Chapter 1:
Chapter 1 : The Girl Who Arrived Before the End
The World Ends Every Midnight
# THE WORLD ENDS EVERY MIDNIGHT
### Chapter 1: The Girl Who Arrived Before the End
*Written by Xiaojue**ABTERRA NEXUS STUDIO*
---
At 11:59 p.m., Aarav learned that the world was about to break his heart again.
He stood beneath the old railway station clock, holding two cups of tea.
One was warm.
The other had already gone cold.
He did not know why he kept buying two.
Perhaps because, somewhere inside him, a foolish little part still believed that tomorrow might be different.
The station was almost empty. Rain whispered against the glass roof, and the last train of the night waited on the tracks like a tired animal that had forgotten where it was supposed to go.
Above him, the clock's second hand moved.
Eleven fifty-nine and fifty seconds.
Aarav looked at the empty cup in his left hand.
"Five minutes," he murmured.
Then he corrected himself.
"Five minutes until the end."
Nobody heard him.
Nobody ever did.
At midnight, the world would disappear.
The buildings, the streets, the rivers, the people sleeping peacefully in their homes—all of it would be swallowed by a darkness without stars.
And at six in the morning, everything would return.
The same streets.
The same rain.
The same strangers buying coffee at the same shops.
The same little boy dropping his red balloon outside the bakery.
The same old woman waiting for a bus that would arrive three minutes late.
Everyone would live the same day again, believing it was new.
Everyone except Aarav.
He remembered every ending.
He remembered the first time the sky had cracked open above his city. He remembered screaming into a telephone while his mother laughed at his ridiculous story. He remembered running through crowded streets, trying to warn people who could not hear the fear in his voice.
He remembered dying, too.
The first time, he had been terrified.
The second time, he had begged for it to stop.
By the hundredth time, he had stopped counting the ways a person could lose everything.
By the four-hundred-and-seventeenth, he had learned something far worse than death.
A person could survive almost anything.
Even the loss of hope.
His phone vibrated.
A message from his mother.
**Don't forget to eat, Aarav. You always say you're not hungry when you're sad.**
He stared at the screen.
He had received that message four hundred and seventeen times.
His mother would never remember sending it. In the morning, she would make breakfast, complain about the price of vegetables, and ask why he looked so tired.
He would smile and tell her he was fine.
He had become very good at smiling for people who would never remember his pain.
The clock struck eleven fifty-nine and fifty-five seconds.
Aarav closed his eyes.
Five.
Four.
Three.
A small voice spoke behind him.
"Excuse me. Is that tea for someone?"
He opened his eyes.
A girl stood beside the ticket counter, holding a transparent umbrella with a broken handle. Her long, dark hair clung to her cheeks, and rainwater glistened on the sleeves of her pale blue dress.
She looked ordinary.
Beautifully, painfully ordinary.
The kind of person someone might pass on a crowded street and forget by dinner.
But when she smiled, something inside Aarav moved.
Not dramatically.
Not like thunder.
More like a locked door remembering the shape of its key.
He looked at the two cups in his hands.
"One is."
"Where is the other person?"
He almost laughed.
"I've been wondering that myself."
She tilted her head. "That's a sad answer."
"I have a lot of those."
"Then you should practice better ones."
For the first time in four hundred and seventeen days, Aarav forgot to count the seconds.
The girl glanced at the cold cup.
"Can I have that one?"
He handed it to her.
She took a sip and immediately made a face.
"Oh, that's terrible."
Aarav blinked.
"You're the one who asked for it."
"I asked for tea. I didn't ask to be punished."
A laugh escaped him.
It was small, unfamiliar, and almost painful.
He could not remember the last time he had laughed without pretending.
The girl looked delighted, as if she had accomplished something extraordinary.
"There," she said. "You look better when you're not trying to look sad."
"You don't know anything about me."
"That's true." She held out her free hand. "I'm Yasini."
He stared at her hand for a moment before taking it.
"Aarav."
"Nice to meet you, Aarav."
The station clock clicked.
Eleven fifty-nine and fifty-nine seconds.
Aarav's smile disappeared.
He knew what came next.
The lights would flicker.
The train would sound its horn.
The sky would split down the middle, revealing a darkness so complete that even the stars would seem to have been erased from existence.
Then everything would end.
He had seen it hundreds of times.
