A blink ago, they had been underwater—or beneath it. Now the world had turned inside out.

Not loud. Not violent. Just… undone.

Where once water hung like stained glass above them, now sky sprawled in impossible stillness—blue and wide and wrong. It was the kind of sky that hadn’t known satellites, or planes, or regret. Only heat. Only hum.

The man didn’t speak.

He was staring at the light—how it moved sideways across the stone, slower than it should. As if time had taken a breath and hadn’t exhaled yet.

The girl crouched by the edge of the platform. The moss was soft, thick—too green. She pressed her hand into it, and it pushed back, almost warm.

The forest beyond didn’t stay silent. Not completely. There were distant sounds—faint bird cries, a low rustle like something too large moving through undergrowth, and a high buzzing, like thought woven into the leaves. Not loud. Not near. But present.

She whispered, not to him, not even to herself—just to the moment: “We didn’t go back,” she said softly.

“We kinda… fell through it, like a story with a missing page.”

He didn’t ask what she meant. He just nodded, like his bones agreed.

Far ahead, through the wall of green, something massive moved. Not fast. Not loud. Just enough to make the canopy ripple.

Above them, the sky shimmered—like blue remembered from a dream, but not quite right. The light had gone wet and spectral, like a memory turned sideways.

It was still day. But colours ran across the sky like bruised silk—faint ribbons of green and violet and silver, curling behind high clouds, slow and deliberate.

A daytime aurora.

The girl stared upward. “Is that normal?” she murmured, voice hushed like she might break it by speaking too loud.

The man squinted. “Solar activity?” he offered, out of habit more than certainty. But even he knew—this wasn’t physics. This was something else.

The sky wasn’t glowing because of science. It was glowing because the world remembered something it hadn’t told them yet.

The aurora moved like thought. Like mourning. Like the atmosphere was already grieving for something it hadn’t lost yet.

They didn’t speak for a while. There was no rush. No clear direction. Only the hush of a world that felt like it might start whispering if they listened long enough.

The girl stepped off the platform first. Her boots sank slightly into the moss, which rose in soft mounds like the skin of a sleeping animal. The thread circled her wrist like a bangle—faintly glowing, always warm, responding not to direction but to presence. It didn’t guide. It didn’t demand. It simply remained—an unspoken promise tied to her skin. She walked with her arms slightly out—not for balance, but as if expecting to be touched by something invisible.

They stood on the edge of the temple, where stone gave way to moss-covered slope. A narrow trail—half-claimed by roots and time—wound down from the platform, leading into the treeline ahead. The forest wasn’t far, but it felt like another world entirely. They lingered for a moment, then moved—slowly, carefully—into the green.

The man followed, slower. Every tree they passed was impossibly tall—leafy spires with bark like burnished leather, branching only high above, where sunlight filtered through like it was being remembered.

Flowers swelled from the ground in colours too deep to be modern—blue so dark it was almost black, red that leaned toward gold at the edges. Ferns hissed gently when brushed.

A shape darted between trunks up ahead. Small. Quick. Lizardlike. But it had feathers—not bright ones, but dusty, ragged, survival-coloured.

The girl smiled faintly. “Is that… a dinosaur?”

The man exhaled, like he hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.

He felt dizzy as he tried to track the shape the girl had noticed—something flitting just beyond certainty through the trees—then murmured, “Where the hell are we?”

The world didn’t answer, but it opened wider.

Everywhere around them, the scale felt off. The trees weren’t just tall—they were cathedral vast, their trunks thick enough to house echoes. Branches arched high above like vaulted ceilings, filtering the strange aurora-draped sunlight into trembling patterns on the moss below.

Insects flitted past—some familiar in shape, but wrong in size. A dragonfly with translucent wings as long as the girl’s forearm buzzed by in a slow, lazy arc. Something beetle-like clicked and skittered across the bark of a nearby tree, its shell iridescent and pulsing faintly like it was breathing.

The air was thick with scent. Sweet rot. Tree sap. Salt carried from a sea they couldn’t yet see. And underneath it all, a sharp ozone tang that made the hair on their arms rise.

The sounds came in layers—chirps and rustles, the heavy beat of something large moving far off, and above it all, a strange whistling hum that seemed to drift down from the canopy and vanish into the ground beneath their feet.

The girl tilted her head slowly, taking it all in.

