The girl's hands trembled as she pressed a small handkerchief to his forehead, dabbing away the thin streak of crimson that refused to stop.
"Oh my god, Aelior! Your forehead is bleeding!" she gasped, panic flaring in her amber-gray eyes.
Aelior blinked, dazed. The city around him was still humming with the aftershock of the impossible — the truck that vanished, the silence that had swallowed the world, the pulse of power that shouldn't exist within him.
He tried to steady his breathing, forcing a weak smile.
"I… I don't know how it happened. Maybe I scratched it too hard? Hehe…"
The laugh sounded brittle, wrong — the sound of a soul trying to pretend it still belonged to the world it had just broken.
The girl frowned, unconvinced. "You were fine a moment ago," she said softly, pressing the cloth again. "Then suddenly this—"
Her voice faltered when she met his eyes — that hollow, storm-wrecked stare that seemed to look past her and through her all at once, as if he were seeing something beyond the horizon of existence itself.
Aelior exhaled shakily and lowered his gaze. "Are you hurt?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
Her brows rose, her tone a mix of teasing and concern. "Why would I be hurt, mister? You're the one bleeding." She tilted her head, studying him. "Are you hiding something?"
Aelior scratched the back of his neck, trying to laugh again. "No, i-it's nothing. Just… dizzy, I guess."
But inside, confusion churned like storm tides.
How am I bleeding? The truck didn't even touch me…
He turned toward the sunset. The horizon burned gold and violet, the city stretched beneath it like a field of stars reborn. "Hey," he murmured after a pause, "it's getting late. You should go home. Your parents must be worried."
She blinked, surprised. "You're the one bleeding, and I should go home?"
Aelior tried to respond, but his throat felt dry. He opened his mouth, but the words never came.
The streetlight above them flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then — the air changed.
It thickened, alive. Sound dulled, stretched thin like a dying breath. His heartbeat thundered in his chest — too slow, too loud. The wind itself seemed to hold still, trembling against the skin of the world.
And in that silence… reality blinked.
The world shimmered faintly, like heat rippling above desert sand.
For a heartbeat, he saw another version of the same moment — the girl bending to pick up her dropped handkerchief, and himself catching it mid-air before it touched the ground. A moment that hadn't happened. A glimpse of a world that never was.
The vision vanished as quickly as it came, leaving behind a faint hum that echoed in his skull.
Aelior's hand twitched. His pulse raced. The weight of the air pressed against him like an unseen tide.
What… was that?
"Aelior?" The girl's voice pulled him back, worried. "Hey, you okay?"
He looked at his hand — and for a breathless second, golden symbols pulsed faintly beneath his skin. Ancient, unreadable, alive. They glimmered like veins of forgotten language before fading again into flesh.
Aelior stumbled backward, pressing his palm to his temple as whispers coiled through his mind — faint, layered, and wrong.
Images flickered:
— His father's voice, older and gentler.
— His sister laughing on a day that never existed.
— Himself, standing before a mirror of shattered skies.
He gasped softly. "What… what was that? What's going on?"
The girl frowned. "What was what?"
Aelior blinked hard, forcing a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "It's nothing. I'm just… dizzy."
But the hum inside him didn't stop.
He reached out instinctively, hand snapping forward — and before he even understood why, a bottle falling twenty feet away stopped midair. His hand caught it — perfectly. Not a second too soon, not too late. Just exact.
The vendor gawked. "Whoa! That was fast, kid!"
Aelior froze, staring at the bottle trembling in his grasp. His body was still. His breath shallow. That motion — that precision — it wasn't his. It belonged to someone else. Someone who had never existed.
The girl stepped closer, stunned. "Whoa… how did you do that? You were here a moment ago!"
Aelior's voice trembled. "I… I don't know. Maybe I'm... I don't know... Usain Bolt? Hahaha"
But deep in the hollow of his mind, a voice not his own whispered — low, ancient, resonant:
You have touched the Fragments… the echoes of what never was.
The words rippled through his veins like lightning wrapped in silence.
And then, as quickly as the strength had come, it vanished. His fingers went limp. The bottle slipped from his grasp and rolled across the pavement. His knees buckled.
The girl lunged forward, catching him before he hit the ground. "Hey, easy! You're burning up!"
Her hand pressed against his chest — his heartbeat thundered against her palm, erratic, too fast.
Aelior's vision blurred — the street, the lights, her face all bleeding together into streaks of gold and gray.
He tried to speak. The words barely formed.
"Unwritten… moments…"
The girl's voice was faint now, distant. "Aelior! Hey, stay with me!"
But the world was already fading.
Darkness coiled around the edges of his mind, soft but absolute. The hum returned — a low resonance, neither voice nor sound, like the universe itself whispering from the cracks of forgotten time.
And just before his consciousness slipped completely, her hand tightened around his — warm, real, human.
Somewhere deep inside that darkness, a voice spoke again.
Calm. Gentle. Eternal.
You are not forgotten.
The world went silent.
And Aelior fell — not into sleep, but into the spaces between what was… and what was never meant to be.