He reached for Yasini's wrist.
"Listen to me. Whatever happens in the next second, don't—"
Midnight arrived.
The lights went out.
For one breath, the world became silent.
Then the sky broke.
A sound like a thousand windows shattering rolled across the city. Beyond the station's glass roof, buildings dissolved into pale fragments of light. Cars vanished in the middle of the road. The distant river rose into the air, its water hanging like a silver ribbon before breaking apart into countless shining pieces.
People screamed.
The train disappeared.
The clock stopped.
Aarav tightened his grip on Yasini's hand.
He had never held anyone during the ending before.
He had always been alone.
"Don't let go!" he shouted.
Yasini stared at the collapsing sky.
Then she looked at him.
And instead of screaming, she asked a question that made the entire universe feel suddenly small.
"Aarav… why do I feel like I've met you before?"
He froze.
"What?"
Her eyes filled with tears.
"I don't know you," she whispered. "I've never seen you before. But when you held my hand, I felt like I was losing someone I've been searching for my entire life."
The darkness reached the station.
Aarav tried to answer.
He wanted to tell her that he had never met her before tonight. That she was a stranger whose name he had learned only seconds ago.
He wanted to tell her that her hand was warm, that her voice had reminded him he was still alive, and that for one impossible moment he had forgotten the end of the world.
But there was no time.
Yasini's fingers slipped through his.
The last thing he saw was her face—not frightened, not confused, but strangely peaceful.
She smiled at him through her tears.
"Please," she whispered. "Find me."
Then the world disappeared.
---
Aarav woke at six in the morning.
Sunlight fell across his bedroom floor.
A bus groaned somewhere outside. A neighbour was arguing over the telephone. From the kitchen came the familiar sound of his mother placing a cup on the table.
Everything had returned.
He sat up, breathing hard.
For several seconds, he could not remember why his hands were trembling.
Then he remembered her.
Yasini.
Her broken umbrella.
Her terrible tea.
The way she had looked at him as if his face belonged to a memory she had lost.
He reached for his phone.
The date was unchanged.
His mother's message was there, exactly as before.
He ran to the kitchen.
"Amma, do you know a girl named Yasini?"
His mother looked up from the stove.
"Yasini? Who is she?"
"I don't know."
She frowned. "Then how am I supposed to know?"
He almost told her everything.
Instead, he swallowed the words and left the house.
For the first time in months, Aarav ran toward the day instead of hiding from its ending.
He searched the railway station.
The ticket counter.
The platform where they had stood.
He asked the tea seller whether he remembered a girl with a broken umbrella.
The man shook his head.
He asked the station guard.
Nothing.
By noon, Aarav had begun to wonder whether the previous night had been a cruel trick played by his exhausted mind.
Then, at 4:17 p.m., he found her.
Yasini stood outside a small bookshop, arguing with a vending machine that had swallowed her money.
"You have one job," she told it sternly. "One. And somehow you've failed at it."
Aarav stopped walking.
For a moment, he could not breathe.
She looked exactly as she had the night before.
Same dark hair.
Same pale blue dress.
Same impatient expression.
She turned and noticed him staring.
"Can I help you?"
Aarav had imagined this moment hundreds of times during his endless days.
He had imagined finding a person who remembered the world ending.
He had imagined discovering that he was not alone.
He had imagined telling someone the truth and watching their face change as they understood the impossible thing he had been carrying.
But he had never imagined how difficult it would be to speak to the girl who had held his hand while the universe died.
"You're Yasini," he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
"Yes. And you're…?"
"Aarav."
"Okay, Aarav. Do I owe you money or something?"
He laughed despite himself.
"No."
"Have we met?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
Yesterday, she had asked him the same question.
Yesterday, she had cried because she felt she was losing someone she had never known.
Today, she looked at him as if he were a stranger who had interrupted her argument with a machine.
"No," he said softly. "Not yet."
She studied him.
Then she smiled.
It was the same smile.
Aarav felt something inside his chest loosen, something that had been tied too tightly for too long.
Yasini pointed at the vending machine.
"Since we're apparently strangers, would you mind helping me convince this thing to return my money?"
He stepped beside her.
"Have you tried asking nicely?"
"I did. It has no manners."
"Maybe it takes after its owner."
She gasped in mock outrage.
