The Girl Who Stole Eternity

“The most dangerous stories are the ones we tell ourselves to stay sane.”

The neon sunset bled into indigo as Jin staggered across the skybridge, his tablet clutched like a lifeline. The city sprawled below him—a circuit board of flickering holograms and anti-gravity rails—but its beauty felt hollow now. His mind still burned with the vision: the tree of fractured spacetime, the girl etching glyphs into her skin, the voice that wasn’t a voice.

She tried to edit the Codex.

He gagged, bracing against the glass railing as the horizon tilted.

“Where’re you slinking off to, prophet-boy?”

Rhea leaned against a support beam, arms crossed, her scalp circuits flickering turquoise. Jin didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The glyph on his tablet throbbed in time with his pulse—an eye, a key, a wound.

“Lab 7,” she sing-songed, stepping into his path. “That message said tonight. Or did your brain fry from all that cosmic truth?”

Jin sidestepped her, voice brittle. “Not interested. Tomorrow’s research duty—remember? I need sleep. Sanity. Anything that isn’t… this.”

“Sleep?” Rhea snorted, falling into step as he pushed forward. “You look like you’ve seen God’s browser history. Spill it.”

He flinched. I did.

“Come on,” she grabbed his collar, yanking him close. Her breath smelled like synthetic mint and burnt circuitry. “You’ve been twitching like a glitched sim all day. What’d you see?”

Jin wrenched free, voice cracking. “Nothing. Drop it.”

“Liar.” She stepped closer, circuits flaring red. “Your pupils dilated at exactly 18:43:27 during Ilun’s lecture. Synced with the Codex fragment’s energy spike. You saw something. Now. Talk.”

“Or what?” Jin hissed. “You’ll hack my neuralink? Run a diagnostic?”

Rhea smirked. “Nah. I’ll just follow you. All night. Humming K-pop. Loudly.”

Jin’s eye twitched.

...

The lab crouched on the city’s eastern fringe—a windowless monolith of black alloy, its surface scarred with glyph-like corrosion. No lights. No drones. Just the hum of outdated security scanners and the stench of rust.

“Charming,” Rhea whispered, crouching beside Jin in the shadow of a coolant tower. “Looks like a tomb for failed experiments.”

Jin’s tablet buzzed. The glyph had spread, splitting the screen into jagged thirds. “We shouldn’t be here.”

“Too late.” Rhea tossed a pebble at the lab’s door. A laser grid flared, slicing the pebble to dust. “Oooh, vintage security. My turn.”

She pulled a chip from her pocket—stolen from Ilun’s lecture hall, probably—and jammed it into the scanner. The grid flickered. Died.

“After you, princess.”

...

The lab stank of ozone and decay. Rhea’s penlight swept over rusted servers, shattered hologram pods, and walls etched with…

“Codex glyphs,” Jin breathed.

But these were different. Smoother. Older.

Rhea traced one. “They’re… growing.”

The glyphs pulsed, threads of bioluminescent moss weaving between them. The air thickened. Jin’s tablet screamed—

THUD.

Something moved in the dark.

“Rat?” Rhea whispered.

“Big rat,” Jin said, backing toward the door.

A shape lunged from the shadows—a girl, no older than twelve, her skin etched with glowing glyphs. She gripped a shard of black glass like a dagger, eyes wide, feral.

“You… shouldn’t… be here,” she rasped. “They’re listening.”

Jin froze. The girl from his vision.

Rhea stepped forward. “Who’s ‘they,’ kid?”

The girl raised her blade. “The ones who tried to fix it. The ones who failed.”

Behind her, a hologram flickered—a massive tree, its branches coiled with code, roots plunging into a pulsing heart.

“The Tree of Eternity,” the girl whispered. “It’s dying. And when it falls…”

The lab trembled. Dust rained from the ceiling.

Jin’s tablet blared—a countdown.

00:10:00

00:09:59

00:09:58

“Run,” the girl hissed. “Before the angels wake.”

...

