Beneath the Paper Sky

When the world ended, it didn’t crumble into fire or freeze into silence—it folded.

It began on a Tuesday, with the sky.

One moment it was bright with morning sun, clouds drifting lazily across the blue. The next, a sharp crease appeared overhead, as if some invisible hand had bent the heavens along a straight edge. Birds scattered. Planes veered. And within hours, more folds appeared—crisp, geometric lines slicing through the sky like origami instructions.

By sunset, the sky was no longer a dome, but a canvas—creased, bent, and finally folded into sharp planes. The stars never came out. The moon blinked off like a forgotten lamp.

People panicked. Scientists fumbled for explanations. Some said it was an atmospheric illusion. Others blamed satellites or solar flares.

But sixteen-year-old Lena Holloway knew better.

She had seen it before.

In her sketchbook.

Weeks before the sky changed, Lena had started drawing a series of dreamscapes. One showed a forest where trees bent like accordion paper. Another, a city where buildings folded flat and stood back up again. And one, drawn in the margins of her math homework, showed a sky with a perfect crease running across the sun.

She hadn’t known why she drew them. They just came.

Now, she stared up at the fractured sky, flipping through her sketchbook in disbelief. Every image was coming true.

Her parents were too busy hoarding supplies and boarding windows to listen. Her teachers stopped holding online classes. The news looped the same footage: people staring up, screaming, praying, or simply sitting on rooftops waiting for answers.

Lena wasn’t interested in answers.

She wanted to know why.

So she packed her sketchbook, a flashlight, and three granola bars, and followed the lines in the sky. Literally.

The folds above cast long shadows on the ground, as if the heavens were reflecting themselves. The creases led her out of the city, into the overgrown fields behind the old train tracks—places she used to explore with her older brother before he disappeared a year ago. Before he’d left behind only a note with a single sentence:

“Beneath the paper sky, you’ll find the door.”

She hadn’t understood it then.

But now, as she stood beneath a part of the sky that shimmered unnaturally, almost pulsing like a heartbeat, she pulled out the sketchbook and flipped to the last page.

There, in charcoal and smudged ink, was the drawing of a doorway—tall, narrow, floating just above the ground.

And as the wind picked up and the folds in the sky shifted again, there it was. The door, hovering before her, exactly as she’d drawn it.

Lena stepped forward.

The door opened inward, revealing paper.

Not darkness. Not light.

Just paper. Miles and miles of blank, moving parchment that rippled like ocean waves. She stepped through.

Inside, the world was… constructed. Trees made of paper tubes and curled leaves. Rivers drawn in ink that flowed across textured parchment. Birds flew overhead, their wings flapping with the sound of flipping pages.

And in the center, on a hill of stacked books and folded maps, stood her brother—Jamie.

He turned as if he’d been expecting her.

“I knew you’d follow the folds,” he said, smiling. “They started coming to me first. The drawings. The visions. I thought I was losing my mind. Then I realized…”

“What?” Lena asked.

Jamie looked around. “This place—it’s not just a world. It’s ours. Built by the ones who see beyond the folds. The artists. The dreamers. People like us.”

Lena glanced at her sketchbook. The pages now glowed faintly, pulsing with warmth.

“But why is the real sky folding?” she asked.

Jamie knelt beside a pool of shimmering ink. “Because that world is collapsing. Too much noise. Too little imagination. The folds are the undoing—and the beginning. This world… this is where we rebuild. From stories. From memory. From imagination.”

Lena looked up. The paper sky above this world was soft, glowing with handwritten constellations and drifting ink clouds.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

Jamie nodded. “But it needs more creators. More dreamers. The others are coming. We need to be ready to guide them.”

Lena took a deep breath, then tore a blank page from her sketchbook. She placed it on the ground, pulled out her pencil, and began to draw.

A lighthouse. A real sun. A mountain with singing trees.

The paper absorbed it instantly, and the drawings came alive.


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Back in the real world, the sky folded one last time. People stood still, breath held, as the last patch of blue disappeared into the crease.

And then, above them, a new sky unfurled—of paper, yes, but glowing with stars and swirls of color that had never existed before.

The old world was gone.

But beneath the Paper Sky, a new one was being written.

One story at a time.