For a few minutes, they argued about a vending machine, shared a packet of biscuits, and laughed at a joke that was not particularly funny.
Nothing extraordinary happened.
The sky remained whole.
The streets remained where they belonged.
And Aarav discovered that ordinary moments could feel like miracles when you had spent too long expecting everything to disappear.
Before they parted, Yasini glanced at the time.
"I have to go."
"Will I see you again?"
She gave him a curious look.
"That depends. Are you always this strange?"
"Only when I'm nervous."
"Then I hope you stay nervous."
She walked away, smiling.
Aarav watched until the crowd swallowed her.
For the first time in four hundred and eighteen days, he wanted tomorrow to come.
Not because he believed the world would survive it.
Not because he expected to find an answer.
But because somewhere in the city, a girl named Yasini was living a day she would never remember.
And he wanted to meet her again.
---
At 11:59 p.m., Aarav returned to the railway station.
He stood beneath the old clock with two cups of tea.
One was warm.
The other was meant for Yasini.
He knew she might not come.
He knew the world would end in a minute.
He knew that, in the morning, he would wake with another day to survive.
Still, he waited.
Because hope was a ridiculous thing.
It survived evidence. It survived disappointment. It survived four hundred and eighteen endings.
And sometimes, it wore a pale blue dress and complained about bad tea.
The clock moved.
Eleven fifty-nine and fifty seconds.
Aarav looked toward the entrance.
Then he heard footsteps.
He turned.
Yasini stood beneath the station lights, holding the same broken umbrella.
She looked breathless, as if she had run all the way there.
"I don't know why I'm here," she said.
Aarav could not speak.
"I was going home. Then I suddenly felt like someone was waiting for me." She glanced at the cup in his hand. "Is that tea?"
He nodded.
She took it.
Then she looked directly into his eyes.
"Aarav, can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
Her smile faded.
"Why do I keep dreaming about a world that ends at midnight?"
The clock stopped.
For the first time in four hundred and nineteen days, Aarav felt genuine fear.
Because Yasini was supposed to forget.
Everyone was supposed to forget.
Yet she was standing before him, remembering something that should have been impossible.
And then she whispered the words that would change everything.
"In my dream, you always die first."
Outside, the first crack appeared in the sky.
**End of Chapter 1.**
### Chapter 1: The Girl Who Arrived Before the End
*Written by Xiaojue**ABTERRA NEXUS STUDIO*
---
At 11:59 p.m., Aarav learned that the world was about to break his heart again.
He stood beneath the old railway station clock, holding two cups of tea.
One was warm.
The other had already gone cold.
He did not know why he kept buying two.
Perhaps because, somewhere inside him, a foolish little part still believed that tomorrow might be different.
The station was almost empty. Rain whispered against the glass roof, and the last train of the night waited on the tracks like a tired animal that had forgotten where it was supposed to go.
Above him, the clock's second hand moved.
Eleven fifty-nine and fifty seconds.
Aarav looked at the empty cup in his left hand.
"Five minutes," he murmured.
Then he corrected himself.
"Five minutes until the end."
Nobody heard him.
Nobody ever did.
At midnight, the world would disappear.
The buildings, the streets, the rivers, the people sleeping peacefully in their homes—all of it would be swallowed by a darkness without stars.
And at six in the morning, everything would return.
The same streets.
The same rain.
The same strangers buying coffee at the same shops.
The same little boy dropping his red balloon outside the bakery.
The same old woman waiting for a bus that would arrive three minutes late.
Everyone would live the same day again, believing it was new.
Everyone except Aarav.
He remembered every ending.
He remembered the first time the sky had cracked open above his city. He remembered screaming into a telephone while his mother laughed at his ridiculous story. He remembered running through crowded streets, trying to warn people who could not hear the fear in his voice.
He remembered dying, too.
The first time, he had been terrified.
The second time, he had begged for it to stop.
By the hundredth time, he had stopped counting the ways a person could lose everything.
By the four-hundred-and-seventeenth, he had learned something far worse than death.
A person could survive almost anything.
Even the loss of hope.
His phone vibrated.
A message from his mother.
**Don't forget to eat, Aarav. You always say you're not hungry when you're sad.**
He stared at the screen.
He had received that message four hundred and seventeen times.
His mother would never remember sending it. In the morning, she would make breakfast, complain about the price of vegetables, and ask why he looked so tired.
