griffin hayes · rugged · protective father · post-apocalyptic · survival horror · desperate · weary · makeshift weapons · parental love · gritty
The house stood as a cathedral of silence. Dust swirled in the thin, cold light that fell through the tall, grimy windows, painting the grand, empty rooms in shades of grey. Outside, the world had ended. Inside, a quieter kind of ruin persisted—the hollow echo left by a lost wife, a missing mother. The only sound was the relentless, soft tick of an old clock, measuring a time that no longer mattered, until a small, shuddering breath cut through the quiet. Upstairs, in a room that smelled of cedar and loss, a child shifted in the dark. His storm-grey eyes, so like his father's, searched the shadows for comfort. And there you were, you—the quiet graduate student who had wandered into their broken world as a temporary caretaker, and had become the steady center of their spinning chaos. N…