The world hadn't completely frozen. Life was still moving, even if the stars and sky betrayed a stillness that felt anything but natural.
"Grandpa, Grandma, Jia," I called, my voice sharper than I intended. "Get back inside, now."
It didn't take long for them to appear, their expressions a mixture of curiosity and reluctant compliance. Jia was the last to cross the threshold, casting one last glance over her shoulder at the strange sky.
"I don't understand," she murmured, barely audible. "It's like the world is holding its breath, waiting for something."
This didn't feel like the natural order of things. It felt… calculated. Purposeful. And that thought unsettled me more than anything.
The clock.
I moved back into the hallway, standing in front of its silent face. It wasn't damaged—I knew that instinctively.
My mind flitted to Yike. His voice, soft yet foreboding, played in my memory like a broken record: "We can't stop it."
The picture of his face rose unbidden in my mind. Yike had always been cryptic, his words often shrouded in layers of meaning that were impossible to unravel until it was too late. Did he know this was coming?
Or had his warning been a coincidence, a shot in the dark that just happened to strike true?
I felt my breathing quicken, and I forced myself to focus. Panic wouldn't help me now. "Devon," I said, my voice steady despite the storm inside me. He looked up from his pacing, his eyes dark with concern.
Outside, the faint sounds of life continued—children's laughter, the occasional bark of a dog, the rustling of leaves—but they only served to heighten the strangeness of it all. It was as if the world was caught in a liminal space, on the edge of something extraordinary and terrifying.
Whatever "it" was, I was certain of one thing: we were running out of time. Even if the clock refused to move, the world was still shifting—unfolding in ways we couldn't yet understand.
"I think I should just call this a night," I didn't wait for Devon to respond. I just head back to my room.I slumped against the wall of my room as the night deepened, the faint whispers outside was not matching the heavy quiet inside me.
It had been hours since that uneasy feeling first gripped my heart, a sensation that something in the world wasn't quite right.
Exhaustion mingled with a torrent of unresolved emotions from these tumultuous days.
I decided to call it a night, even though sleep felt like a distant promise.
In that moment, I realized that I had finally grown enough to decide what I always wanted out of life—even if it meant standing alone in the face of the inexplicable.
Down in the living room, Jia's eyes remained glued to her phone as she scrolled through every possible headline, desperate for updates on the "eclipse shift." Every so often, her finger paused and her brow furrowed at a new twist in the story.
Devon, on the other hand, paced back and forth, his expression dark with worry. He muttered under his breath about how nothing like this should ever happen, his discontent simmering like a slow-burning fuse.
Then everything went blank.
I woke up to the faint morning light streaming through the living room curtains, the soft weight of a blanket draped over me.
For a moment, I didn't move—my thoughts sluggish, heavy—as I tried to make sense of where I was. My mind felt foggy, tangled with scattered fragments of memory that refused to come together.
Devon was asleep on the floor cushion beside me, his face slack, his brow furrowed even in rest.
Jia had claimed the sofa, her phone loosely clasped in one hand as if she'd been scrolling through headlines until exhaustion claimed her.
I blinked slowly, trying to recall how I ended up here. The last thing I remembered was stepping outside with them, joining the neighbors as we stared up at the frozen night sky.
After that I went to bed upstairs and … nothing.
Just an empty void where my memory should have been.
"Taryn."
The sound of Grandma's voice made me turn sharply, the warmth in her tone grounding me as I looked toward the kitchen door. She stood there in her apron, her smile soft yet weighed down by something I couldn't quite place.
"You're awake," she said, her words quiet, gentle. "Come. Let them sleep."
I hesitated, glancing back at Devon and Jia before pulling myself up. My body protested the movement, my muscles stiff from whatever unnatural sleep had taken me.
The floor creaked softly as I followed Grandma into the kitchen, the comforting scent of brewed coffee and freshly baked bread mingling in the air. It should have been calming, but instead, it only heightened the strange sense of wrongness clinging to the edges of my mind.
"I don't remember falling asleep," I admitted, sinking into the worn chair at the table. My voice sounded hollow to my own ears, and I could feel the tension curling in my chest. Grandma poured me a cup of coffee, her movements slow, deliberate—almost too calm for the storm building inside me.
"Last night is a blur."
Grandma nodded, sitting down across from me with her hands folded neatly on the table.
"You were just standing in the middle of the stairs, looking at us like you were giving a command. Then you started mumbling something strange—words I didn't understand. Devon pulled you toward the couch to sit beside Jia. You were pale, dear. Sweating. It frightened me."
I felt my breath catch. "Mumbling? What did I say?"
Her expression tightened, a shadow crossing her face. "I couldn't make it out," she said slowly, carefully.
"It sounded… foreign. Like no language I've heard before. But the look in your eyes, Taryn—it wasn't like you. It was as though you were staring through us, at something beyond."
Her words hit me like a wave, crashing over the fragile walls I'd built around my thoughts.
My grip tightened on the mug, the warmth doing nothing to dispel the chill spreading through my veins.
I couldn't remember any of it—the stairs, the words, the look in my eyes—and that scared me more than anything.