He would smile and tell her he was fine.
He had become very good at smiling for people who would never remember his pain.
The clock struck eleven fifty-nine and fifty-five seconds.
Aarav closed his eyes.
Five.
Four.
Three.
A small voice spoke behind him.
"Excuse me. Is that tea for someone?"
He opened his eyes.
A girl stood beside the ticket counter, holding a transparent umbrella with a broken handle. Her long, dark hair clung to her cheeks, and rainwater glistened on the sleeves of her pale blue dress.
She looked ordinary.
Beautifully, painfully ordinary.
The kind of person someone might pass on a crowded street and forget by dinner.
But when she smiled, something inside Aarav moved.
Not dramatically.
Not like thunder.
More like a locked door remembering the shape of its key.
He looked at the two cups in his hands.
"One is."
"Where is the other person?"
He almost laughed.
"I've been wondering that myself."
She tilted her head. "That's a sad answer."
"I have a lot of those."
"Then you should practice better ones."
For the first time in four hundred and seventeen days, Aarav forgot to count the seconds.
The girl glanced at the cold cup.
"Can I have that one?"
He handed it to her.
She took a sip and immediately made a face.
"Oh, that's terrible."
Aarav blinked.
"You're the one who asked for it."
"I asked for tea. I didn't ask to be punished."
A laugh escaped him.
It was small, unfamiliar, and almost painful.
He could not remember the last time he had laughed without pretending.
The girl looked delighted, as if she had accomplished something extraordinary.
"There," she said. "You look better when you're not trying to look sad."
"You don't know anything about me."
"That's true." She held out her free hand. "I'm Yasini."
He stared at her hand for a moment before taking it.
"Aarav."
"Nice to meet you, Aarav."
The station clock clicked.
Eleven fifty-nine and fifty-nine seconds.
Aarav's smile disappeared.
He knew what came next.
The lights would flicker.
The train would sound its horn.
The sky would split down the middle, revealing a darkness so complete that even the stars would seem to have been erased from existence.
Then everything would end.
He had seen it hundreds of times.
He reached for Yasini's wrist.
"Listen to me. Whatever happens in the next second, don't—"
Midnight arrived.
The lights went out.
For one breath, the world became silent.
Then the sky broke.
A sound like a thousand windows shattering rolled across the city. Beyond the station's glass roof, buildings dissolved into pale fragments of light. Cars vanished in the middle of the road. The distant river rose into the air, its water hanging like a silver ribbon before breaking apart into countless shining pieces.
People screamed.
The train disappeared.
The clock stopped.
Aarav tightened his grip on Yasini's hand.
He had never held anyone during the ending before.
He had always been alone.
"Don't let go!" he shouted.
Yasini stared at the collapsing sky.
Then she looked at him.
And instead of screaming, she asked a question that made the entire universe feel suddenly small.
"Aarav… why do I feel like I've met you before?"
He froze.
"What?"
Her eyes filled with tears.
"I don't know you," she whispered. "I've never seen you before. But when you held my hand, I felt like I was losing someone I've been searching for my entire life."
The darkness reached the station.
Aarav tried to answer.
He wanted to tell her that he had never met her before tonight. That she was a stranger whose name he had learned only seconds ago.
He wanted to tell her that her hand was warm, that her voice had reminded him he was still alive, and that for one impossible moment he had forgotten the end of the world.
But there was no time.
Yasini's fingers slipped through his.
The last thing he saw was her face—not frightened, not confused, but strangely peaceful.
She smiled at him through her tears.
"Please," she whispered. "Find me."
Then the world disappeared.
---
Aarav woke at six in the morning.
Sunlight fell across his bedroom floor.
A bus groaned somewhere outside. A neighbour was arguing over the telephone. From the kitchen came the familiar sound of his mother placing a cup on the table.
Everything had returned.
He sat up, breathing hard.
For several seconds, he could not remember why his hands were trembling.
Then he remembered her.
Yasini.
Her broken umbrella.
Her terrible tea.
The way she had looked at him as if his face belonged to a memory she had lost.
He reached for his phone.
The date was unchanged.
His mother's message was there, exactly as before.
He ran to the kitchen.
"Amma, do you know a girl named Yasini?"
His mother looked up from the stove.
"Yasini? Who is she?"
"I don't know."
