From the jagged lip of a sandstone cliff that shouldn't exist yet—
in a timeline fraying at the seams like an ancient book unbinding itself—
Raahi watched them.
His body flickered.
Part shadow.
Part static.
An outline crawling with ruptured pixels, like his skin was forgetting what form meant.
Where he stood, the air pulsed unnaturally—heat rippling, time hiccupping, light folding in on itself like origami in reverse. Reality bent around him like glassware too close to a flame.
The children—Rasmika and Ryan—stood just below, at the chamber's fractured threshold.
She, all graphite-stained hands and sharp glances.
He, too quick to laugh, too afraid to listen to the ache building in the back of his mind.
They thought they were alone.
They weren't.
They never were.
"Timeline… unstable," Raahi whispered, though he didn't need to.
The words slipped from his mouth like corrupted code.
They remember… too early.
Alira sequence… contaminated."
The atmosphere thickened—not with weather, but with memory.
Not memory as nostalgia.
Not memory as truth.
But memory as entity.
As presence.
As invasive species.
The wind howled in tongues not heard in centuries, atoms rearranging themselves into old songs and unread prayers. For a moment, the cliff was a battlefield. Then a monastery. Then... void. Flickering between all three like a wounded reel of film.
Raahi raised a shaking hand.
Not in warning.
In wonder.
Glowing scars pulsed along his forearm—sigils etched in data-braille, remnants of a time-script that once chose him as its scribe. They blinked with urgency now, like they were trying to escape his skin.
Below, Ryan chuckled nervously. Rasmika scribbled in her journal, not knowing the ink in her pen was already older than she was. The words she wrote were not inventions. They were excavations.
Raahi watched them, watched them with something older than sight.
He watched them the way ruin watches a city.
The way prophecy watches a silence.
"Fate thread entwined," he said to no one, and to everything.
Dual-source memory confirmed.
Interference escalating.
She is not ready.
He never was.
A gust of air barreled into him, thick with ash and electricity, but Raahi did not flinch.
His glitch held.
He was still, but not stable.
Above, the sky unraveled.
Clouds bled at the edges.
The sun cracked open like an old lens—its light refracting into geometry not built for this plane.
The horizon trembled. Time drooled.
Raahi stood in it all—silent, breaking, recording.
And then—
he vanished.
Not like someone leaving.
Like someone being deleted.
He returns in the space between one breath and the next.
No fanfare.
No reboot.
Just presence.
Raahi doesn't blink.
Not out of duty—
but disbelief.
Because what he sees shouldn't exist yet.
Because they are remembering things he never logged.
Because they are writing the archive from within.
He perches between seconds—on rooftops that haven't been built, in cities not yet born—and watches the children of the fracture walk too close to the ache of remembering.
Their minds, soft like fruit,
already bruising under the pressure of what's to come.
Their dreams are mismatched collages—half memory, half premonition.
They speak in symbols they've never studied.
They flinch at names that haven't been spoken yet.
They cry in languages their mouths do not know.
They walk like survivors without scars.
Log 004: Timeline is… unstable.
They remember too early.
The ink bleeds straight into the page—no pen needed.
It pulses. Blue and trembling.
Alive.
There is no protocol for this.
Raahi was not built to fix.
He was built to witness.
To observe, not interfere.
To trace the arc of a memory before it becomes a monument.
Or a weapon.
Or both.
But the air is heavy now.
Thick with the scent of burning scripts.
Prophecies still unspoken cling to the wind like pollen.
Raahi watches.
Watches them become more than they were written to be.
Watches them burn the blueprints he was assigned to protect.
He grips his pen like a blade.
It shakes.
But he does not drop it.
"They were never supposed to meet again," he says, voice thin as gauze.
"And yet… here they are."
Rasmika's scar glows faintly under her sleeve.
A line of light—threaded with memory, threaded with grief.
She writes as though she's digging through sand, as though each sentence is an artifact.
Every word carries weight she shouldn't yet understand.
Ryan paces, restless. His shadow moves independently of him, twitching at the edges like it remembers a war he has not fought. His breath fogs in patterns—constellations that haven't been named.
"What do they know," Raahi wonders, "that time hasn't yet taught them?"
What did we bury, that memory exhumes like instinct?
The chamber below echoes like a lung.
They are inside a body of stone and intention.
The mirror behind them shimmers—not reflective, but responsive.
Its surface is not glass, but memory folded inwards.
It does not show.
It remembers.
Raahi has watched many versions of them before.
Rasmika, reborn in deserts.
Ryan, erased in oceans.
Again and again they find each other.
And each time—
it breaks something.
This time, though... something's different.
They are ahead of schedule.
Remembering too soon.
Not echoes—origin points.
They are becoming the memory.
They are burning the script.
"Memory was supposed to be a mirror," Raahi mutters.
Now it's a torch.
They are lighting the future with forgotten fire.
His hand shakes.
The log auto-bleeds into the page.
This was never supposed to happen.
There is no timeline where this ends gently.
And yet—
He does not look away.
He is afraid.
But he is also beginning
to hope.
Because if memory can defy design...
If fate can be rewritten in real time...
Then maybe this isn't collapse.
Maybe it's metamorphosis.
Raahi stands—glitching on the edge of something sacred.
Not time.
Not space.
Something else.
A liminal place. A crack in chronology.
A page folding into itself.
A rooftop that doesn't exist, above a city that isn't real—
yet feels older than God.
Below, Rasmika hums softly as she writes.
A tune no one taught her.
Ryan leans into the mirror and sees not his reflection,
but his future's debris.
Raahi grips the pen.
He logs nothing.
He simply breathes.
And in that breath—
the entire archive holds its breath with him.
Final entry of the night:
There is no protocol for a future that disobeys.
They were supposed to forget.
But they are remembering everything.
Not just what was.
But what will be.
They were never just subjects.
They are becoming the archive itself.
They are the breach.
And the bridge.
And I—
I am no longer just a witness.
And in the silence that follows,
somewhere between fracture and flame,
Raahi vanishes again—
not like someone leaving,
but like a story
being rewritten
from the inside out.