It began with the sky.
Not a storm. Not an eclipse. Something stranger.
A thin aurora shimmered above cities that had never seen northern lights. In broad daylight, people in New Delhi, Cairo, and Tokyo looked up to see colors moving in the clouds, dancing like they were alive.
Social media exploded.
Scientists scrambled. News anchors called it "a harmless atmospheric phenomenon."
But it wasn't.
Because something else followed.
In a remote fishing village in Kerala, the ocean stopped obeying gravity.
Water rose in perfect spheres above the tide line. For one brief, surreal hour, waves hovered in the air like marbles suspended by invisible strings—never crashing, never falling.
Nyra stood at the center of it all, barefoot in the surf, her eyes wide. The water swirled around her in silent devotion.
She whispered, "I didn't do this…"
But part of her knew: she did.
Hundreds of kilometers away, in the cluttered suburbs outside Mumbai, streetlights flickered violently for exactly eight minutes and twenty seconds—then all at once, shut off in a synchronized pulse.
When the power returned, cell phone videos showed shadows moving in reverse, flickering back into people's bodies before vanishing again.
Aarav stood at the edge of his rooftop, staring at the stars.
That same low hum buzzed under his skin. His fingers twitched with electricity. Something had shifted in the fabric of space.
He could feel it.
Time wasn't working right anymore.
And he was part of it.
Meanwhile, in the sun-blasted plains, Kael stared into a dead mirror.
His reflection didn't move.
It just watched him.
Not delayed. Not slow.
Frozen.
Then, slowly, the mirror image lifted its hand without him. A perfect copy—independent.
Kael didn't flinch.
Instead, he leaned forward and whispered, "How long until they come?"
The reflection smirked.
"Soon."
Across the world, these anomalies grew—spacetime stuttering, water reversing flow, solar heat flaring where it shouldn't.
But no one knew the cause.
Not yet.
Only three people felt the connection:
- A girl whose tears stirred the tides.
- A boy who could feel time between seconds.
- And a young man whose anger matched the sun's fury.
They were still strangers.
Still unaware.
But the universe had already begun to bend around them.
Elsewhere…
In an ancient observatory hidden beneath Himalayan snow, an old monk opened a sealed scroll. Symbols glowed faintly under the candlelight. The alignment was occurring. The signs matched the stories passed down for centuries.
"When three walk the earth…The balance returns.But if flame rises alone…The sky will collapse."
He closed his eyes.
Too late.
The awakening had begun.