thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
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Reading
11 d, 4 h
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The dark is not empty. It is heavy, crushing, and silent. I expect to fall forever. I expect the void of the collapsing timeline to shred me into atoms, leaving me adrift in a century that no longer exists. Instead, I hit solid wood. The impact knocks the breath from my lungs. I lie there, gasping, my fingers curling instinctively into the familiar, thick weave of a Persian rug. My velvet robe is tangled around my knees, damp with the residual chill of the magic. I open my eyes. Sunlight. Blinding,…-
22.0 K • Completed
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Blackmere House, 11:47 p.m. ADRIAN The marriage contract begins to bleed thirteen minutes before my bride arrives. I stand alone in the library with one hand braced against the mahogany desk and watch a bead of red ink swell beneath her empty signature line. It should fall. Instead, it crawls upward, defying gravity, and disappears into the vellum as if the page has developed a pulse. Behind me, the astronomical clock measures the final minutes of another life I have failed to keep. Tick. My…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The spin tears the breath from my lungs. A blur of candlelight streaks past my vision, a smeared ribbon of gold against oppressive darkness. My ribs are trapped in a cage of whalebone, the crushing weight of heavy, embroidered silk dragging at my hips. This is not my body. This is not my dress. A hand—clad in white kid leather, the grip bruising and absolute—anchors my waist, yanking me out of a stumble before I can fall. "Keep moving." The voice at my ear is low, jagged, slipping under the…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The twelfth chime of the astronomical clock strikes, and reality tears at the seams. It is not a sound. It is a violent, atmospheric pressure that crushes the air from my lungs. The blood-red glow emanating from the vellum on the desk expands, swallowing the firelight, swallowing the shadows, swallowing the frantic thud of my own heart. For a fraction of a second, the world is suspended in a terrifying, suffocating vacuum. Then, the heavy mahogany doors burst open. I flinch, bracing for the drunken,…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The blue ink of my signature glows against his skin, a neon anachronism cutting through the shadows of 1816. I stare at my own handwriting, perfectly preserved on the hard muscle above his hip bone. The contract does not just know me; it waited for me. My lungs refuse to expand. The heavy silk of my gown feels like a shroud, dragging me down into a history I am somehow already responsible for. "I didn't sign this," I say, the words scraping out of my dry throat. "I signed a museum release…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The smell of damp earth and rotting orchids is suffocating, but it is the fluorescent light that makes my breath catch in my throat. I stand in the center of the Blackmere estate’s massive, wrought-iron glasshouse. Outside, the relentless, freezing rain of the Year Without a Summer batters the glass panes, the sky a bruised, unnatural violet. But on one specific pane, tucked behind a sprawling, dead fern, the glass is not reflecting the 1816 storm. It is a window into Chicago. I step closer, my satin…
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22.0 K • Completed
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The rain of 1816 feels like iron nails against my skin as we run blindly from the glasshouse to the manor. I do not feel the cold. I do not feel the heavy, sodden weight of my ruined silk skirts dragging through the mud. The only thing registering in my nervous system is the crushing, suffocating weight of the truth. I sent the contract back. My future self—a woman hollowed out by a lifetime of ruthless, solitary litigation—had packaged a cursed 1816 divorce deed and shipped it through a temporal…
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22.0 K • Completed
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His fingers are no longer flesh. I stare at the hand Adrian has braced against the mahogany bedside table. The knuckles, the calluses, the pale skin—they are gone, replaced by a dense, shifting lattice of black and red typography. The letters crawl over each other in a sickening, microscopic swarm, forming the shape of a hand but holding none of its substance. When he tries to grip the edge of the wood, his text-fingers pass cleanly through the solid mahogany, leaving a faint scorch mark of ozone on the…
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22.0 K • Completed
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Silence is not empty. It has a weight. It has a texture. I remain on my knees on the Persian rug of the master suite, my arms locked around a ghost that has already scattered. The air in the room is frozen, brittle as spun sugar. I look at my hands. My palms and fingers are coated in a fine, pitch-black powder. It is soot. It is oxidized ink. It is all that remains of the physical vessel of Adrian Blackmere. I slowly turn my head toward the splintered hole in the heavy oak door. The Duke of Rutland is…
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22.0 K • Completed
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FREYA The bowstrings creak like snapping timber in the fog. I am staring up at the carved dragon prow of the longship, the lethal iron tips of half a dozen arrows pointed directly down into our skiff. Beside me, Astrid is collapsed on the wet floorboards, her muscles completely devoid of the kinetic framework that made her a warrior. The Ehwaz rune on my palm throbs, heavy with the data she gave me on the burning roof. I am holding her hours, her years, her violence. "I have the witch!" the…-
23.5 K • Completed
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