Rimora learned to measure time by light.
Each morning, a thin blade of sun slipped through the cracks in her cell and crawled across the stone floor. It moved slowly, almost shyly, as if afraid of being noticed. She followed its path with her eyes until it vanished again, swallowed by shadow. That was how she counted days. Not by calendars or voices or bells, but by how long the light dared to stay.
Five years passed.
Then ten.
Inside the prison, time did not flow forward. It stretched, recoiled, looped back on itself. Some days felt endless, others collapsed into nothing. Rimora scratched marks into the wall at first—careful lines, evenly spaced—but eventually the stone filled, and the markings lost meaning. Days blurred. Months dissolved. Years became a concept rather than a certainty. Sometimes she wondered if anyone outside still remembered her name, or if it had already been worn smooth by disuse.
Her body changed.
Hunger carved her down slowly. Her hair thinned, falling in brittle strands. Her skin grew pale, almost translucent, veins faintly visible beneath it. Her bones pressed closer to the surface, sharp reminders of how little space she now occupied in the world. Yet her mind did not dull. If anything, it sharpened. Suffering honed her thoughts into something precise, unforgiving. She remembered everything—the warnings, the laughter, the way truth had been dismissed with smiles.
Sound traveled strangely in the prison.
Chains clinked down distant corridors. Guards' footsteps echoed, uneven and hollow. Somewhere, other prisoners cried, pleaded, went silent. But it was not those sounds that haunted her. It was what she could not hear. Beyond the walls, there was a different quiet—a thinning of life. She sensed it in pauses that lingered too long, in absences that never filled themselves. A child vanished from a street. A neighbor failed to return home. A village emptied without ceremony. Death no longer announced itself. It simply removed people.
She remembered standing in the open air, shouting.
She remembered disbelief turning into mockery.
Now there was nothing left to argue with. The prophecy was no longer a warning. It was an unfolding fact.
Nights pressed hardest.
Darkness made the cell feel like a grave placed inside another grave. Rimora wrapped her arms around herself and pressed her hands to the bars, imagining the wind outside carrying news—fires, collapses, disappearances—each one a confirmation she would never receive. Cold seeped into her bones, but rage burned beneath it, quiet and relentless. Time mocked her by continuing without her consent, slipping past hands that could no longer reach beyond stone.
Dreams came rarely.
When they did, they were fragments—unfinished images, glimpses without mercy. Futures she could neither stop nor flee. She was no longer part of events. She was their witness, sealed away. Among prisoners, her name passed in murmurs. A warning. A myth. The girl who saw the end and survived long enough to watch it arrive.
Her body aged.
Her eyes did not.
They remained bright, unyielding, two steady flames in a place designed to extinguish everything. She counted her heartbeats in the dark, each one an act of refusal. Even the guards noticed. They no longer mocked her openly. Some avoided her gaze. Others lingered too long, fear flickering behind indifference. They called her cursed, unnatural—but the word prophecy hovered unspoken between them.
Rimora stopped speaking.
Not because she had surrendered, but because words had become weightless here. Stone did not listen. Chains did not remember. Silence was not imposed on her; she adopted it, learned its rhythm, breathed with it. Waiting became her discipline. Observation her only remaining power.
Her thoughts wandered anyway.
To what had been.
To what still might be.
Each passing shadow felt like a lifetime. Each shift of light marked another erasure she could not stop.
Outside, the world decayed without spectacle.
The catastrophe crept forward patiently, like a predator that understood its prey would not run. Families fractured one death at a time. Homes filled with absence. Streets thinned, laughter drained away, replaced by long stretches of quiet punctured by sudden grief. Entire districts shrank, people dispersing or vanishing, yet no one named the pattern.
Scholars argued.
Priests prayed.
Rulers blamed fate.
Records were adjusted. Numbers softened. Histories rewritten before the ink had dried. From their towers, the elites watched and reassured themselves, convinced wealth could insulate them from anything unnamed. Markets stayed open. Festivals continued. Life performed normalcy with practiced exhaustion.
But shadows grew longer.
The poor wept in private. Children grew up without remembering who was missing. Tragedy became routine, grief procedural. Rumors surfaced—strange sicknesses, sudden deaths, unexplained disappearances—but they were folded neatly into excuses and buried. The air itself felt heavy, sorrow clinging to every breath, yet eyes stayed lowered. Denial became a survival instinct.
Death learned subtlety.
It walked unseen.
The world adapted to loss instead of resisting it, shrinking inward, hollowing out. Joy became a memory rather than a presence. And far beneath it all, Rimora's visions continued to flicker—distant lightning over a landscape that refused to look up.
The world kept moving.
And she remained still.