As she spoke, her fingers brushed against the trunk of a nearby tree—rough and warm, like sunlit bark soaked in memory. Something small moved beneath the surface—a bubble, or maybe a trapped insect, caught in ambered sap so fresh it still glistened. “Are we supposed to be here?” she asked.

The man didn’t answer. He was staring at a cluster of flowers that shifted colour when he looked at them—blue, then violet, then a shade of green that made his jaw tighten like he’d bitten into memory. Then, suddenly, he stepped back, eyes wide.

Something about it felt too final—like the world itself was holding its breath, waiting for an ending it already knew.

“Cretaceous,” he breathed. “Late-stage… maybe. I think.”

He scanned the world around him—monolithic trees stretching skyward, air dense with scent, flickers of motion where creatures watched unseen, and an unfamiliar sky that felt more like memory than safety.
But he didn’t just see it. He registered it.

The way the light filtered through the canopy—angled, ancient, wrong.
The shimmer of insects too large to name. The echo of footsteps that never landed.
Even the breeze felt like it was passing through someone else’s dream.

He turned slowly, catching glimpses of life that didn’t belong in the now—feathers dusted with time, a shadow moving not with intent, but with instinct too old to argue with. One massive frond curled in on itself as if hiding from something that hadn’t happened yet.

He swallowed. The taste of the air was metallic, thick with ozone and endings.

Oh god… the end of giants. The end of everything.

He didn’t move. But the words settled in his chest like stones.

The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful. It pressed in—thick, heavy, like the forest itself was holding its breath.

The girl looked around slowly. Her hand drifted to the thread on her wrist, as if checking it was still there.

“Are we safe here?” she asked, softer than before.

The man didn’t answer immediately. His eyes stayed wide, flicking between treetops, light, movement—each piece a shard of a puzzle he hadn’t finished shaping yet. He wasn’t just watching. He was trying to understand.

“We’re not supposed to be here,” he said at last. “This world isn’t just old—it’s ending. Not because of anything hunting us… but because its time is almost up. And we’re not written into that ending.”

He glanced up at the sky again. “We’re not written into this story. Not even as a footnote.”

The girl turned toward him, her head tilting. “Part of what?” she asked. “What story are we not in?”

He didn’t answer—his mind racing, fists clenched tight at his sides as if trying to hold something together that was already coming apart.

But the fear in his voice had spread—thin and invisible, like mist crawling over water.

Then he moved.

Not running. Not panicking. Just fast. Intent.

He stepped into a small clearing, eyes scanning the open sky above the treetops. His jaw clenched.

“I need to see it,” he muttered. “If it’s coming—if we’re that close—then it should be there. Somewhere.”

He shielded his eyes and searched the sky. The aurora was still curling in slow, ribboned motion—but something behind it flickered. A light that didn’t belong.

He didn’t blink.

The girl followed him into the clearing, slower, quieter. Her eyes never left the sky—but her hand drifted again to her wrist.

Unseen, the thread had begun to slip from her wrist—quiet as breath, sure as memory.

It slipped from her skin like a whisper, trailing behind her unnoticed, leaving a faint line of light across the moss—moving, not drifting. It wasn’t falling loose. It was leading.

Winding a path—not away, but back.

Back through the clearing. Back through the forest. Back toward the temple.

And at the edge of the trees, just where the first shadows met the moss, something watched them. Not hidden. Not revealed. Just… waiting.

Behind them, the man paced. Not wildly. Not aimlessly. But searching—tracking the sky like it might offer a second opinion.

He shifted angles, squinted through the haze. Walked in a slow arc, trying to catch the right sliver of horizon between treetops.

“Too bright… dammit…” he muttered—like fear slipping out disguised as complaint.

“C’mon,” he whispered. “Where are you, you shiny bastard.”

Then—something caught. A flicker of light, low on the edge of the world, sharp and golden like a match struck in fog.

His breath caught. He stilled. And everything else went quiet.

Then his eyes widened.

He froze, gaze locked on the horizon. For a heartbeat, he didn’t move.

Then he whispered, “Oh no.”

There it was.

A flicker that didn’t shimmer like the aurora. It burned. White at the edges, gold in the centre, and too fast to be a star.

The confirmation hit him harder than fear alone.

“This is it,” he breathed.

His voice had gone hollow, distant—like he was no longer speaking to her, but to the horizon itself.

“The end is coming,” he said again, softer. Not with drama. With recognition.

“The close of an epoch,” he added, almost absently. “History doesn’t get closer than this.”

