THE ORIGIN DIMENSION OF TIME

  It is earth.Year 1997.

  The storm over the Bermuda Triangle wasn’t on any of the charts.

  Captain Mara Vance knew that the moment her Cessna’s instruments began their slow, lazy waltz toward madness. The compass spun like a child’s top. The radio dissolved into a hiss of white noise that sounded, for one eerie second, like a sigh. Outside her windshield, the brilliant August blue of the Atlantic sky had curdled into a peculiar, bruised green. The sea below wasn’t water anymore; it looked like liquid obsidian, still and solid as a plate of glass.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Miami Control, this is November-Four-Two-Charlie…” Her voice was calm, a pilot’s calm, the kind that sits on top of a well of cold terror. Static answered.

  Then, the green darkened. It wasn’t a cloud. It was an absence, a rip in the fabric of everything. It opened below her, not in the water, but in the world itself. There was no pull, no violent suction. The rip simply widened until it was all there was, and her plane fell into a silence so profound it felt like a physical blow.

  The noise of the engine, the rush of wind—gone. The vibration of the airframe ceased. Mara was falling, but she felt no wind, no gravity. She was suspended in a… nothingness. A nothingness that wasn’t dark. It was a color she had no name for, a directionless, sourceless glow that seemed to come from inside her own eyes.

  And then, she wasn’t in the plane anymore. She was just her, Mara Vance, adrift.

  She saw things. Not with her eyes, but in her mind. She saw the great, slow heartbeat of continental drift, the frantic dance of subatomic particles, the languid spin of galaxies. She saw her own life not as a line, but as a sculpture, every moment—birth, her first solo flight, her mother’s laugh, the taste of a peach last Tuesday—existing all at once, solid and touchable. Past, present, and future were just points on a map she could walk between.

  It was beautiful,terrifying and too much for a mortal to comprehend.

  “Be not afraid.”

  The thought wasn’t a sound. It was a settling, like dust in a sunbeam. It organized the chaos, dimmed the overwhelming light. Before her, something coalesced. Not a shape, but a concept made manifest. It was the first tick of the first clock and the last tock of the final one. It was the seedling breaking the soil and the mountain crumbling to sand. It was the patina on bronze and the fading of a sunset. It was all of it, flowing in a perfect, silent, inevitable stream.

  She knew what it was. The Entity. The source. Time.

  Where am I? She thought the question, and the understanding bloomed in her mind instantly.

  You are at the Wellspring, came the reply, a gentle infusion of meaning. The place from which your reality’s river flows. I am its keeper. You have passed through a… thin place. A place where the fabric wears through, and what is outside may be glimpsed.

  Mara, her pilot’s mind grappling for a handhold, formed another thought. Outside?

  A sense of profound patience enveloped her. Your universe—space, matter, energy—is a magnificent, complex song. But it is only one song. The instruments that play it, the concepts that govern it, exist in their own realms. This is mine. Elsewhere, in their own absolutes, are the domains of Gravity, of Entropy, of and much more. They are the frameworks. Your world is the painting stretched upon them.

  The awe was a crushing, wonderful weight. Godly entities. Not gods with faces and tempers, but fundamental, conscious principles. The architects of reality, sleeping in their abstract dimensions.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Why me? she thought, a small, human spark in the infinite.

  Chance, the presence responded, and the concept carried a hint of something like tenderness. A stitch came loose. You were there. You are a brief, bright note in the song. I hear all notes at once. Your first cry. Your last heartbeat. The moment you decided to become a pilot. It is all here, now, with me.

  Mara thought of her life, her unfinished arguments, her unsaid “I love yous,” the book by her bed half-read. A profound sorrow washed over her. Is this death?

  The Entity seemed to consider. No. Death is a process within the song. This is… before the song. You are visiting the composer. You cannot stay. Your biology, your consciousness, is a thing of sequence. Of my river. To stay here is to unravel.

  Can I go back?

  Yes. The stitch will mend. You will return to your stream. But you will have seen the river from above.

  She felt a question burning, the biggest one. What’s the point? Of it all? The suffering, the joy, the war, the love… if it’s just a song?

  The presence of Time did not answer with words. Instead, it let her feel. It let her feel the unbearable beauty of a single, fleeting moment—a bee on a flower, a hand held in the dark, a perfect chord of music. It let her feel how that moment, precisely because it was fleeting, because it was cradled between a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ held a weight, a preciousness that absolute, eternal existence could never possess.

  The meaning was not in the destination, but in the flow. The joy was precious because of loss. The love was vital because of time’s limit. Her life was not a sentence to be read; it was a note to be sung, and its value was in its unique, unrepeatable place in the harmony.

  She understood. It was enough.

  It is time, the Entity imparted. There was no sadness in the statement, only the gentle firmness of a truth.

  The directionless glow began to soften, to focus. The sense of infinite presence began to withdraw, not leaving her, but receding to its rightful, boundless scale.

  Thank you, she thought, with all her being.

  A final pulse of meaning reached her, warm as a sunbeam and ancient as stone: Sing your note, Mara Vance. It is a good one.

  The world slammed back in with a cacophony of sound and force. Roaring engine. Screaming wind. The violent shudder of the airframe.

  Mara gasped, her hands clenched on the controls. The green bruise was gone. The sky was August blue. The Atlantic below was water again, choppy and normal. Her instruments flickered, then stabilized, needles settling into their familiar ranges.

  “—November-Four-Two-Charlie, do you copy? You dropped off radar for three minutes. We have you now. Are you in distress?”

  Three minutes. She had lived an eternity in three minutes.

  Her voice was steady, calmer than she felt. “Miami Control, this is November-Four-Two-Charlie. I’m here. No distress. I’m… I’m okay.”

  She leveled the plane, her hands moving by instinct. The sun was setting, painting the clouds in colors she now saw with new eyes. She saw the time in them. The slow, inevitable fade. And it was not a tragedy. It was what made the colors beautiful.

  She flew west, toward the coast, toward home. She would land,finish the book and make the call she’d been putting off. Her life, her finite, fragile, magnificent string of moments, was waiting for her.

  And somewhere, outside of all time and space, in a dimension of pure, flowing abstraction, the composer listened, and found the brief, bright note of a woman flying a small plane into a sunset, and it was good.