thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
Comments
0
Reading
11 d, 4 h
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MINA The older Elias lunges. He moves with the terrifying, liquid speed of a man who has lived outside of time for two decades. The kinetic blade in his hand hums, a blur of silver and sickly green light aimed directly at my throat. He is not trying to intimidate. He is calculating an execution to save a timeline. Young Elias hits him like a freight train. The impact is deafening, a collision of bone and heavy wool that sends both men crashing into the massive iron drive-shaft of the clock tower. The…-
24.5 K • Completed
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Boston, Seven Days Before the Eruption JULIAN The dead man’s heart beats at 2:13 in the morning. I hear it through six inches of laboratory glass. One slow impact. A pause. Then another. The sound comes from the display case across the darkened geology lab, where a plaster cast of a victim from Pompeii lies curled on his side beneath museum lights. He has no heart. He has no flesh. He is a hollow made by ash nearly two thousand years ago, filled by archaeologists who wanted the shape of his final…-
23.4 K • Completed
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Julian The concrete floor of the lab heaves upward, slamming into my spine with the force of a freight train. Except it isn’t concrete. It is stone. Cool, perfectly fitted stone, slick with a fine layer of gray dust. I choke, inhaling air that tastes heavily of rotten eggs, scorched earth, and something sharply metallic. The sterile, air-conditioned hum of the university’s servers is gone. The blue glow of my dual monitors, which only seconds ago were mapping the geothermal anomalies of the…
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23.4 K • Completed
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Cassius The heat is tearing my ribs apart. The moment the heavy iron door of the training yard slammed shut, severing my line of sight to the stranger, the brand on my chest flared into an agony I have not felt since the iron was first pressed to my flesh twenty years ago. It is not a dull, weather-aching throb. It is a physical tether, a chain pulled taut, dragging me violently toward the dark holding cells beneath the arena tiers. I drop my splintered wooden sword into the sand. The impact kicks up a…
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23.4 K • Completed
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Julian The heavy bronze doors of the Stabian Baths slam shut behind us, echoing through the vaulted, empty frigidarium. We had chosen to tear the cage apart. When I pressed my hand flush against the molten core of Cassius's chest back in the cell, we didn't just delay the mountain. We ripped the kinetic energy directly from the fault line and vented it through the arena's foundations. The basalt floor shattered. The iron gate blew outward in a cloud of blinding, superheated dust, burying Felix and his…
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23.4 K • Completed
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Julian The deafening shriek of the ruptured hypocaust tears the heat pocket to shreds. The golden void shatters into the brutal, physical reality of boiling water and fracturing marble. Cassius’s massive weight hits me, driving me backward onto the cracked tiles just as a geyser of superheated, blinding white steam erupts exactly where we had been kneeling. I hit the floor hard, the breath knocked from my lungs. Cassius is a solid, unyielding shield of muscle and sweat pressed entirely over me. The…
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23.4 K • Completed
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Julian The heavy timber siege barricades fall into place with a concussive boom that shakes the basalt paving stones. The cohort of Praetorian Guards locks their massive, rectangular scuta shields together, forming an impenetrable wall of iron, wood, and disciplined malice. Behind them, Felix the lanista points his curled whip toward the amphitheater plaza, shouting orders that are swallowed by the roar of the panicked crowd. The slaves we just freed from the crypts surge forward, only to be brutally…
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23.4 K • Completed
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Julian The sound of the world ending does not begin as a roar. It begins as a profound, absolute vacuum. For a fraction of a second, the concussive shockwave from Vesuvius rips every molecule of oxygen out of the amphitheater. My eardrums pop, a sharp, agonizing spike of pressure driving straight into my skull. Then, the sound hits. It is not an explosion. It is the physical, planetary scream of billions of tons of solid bedrock being vaporized in a single, catastrophic instant. The kinetic wall of air…
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23.4 K • Completed
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Julian Cassius’s hands are clamped over my freezing wrists, dragging my palms flush against the molten, ruined geography of his chest. Take it all, Julian. Let them forget my name. The words are a death sentence masquerading as a vow. He is offering me the ultimate, terrifying absolute of his existence: his final breaths, his remaining time, the very rhythm of his pulse. He is offering to become the plaster cast in the Naples Museum so that I can walk away. The superheated pyroclastic surge is…
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23.4 K • Completed
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Julian The silence that follows the end of the world is heavier than the stone that buried us. I open my eyes. There is no light. There is only a blackness so absolute it has a physical texture, pressing against my retinas. I try to draw a breath, but my lungs seize, pulling in air that tastes of pulverized limestone, copper blood, and scorched earth. My right leg is pinned beneath something unyielding. My left arm is free. I am alive. The massive marble lintel of the temple did not crush us. It caught…
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23.4 K • Completed
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