The ceiling split. Chunks of black alloy rained down as the glyphs bled crimson. Rhea shoved Jin sideways, her circuits flaring blue—a human lightning rod in the chaos.

“RUN, IDIOT!”

Jin stumbled, his tablet shattering as a shard of glass—no, not glass, Codex glyphs made solid—sliced through Rhea’s chest. She gasped, crumpling, her blood pooling into the shape of a spiraling eye.

“RHEA—!”

The shadow entity materialized above her corpse, its form a writhing tangle of static and starlight. A spear of darkness coalesced in its grip, humming with the sound of a collapsing star. Jin froze.

The spear flew.

Pain. White-hot. Then cold.

It pierced his right eye, pinning him to the wall. His scream died as the world dissolved into static.

...

“Hyyy… Jin…”

Blackness.

“Wake up…”

The voice coiled around him, syrupy and familiar.

“JIN.”

Huhhhhhh—!

...

Year 2025
Monday. 2:17 PM. A day before summer break.

Jin jolted upright, gasping, his desk rattling. Sunlight streamed through grimy classroom windows. Chalk dust hovered in the air. Thirty pairs of eyes stared.

“Jin Oblivien!”

Mr. Harkness, his biology teacher, loomed over him, face puce. A glob of spit landed on Jin’s cheek. “Sleeping again? In my class?!”

Jin’s hand flew to his right eye. No spear. No blood. Just sweat.

“I—I wasn’t… there was a lab, a girl, a spear—”

“A spear?” The class erupted in laughter.

“Detention!” Harkness barked. “Cleaning duty! And if I catch you snoring again, I’ll personally donate your brain to the science fair!”

...

The bell rang. Jin numbly shuffled into the hall, his skull throbbing. His reflection in a locker showed no wound—but his right eye twitched, pupils uneven.

“Hey, Prophet!”

Rhea—no, not Rhea, just a girl with the same name, he told himself—leaned against a locker, chewing gum. Same shaved head, no circuits. Same smirk. “Heard you got stabbed in the eye by a demon spear. Epic.”

Jin blinked. “How did you…?”

“You were mumbling in your sleep.” She tossed him a crumpled soda can. “Help me clean the lab. Harkness’s orders.”

...

The “lab” was a glorified storage closet—dusty microscopes, cracked beakers, a poster of the solar system with Pluto crossed out. Jin scrubbed graffiti (Harkness eats glue!) as Rhea rattled on about summer plans.

“—gonna binge Cosmic Wars and hack the school’s AC. Hey.” She kicked his shoe. “You’re zoning again.”

“Sorry.” Jin rubbed his eye. The pain sharpened. “Just… a weird dream.”

“About?”

“A codex. Angels. A tree that… never mind.”

Rhea paused. “A tree made of code?”

Jin dropped his sponge. “How did you—?”

“Relax.” She rolled her eyes. “You literally said ‘the Tree of Eternity’ while drooling on your desk.”

He exhaled. Of course.

But then—

A flicker. On the lab’s chalkboard.

Glyphs.

His glyphs. The same jagged eye-key hybrid, smudged in chalk dust.

“Did you… draw this?” Jin whispered.

Rhea frowned. “Draw what?”

The glyph pulsed. Jin’s eye burned.

...

After detention, Jin took the long route home. The summer air smelled of asphalt and cut grass. He paused under the Ursa Major constellation poster outside the astronomy club.

“The Dubb e Akbar,” his mother’s voice echoed. “The Great Bear.”

A shadow moved.

The girl from the lab—same etched glyphs, same feral eyes—stood across the street. Real. Solid.

“You’re… not part of the dream,” Jin breathed.

She raised a hand, fingers splayed. A tiny black hole spun above her palm, devouring light.

“It wasn’t a dream,” she said. “It was a test. And you failed.”

The hole expanded. The street unraveled.

Year 2489 CE.

Professor Veyra’s voice cut through the hum of holograms. “Let me be clear—we are not historians. We are morticians.”

The Codex fragment shimmered above her podium.

Jin’s right eye twitched.

“Every ending is a lie told by the next beginning.”