812
1280 Words
Aria didn’t remember the walk home.
Not the trees whispering in the wind. Not the shadows that felt thicker than usual. Not the distant sound of a siren slicing through the night. All she remembered was Elior’s lips on hers—and the tsunami of visions that had hit her like a freight train.
Now she sat curled in the corner of her room, knees hugged to her chest, her heartbeat echoing like a war drum in her ears.
The kiss had lit a fuse inside her.
And it was still burning.
She’d never felt anything like it. Not just the physical spark—though it had left her breathless—but the collapse that came after. The visions had been… too much. Too vivid. Too real.
She could still see them when she closed her eyes.
Wendy, screaming her name.
Harper, bruised and burned, holding something in her hands that looked like a piece of time itself.
Isabel, whispering something over and over: “Don’t let her break.”
Elior, falling through smoke and lightning, reaching out as if she could stop it.
And in the middle of it all—the number 812, etched in fire.
It was carved into walls, screens, people’s skin.
Aria squeezed her eyes shut.
What did it mean?
The next morning, her phone buzzed with a storm of messages.
Wendy (7:12 a.m.): “You didn’t text. You okay?”
Isabel (7:15 a.m.): “Aria. Call me. Now.”
Harper (7:23 a.m.): “We had a dream. The same dream. It was about you.”
Her blood ran cold.
She barely managed to pull on clothes before running out the door.
They gathered in Isabel’s basement, windows covered, the old couch groaning under their weight.
Aria sat with a blanket draped over her shoulders, hair still damp from a rushed shower, eyes wild with unspoken thoughts.
“I saw fire,” Harper said first, voice low. “And you, Aria. You were… glowing. Like your skin was made of light. You looked terrified.”
“I saw her too,” Wendy added. “But something was chasing her. It was made of shadows—like it didn’t belong in this world.”
Isabel nodded. “I saw the number. 812. Over and over. And a mirror cracking from the inside.”
Aria’s heart dropped. “I saw all of it too. Right after Elior kissed me.”
Their heads snapped toward her.
“He kissed you?” Isabel said, blinking.
“Wait—what?” Wendy echoed.
Aria held up her hands. “It wasn’t… planned. It felt like it had already happened. Like he was picking up a thread from another timeline.”
Harper raised a brow. “And how did it feel?”
Aria hesitated. “Like falling into the future. And drowning in it.”
A hush fell over the room.
Then Wendy said softly, “Do you think he did it on purpose? To trigger something in you?”
Aria stared down at her fingers. “Maybe. But it felt real. Like he needed to do it.”
Harper stood and started pacing. “Okay. Elior is clearly not normal. He shows up, knows about the explosion, talks about alternate futures—and now he’s kissing you into psychic seizures.”
Isabel chewed on a pencil cap. “If the dreams are connected to the visions, and if we’re all sharing fragments of the same possible future… then this number—812—might be a date.”
Wendy frowned. “Like August twelfth?”
Harper looked up. “That’s in exactly… sixty days.”
A beat of silence.
Aria swallowed hard. “What happens on August twelfth?”
“I think that’s the day everything ends,” Isabel whispered.
That night, Aria sat at her window with a notebook, writing the number 812 over and over again.
She had tried to ignore the feeling, but something inside her buzzed with certainty: August 12th wasn’t the end. It was the beginning of the unraveling.
She picked up her pencil and began to sketch.
Her hands moved on their own, guided by something deep and ancient. The lines formed a doorway. A mirror. A fire. A falling body.
And then, suddenly—
Her hand burned. The pencil fell from her grip.
A new image had appeared on the page, one she hadn’t drawn consciously.
Her own face, crying black tears.
And beneath it, in shaky writing:
“You opened the door. Now time will bleed.”
Meanwhile, across town, Elior stood alone on a rooftop, watching the skyline shimmer beneath a blood-orange sunset.
He clenched his fists.
This timeline was already off-course.
Aria was awakening too fast.
He had kissed her because he had to. In another version, he’d waited—waited too long. And she’d died before unlocking her full ability.
He couldn’t let that happen again.
Not this time.
Not in this loop.
He stared out toward the west, where the faultline in time was already beginning to c***k—where the countdown to 812 had begun.
And from the shadows behind him, a voice whispered:
“You’ve already failed, traveler.”
He didn’t turn. “I haven’t yet.”
The next morning, Aria skipped school.
She needed answers. And she wasn’t going to get them from teachers or textbooks.
She stood outside the town’s historical society building, camera bag slung across her chest, hoodie drawn up over her head. It was quiet. Too quiet.
Inside, the old archivist—a wiry man named Malcolm—barely glanced up from his desk.
“Back again?” he said without looking.
“Research,” she replied.
“Still about the explosion?”
Her voice dropped. “I need to know if anything strange ever happened here before. Before the pipeline. Before the school was even built.”
Malcolm eyed her warily, then sighed and pointed toward the back. “There’s a box marked ‘Temporal Disturbances.’ Probably just junk, but knock yourself out.”
She found the box buried under a stack of yellowing maps.
Inside: newspaper clippings, blurry photos, brittle journals.
She flipped through until one headline caught her breath.
“Mysterious Light Seen in Woods – August 12, 1983”
She stared at the date.
August 12th.
She yanked the paper out, heart racing.
The story spoke of a strange silver flash that paralyzed a group of hikers for several minutes. No explosion. No injuries. Just silence, a flash of light—and then amnesia.
One of the hikers claimed they “lost time.”
Another drew a symbol that looked exactly like the sketch Aria had made of the broken mirror.
She sat back, stunned.
Whatever had happened to her and her friends—it wasn’t the first time.
When Aria returned home, she found a letter taped to her door.
No postage. No name.
Inside, a single note in red ink:
“The past is bleeding forward. Stop looking.”
Her hands trembled.
She took a deep breath, then burned the note over her bathroom sink.
Whoever was leaving these messages… they didn’t want her finding the truth.
Which only meant one thing—
She was getting closer.
That night, Aria stood at her mirror, the house dark around her.
She reached out and touched the glass.
It rippled under her fingers.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
The reflection melted, like time itself had become liquid.
Then a voice—her voice—spoke from the other side.
“You think this is about saving the future. But it’s not. It’s about choosing which one you’re willing to destroy.”
And then—
her reflection smiled without her.
- Writer
