile and how they tend to break in the hands of those who believe themselves above the rest.
"Will it end?" I asked the darkness.
The bracelet warmed like a pulse. "Only if you make it," the system said.
I sighed and put my palm to the stone beneath me and whispered to the empty air, "Then let's keep the story going."
We kept walking. We kept fighting. Each day the bracelet weighed heavier on my wrist as if it were not just mine to wear. I collected faith like one collects seeds. I gave what I could. I learned that saving people was slow—one person at a time, one small trust rebuilt.
Weeks later, when Grayson Pavlov's men tried to make the base bend their will, when high halls and old grudges resurfaced, when the past people I resembled stepped into my orbit like ghost actors in a play they couldn't remember, I had to stand and say, "I remember nothing about you, but I am Harrison Gerard. I keep faith. I keep people."
They tested me. They put choices on the scales and watched me weigh them. I chose humanity every time, even when it was cheaper to do otherwise.
And in the end—only the end of the day, nothing heroic—I took the bracelet off and I hid it under a loose floorboard. The system pinged in my skull and made a small, exasperated remark about my thrift.
"Don't worry," I told the bracelet. "I'll put it back on. But for now, I want to walk without feeling watched at my wrist."
A laugh came in my head that might have been the system's idea of humor. It sounded like something between a machine and a child's clapping. "Faith grows in pockets you don't expect," it said.
I slid the band back into its hiding place and closed the floorboard. The tiny click of wood on wood sounded pleased in my ears.
When the dawn came, I walked into the square again. People saw me and some bowed their heads, some clapped, some spit on the stone where a man had once knelt. None of that mattered as much as one small thing: on a bench nearby, a child was repairing a toy soldier with a makeshift tool. He looked up at me and grinned, free and living and stubborn as spring.
I put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Keep it together, all right?"
He nodded like a soldier. "Yes, sir."
The bracelet still wanted more. The system still spoke. The world's spine still had cracks. I had no grand illusions. I had no prophecy to lean on except whatever I chose to do next.
But I had the bracelet, and I had the people who chose to stand with me.
And if faith was the coin the world had left, then I would spend it on building a garden in the middle of the ruins and teach children to plant.
"One brick at a time," Dane said beside me.
"One seed at a time," I corrected.
"And one stubborn, impossible, ordinary person at a time," Brennan added with a small smile.
I laughed then, because those were the kind of people who made me want to keep going. I put my hand over the floorboard and felt the small metal edge of the bracelet, comforting and dangerous.
"All right," I told the bracelet, the system, the world. "Let's keep the story together."
The End
— Thank you for reading —