The dark-haired woman reached out and tucked a strand of silver hair behind the other woman’s ear—a small gesture, soordinary,yet it spoke so much.
When they leaned in to kiss, the bridge and the canal and the lights dissolved before their lips met—and then I was turning again, spinning, falling.
The next scene unfolded in this new angle like it had been waiting for my attention all along. My mind buzzed as I chased the colors that came into existence, the shapes that drew themselves out of the air.
A room full of children, dozens of them. They couldn’t be older than five or six, and they were sitting cross-legged on a wooden floor. They were wearing white suits with colored patches at the pockets and collars, and their faces were turned upward, mouths open, eyes wide, watching something I couldn’t see from my angle. Their expressions were identical—that particular blend of terror and wonder that only children could hold at the same time properly.
Then came a voice that shook me to my core, not because I recognized it, but because I heard it so clearly, just over the background noise that was made ofallsounds together, simultaneously.
“And the Great White Rabbit looked upon what he had built, and he said: this is mine, and it is magnificent, and I shall share it with no one!”
The children gasped. One of them—a tiny girl with braids—grabbed the arm of the boy next to her. The boy grabbed the girl on his other side. A chain reaction of tiny hands holding other tiny hands, and the voice continued:
“But Time—oh, Time was clever, you see. Time was patient. Time said: you may keep your clock, Rabbit. You may keep yourrealm. But you will never keep me. For I belong to everyone, and no one, and especially not to thieves.”
The children squealed. The girl with the braids shouted, “Did the Rabbit cry?”
“Oh, he wept,”said the voice, and I could hear the smile in it.“He wept rivers of minutes and seas of hours, and his tears became the Spill, where time runs out and the falling never stops.”
The scene was already fading when the girl with braids whispered to the boy beside her: “I’m never-ever-reven going to steal anything.”
I barely heard the boy whispering back, “Me, neither.”
Such an intense,personalmoment, and then they were gone.
More. There were more scenes, more moments, morewhatever it wasthat I was looking at in this gallery.
The next came slower, almost crept in from below, rising to meet me as I fell—and the moment it took shape, I knew it was older. Much older. The colors were muted, browns and golds and the deep, bruised purple of a sky at dusk. The air I breathed suddenly smelled of grass and smoke and something sharp I couldn’t name, and the sound ofsilencebecame clearer over the background noise of everything else that was going on around me. A field, wide and flat, stretched to the horizon.
Standing in the center of it, all alone, was a figure.
I stopped breathing.
Something about that shape. Something about that field.Something about something about something…
It wasn’t a man or a woman. It was…something in between, or beyond, with hands that were too long and feet that were bare against the grass and hair that moved in a wind I couldn’t feel.
Don’t ask me how I knew, but in the figure’s hands there was a clock—enormous and delicate at the same time. Itsface wasn’t metal or glass but light, solid light, ticking with a sound that was less a sound than a heartbeat.
The heartbeat ofeverything.
Or so it felt like to me.
The figure held the clock to its chest, like it was suddenly afraid it might lose it. And suddenly, around it the grass began to grow fast, the way grassdidn’tgrow, and seeds went to stems and to flowers in the time it took me to blink. Trees erupted from the soil before my eyes, their trunks spiraling upward, their branches reaching for a sky that was filling with stars that hadn’t been there a moment before. I could swear it—they hadn’t existed just now.
The ground shifted, flattened, spread outward in every direction like a disc being drawn in real time.
Then, just as fast, in barely a blink, the field was gone, and that heartbeat faded into the background noise.
After that, the scenes came faster—or maybe my attention shifted from one to the other quicker? I couldn’t be sure, but the deeper I fell, the more I saw—except the images didn’t linger now, not the way they had a moment ago, in full vivid detail. Now they were more like flashes, bright and brief, like lightning illuminating a landscape for a single instant.
A coronation. Two women kneeling before a crowd, crowns being placed on their heads, their hands clasped between them. The crowd was cheering, but one of the women with snow-white hair was squeezing the other’s fingers so hard her knuckles were white, and her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
A war—or rather, the end of one. Soldiers in court colors dragging themselves through mud, their chronobanks shattered, the sky above them the wrong color. A tower in the distance, burning. Someone screaming a name I couldn’t quite make out.
The sounds, the smell—it was all so wrong. So…painful.
But I didn’t have time to feel more because in the next blink the flash had changed, and now a child was in front of me, planting a glass heart on a tree. Reaching up on her tiptoes, her mother holding her waist, both of them laughing when the branch dipped under the weight and the heart swung like a pendulum.