Watching.
Rimora's youth drained away inside the stone walls, not all at once, but grain by grain. Strength left her quietly. Her fingers curled stiffly against rough stone. Her knees ached from hours spent kneeling on cold floors. Her hair dulled, lost its weight, fell more often than it should have. Yet her mind remained alert, unblinking, fixed on the catastrophe the way an astronomer tracks a storm that has not yet reached the horizon. She remembered the faces of those who had laughed at her—the curl of their mouths, the ease of their disbelief. Their voices no longer echoed in the world. Time and circumstance had swallowed them, just as she knew it would.
Among the prisoners, she became something half-spoken. A warning passed between murmurs. The girl who saw the end. The one locked away because she knew too much. Sometimes scraps of news reached her—guards careless, prisoners curious. Vanishings. Whole families gone. Streets quieter than before. But the stories were always incomplete, stripped of pattern, meaningless without the connections only she could see. She listened without interruption, stored every fragment, fitted it into the growing map inside her mind. She waited. Watching, recording, imagining interventions her hands could not perform.
Sleep came unevenly. Dreams dragged her through faces she could not save, voices she could not reach. She woke often, breath shallow, eyes already sharp. Cold never left her. Hunger pressed constantly, a reminder that she still occupied a body. At night, she whispered to herself—warnings with no audience, broken prayers, thoughts spoken simply to prove that silence had not yet won. Each heartbeat counted. Each breath resisted. Her body became a geography of pain, but her spirit did not bend. It burned low and steady, a contained defiance that refused extinction.
Even the guards felt it.
They brought her food and chains, keys and orders, but they did not meet her gaze easily. Some lingered too long at the door, uneasy. Others whispered that she carried something forbidden, something that did not belong in a cell. Time did not dull her resolve. It sharpened it. Each year honed her certainty into something edged and dangerous. In the stillness, she made a vow that no one heard: she would witness every hidden death, remember every erased soul, hold their names where the world refused to.
Outside, the catastrophe moved like water through cracks—slow, patient, impossible to seal. Entire communities thinned before anyone noticed. Graves went unmarked. Deaths went uncounted. Labels were applied like bandages: illness, misfortune, accident. Each one a lie. Elites adjusted numbers, revised records, erased families from history with clean hands and clean ledgers. Markets remained open. Festivals continued. Governments functioned. But streets told a different story. Homes emptied. Schools closed. Neighborhoods hollowed out.
The poor learned to grieve quietly. Children grew into adulthood knowing absence as a constant. Silence became ordinary. Scholars debated abstractions. Priests offered comfort without answers. Rulers denied patterns written plainly in blood and omission. The world adapted. It hardened. Loss became routine. Grief became background noise. Rimora felt it all from behind stone, the weight of decay pressing on her chest, knowing no one else grasped its scale.
Inside the prison, her mind fractured time into what was and what was coming. Every day brought signs—winds that carried a wrongness, animals disappearing from streets, shadows behaving differently. She traced patterns relentlessly. Each realization added burden, never relief. Families she could not reach. Towns she could not warn. Futures she could not divert. She scratched notes into stone, memorized entire sequences when paper failed, built archives no one would ever read. She became feared and watched, a presence that unsettled the air.
She spoke to herself often. Long, spiraling arguments about actions she could not take. Plans she could not execute. Still she endured. A sentinel locked in place. A witness trapped inside history as it moved without her.
At night, she pressed against the bars and searched the stars. They offered no comfort, but their patterns whispered of what was approaching. The second wave gathered far beyond sight—larger, crueler, patient. Her chest tightened as visions sharpened. Cities erased without fire. Seas swallowing edges of land. Lives ending without warning or sound. She felt its rhythm in bone and breath, in the way the world held itself too still. Leaves fell wrong. Animals fled without noise. The sky flickered with subtle imbalance.
The world continued as if intact.
She saw only fractures.
Time became a long dirge she alone conducted. Days bled into weeks, into years, each marked by unnoticed deaths and rewritten histories. Her mind became a ledger of erasure. Pain taught her endurance. Patience became her weapon. Even when sunlight reached her cell, it arrived muted, filtered through sorrow. Nights brought visions sharper than waking thought, truths too heavy for any crowd.
She became a myth among prisoners. A living memory of a world dying quietly.
Every breath was an act of witnessing.
And when the second wave finally loomed—vast, deliberate, merciless—she felt it settle into the marrow of her bones. It did not rush. It waited. She saw decades ahead with terrible clarity. She remained chained, unheard, watching the world walk forward blindly.
Rimora pressed her face to the bars and stared into the infinite dark.
She would remember.
She would endure.
She would witness it all.