She frowned. "Then how am I supposed to know?"
He almost told her everything.
Instead, he swallowed the words and left the house.
For the first time in months, Aarav ran toward the day instead of hiding from its ending.
He searched the railway station.
The ticket counter.
The platform where they had stood.
He asked the tea seller whether he remembered a girl with a broken umbrella.
The man shook his head.
He asked the station guard.
Nothing.
By noon, Aarav had begun to wonder whether the previous night had been a cruel trick played by his exhausted mind.
Then, at 4:17 p.m., he found her.
Yasini stood outside a small bookshop, arguing with a vending machine that had swallowed her money.
"You have one job," she told it sternly. "One. And somehow you've failed at it."
Aarav stopped walking.
For a moment, he could not breathe.
She looked exactly as she had the night before.
Same dark hair.
Same pale blue dress.
Same impatient expression.
She turned and noticed him staring.
"Can I help you?"
Aarav had imagined this moment hundreds of times during his endless days.
He had imagined finding a person who remembered the world ending.
He had imagined discovering that he was not alone.
He had imagined telling someone the truth and watching their face change as they understood the impossible thing he had been carrying.
But he had never imagined how difficult it would be to speak to the girl who had held his hand while the universe died.
"You're Yasini," he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
"Yes. And you're…?"
"Aarav."
"Okay, Aarav. Do I owe you money or something?"
He laughed despite himself.
"No."
"Have we met?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
Yesterday, she had asked him the same question.
Yesterday, she had cried because she felt she was losing someone she had never known.
Today, she looked at him as if he were a stranger who had interrupted her argument with a machine.
"No," he said softly. "Not yet."
She studied him.
Then she smiled.
It was the same smile.
Aarav felt something inside his chest loosen, something that had been tied too tightly for too long.
Yasini pointed at the vending machine.
"Since we're apparently strangers, would you mind helping me convince this thing to return my money?"
He stepped beside her.
"Have you tried asking nicely?"
"I did. It has no manners."
"Maybe it takes after its owner."
She gasped in mock outrage.
For a few minutes, they argued about a vending machine, shared a packet of biscuits, and laughed at a joke that was not particularly funny.
Nothing extraordinary happened.
The sky remained whole.
The streets remained where they belonged.
And Aarav discovered that ordinary moments could feel like miracles when you had spent too long expecting everything to disappear.
Before they parted, Yasini glanced at the time.
"I have to go."
"Will I see you again?"
She gave him a curious look.
"That depends. Are you always this strange?"
"Only when I'm nervous."
"Then I hope you stay nervous."
She walked away, smiling.
Aarav watched until the crowd swallowed her.
For the first time in four hundred and eighteen days, he wanted tomorrow to come.
Not because he believed the world would survive it.
Not because he expected to find an answer.
But because somewhere in the city, a girl named Yasini was living a day she would never remember.
And he wanted to meet her again.
---
At 11:59 p.m., Aarav returned to the railway station.
He stood beneath the old clock with two cups of tea.
One was warm.
The other was meant for Yasini.
He knew she might not come.
He knew the world would end in a minute.
He knew that, in the morning, he would wake with another day to survive.
Still, he waited.
Because hope was a ridiculous thing.
It survived evidence. It survived disappointment. It survived four hundred and eighteen endings.
And sometimes, it wore a pale blue dress and complained about bad tea.
The clock moved.
Eleven fifty-nine and fifty seconds.
Aarav looked toward the entrance.
Then he heard footsteps.
He turned.
Yasini stood beneath the station lights, holding the same broken umbrella.
She looked breathless, as if she had run all the way there.
"I don't know why I'm here," she said.
Aarav could not speak.
"I was going home. Then I suddenly felt like someone was waiting for me." She glanced at the cup in his hand. "Is that tea?"
He nodded.
She took it.
Then she looked directly into his eyes.
"Aarav, can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
Her smile faded.
"Why do I keep dreaming about a world that ends at midnight?"
The clock stopped.
For the first time in four hundred and nineteen days, Aarav felt genuine fear.
Because Yasini was supposed to forget.
Everyone was supposed to forget.
Yet she was standing before him, remembering something that should have been impossible.
And then she whispered the words that would change everything.
"In my dream, you always die first."
Outside, the first crack appeared in the sky.
**End of Chapter 1.**
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