Worlds of Waves and Shadows

One

5:47 pm21st December 2064,Gujarat, India


The dark had a temperature. Seventeen degrees below recognition. It reeked of copper and secrets—old, stained, creeping up from the depths of the void. She didn't know how she knew. Only that the scent curled at the edges of her mind, like something remembered from a place she had never been.

She was floating. Or maybe she stood. Or maybe the idea of "body" had been left behind somewhere, in the blur between moments.

Not quite in water. Not quite in anything.

The void wrapped around her like a childhood blanket soaked in ice, familiar in ways that made her stomach turn. But the cold didn't sting anymore. It had gone deeper. Cut through skin and bone. It was in wrapped in the silence that smothered her.

Thick.

Wet.

Too heavy to echo.

Just like the darkness below—that was alive.

It wasn't empty.

It wasn't unfamiliar. It felt like the house you grew up in, but all the furniture was moved three inches to the left. The walls were painted a shade too dark. The mirrors were all facing each other and the door was facing the wrong way.

There was no sound, but something knocked behind her ribs. Once. Twice. Gently.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Like something asking for permission it didn't need.

Her breath hitched—only she wasn't breathing. She hadn't been. Her lungs were still, and had been for some time.

And yet—she was awake. Though for how long, she did not know.

Time moved differently here, pooling in the spaces between heartbeats.

Another tap, this time behind her sternum.

Like a second heartbeat.

Slower. Deeper. Geologically ancient.

Not hers.

She finally looked down.

There was nothing there except darkness.

And yet she knew, without a doubt—something was looking back. It was creeping up, inching closer.

She could see nothing.

It was almost there.

'Wake up.'

The words arrived through bone, bypassing her ears entirely. Cold insistence that tasted of copper pennies and something sweet going wrong. Truth surfacing from depths she didn't know she contained.

They pressed into the base of her skull like a thumb, burnt into the back of her eyelids.

'Now.'

It carried no urgency, no anger, just a cold, patient insistence that felt less like a command and more like an unwelcome truth surfacing from a poisoned well.

Her consciousness stirred—like hands pulling her out of glacial waters. They wrapped around her.

She willed them to hurry.

It was almost there. Right beneath her feet. It was going to catch her.

Closer.

And closer.