The way someone might say a name they never meant to remember out loud.

He blinked, once—slowly. Then turned in place, eyes tracking the horizon.

“We’re standing in it,” he whispered. “Not before. Not after. Right in the middle of it.”

He kept turning, like his brain couldn’t hold still. Like he needed proof—more proof—that they were exactly where they shouldn’t be.

But the girl didn’t move. Her eyes had dropped to the moss where something glowed faintly—the thread.

It had fully unravelled from her wrist now, trailing a ribbon of light across the ground, winding its way back toward the trees. Back toward the temple. Toward something waiting.

She didn’t speak. She just took a breath, and stepped toward it.

The man didn’t notice at first. He was still staring at the sky. Still muttering to himself. Still coming undone.

She reached out—quiet, calm—and caught his sleeve.

He flinched, blinked, then looked at her.

She didn’t say much. Just enough.

“Come on,” she said. “We’re not meant to stay out here.”

And when he didn’t move, she tugged—gently, but with certainty. The thread pulsed, once, as if agreeing.

Together, they began to walk—through the moss, through the light, back to the massive stone steps of the temple rising through the green.

The stairs weren’t stairs so much as terraces—massive stone slabs wide enough to hold silence, and heavy enough to remember it. Each one felt like a page turned too slowly, thick with the hush of something ancient watching. Their climb was slow, not from fatigue, but reverence. Each step felt heavier than the last, like the weight of time itself pressed downward.

The thread shimmered faintly ahead of them, weaving through cracks in the stone, always just within reach, like a thought too big to forget.

As they ascended, the world below fell away—moss, trees, sky, even the air itself thinning into wind.

Near the top, the girl looked back.

She didn’t speak at first. Just stared out over the trees—wide-eyed, like she’d stepped into a picture that didn’t know it was real.

The forest spread out below, wrapped in mist and glimmering sky. Between the trees, giant shapes moved—slow, swaying, peaceful. Long-necked creatures grazed near a clearing, their tails curling behind them like paint strokes on water. One let out a soft sound—half moo, half song—that made her chest feel strange.

She didn’t know their names. Just that they were big, and gentle, and felt like they mattered in a way she couldn’t quite say.

They belonged here. That much she understood.

And for some reason, it made her feel like she might cry. Not in a sad way. Just… full.

The man did not stop to look. He was breathing hard now—not from the climb, but from a pressure gathering inside him: not quite fear, not quite awe, but something tangled and urgent, like recognition coming too fast.

He glanced up, scanning the sky, the stones, the girl. The thread. Too neat. Too certain. He didn’t trust paths that behaved like they already knew the ending.

“They knew,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Whoever built this. They knew we’d come.”

The girl didn’t reply.

She just placed a hand on the wall beside her, like she was steadying herself—but also like the thread had brought her here before, and the stone remembered.

The wind brushed past.

“Were you always going to be here?” she asked, thinking out loud.

The thread pulsed once ahead of them, no brighter than before—but more present. Like it heard her.

And then, they reached it.

The summit. The platform. The place where the thread ended.

Something was waiting.

Not cloaked. Not grand. Just… there.

A figure. Still. Unmoving.

Whether it had always been stone or had only just remembered being human, they couldn’t tell.

It did not greet them.

It simply opened its eyes.

It did not blink. It did not move. But in its gaze, something shifted.

The girl didn’t flinch. The man nearly did.

Because in that moment, they both understood— this was not a meeting. It was a remembering.

The sky behind them began to change.

For a moment—just a breath—it was beautiful.

The sky shimmered like glass lit from beneath, every cloud edged in violet and gold. The trees below caught the light in their leaves, shimmering like they knew this was their last dawn. Even the moss seemed to glow—soft, defiant, alive.

It was the kind of beauty you only notice when you already know it’s leaving.

A second sun was rising. Not red. Not gold. Just… ancient.

Burning.

Light spilled over the horizon like spilled milk and flame, and the wind stopped.

The Guardian didn’t speak.

It only stood there—solid, still, and silent—as if the weight of time itself had gathered behind its eyes.

But the thread pulsed once more— then vanished from sight.

There was no scream. No rescue. Just the breathless hush of a world offering up its memory.

And that’s when they knew— they weren’t here to be saved.

They were here to witness.

They stood at the end of history.

And the sky was about to show them the end of an era.

---

❂ The thread winds this way.

Follow where it frays, tangles, or tightens.

Each part holds the next—and the next part is just below.