The dream

The sky was in the wrong color.

Aria was sitting beside the window, third row, second seat, her pen moving across her notebook in the automatic way of someone whose hand was taking notes while her mind was somewhere else entirely.

Then she looked up.

Gold.

Not the gold of late afternoon or the gold of a good sunrise. Something older than either of those. A gold that seemed to exist inside the light itself rather than on the surface of it deep and source less and warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. The clouds moved through it slowly, unhurried, like shapes seen through amber glass, and Aria's pen stopped moving and she forgot completely that she was supposed to be writing anything down.

"You're doing it again," said a voice beside her.

She turned.

The boy in the next seat was watching her with an expression she couldn't quite read his face arranged into something casual, his eyes doing something else entirely. Something more careful. More attentive. He had dark hair that fell slightly across his forehead and a pen in his hand that had clearly not touched his notebook in some time. His notebook was open to a page that was almost entirely blank.

She didn't know his name. She wasn't sure why she knew his face as well as she did —only that she did, the way you know the faces of people you have been quietly, involuntarily aware of for longer than you've admitted to yourself.

"Doing what," she said.

"Watching the window instead of the lecture."

"The sky looks strange."

He leaned slightly forward to look past her — close enough that she was aware of exactly how close, close enough to catch the faint warmth of him in the cool classroom air. His shoulder nearly touched hers.

"Hm," he said.

"That's all you have? Just hm?"

"It does look strange," he said. "It looks...." a pause, searching. "Heavy."

She looked at him. "That's exactly what I was going to say."

Something moved across his face. Quickly managed. Quickly gone. He leaned back, looked at his blank notebook page, turned his pen once between his fingers.

"Strange," he said mildly. As though he meant something other than the sky.

At the front of the room the professor's voice moved through the lecture in steady waves, each sentence dissolving before it reached her. Around her the classroom maintained its ordinary morning sounds — pens scratching, a chair shifting, someone's phone vibrating twice against a desk before going quiet. All of it perfectly normal. All of it somehow very far away.

Aria turned back to the window.

The gold was deepening.

She saw the edge of it first.

Just the edge — appearing through the gold-saturated clouds, a line of red and white that her mind initially tried to explain as a trick of light, a reflection, something ordinary dressed in strange clothing. But it kept coming like rain. More of it. Then more. Then all at once it was simply there in the sky outside the window and there was nothing ordinary left to explain it with.

Red and white.

Vast in a way that the word vast does not cover miles of it, or more, descending in absolute silence with a grace that belonged to nothing in any natural world she knew. Its edges rippled faintly, catching a light that didn't come from the sun, pulsing at slow intervals that were almost, almost like breathing. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Her chest knew this before her mind did, tightening with something that lived between reverence and terror, the feeling of standing at the edge of something so immense that the concept of yourself momentarily stops meaning anything.

The professor stopped speaking mid-sentence.

Chairs scraped. People stood. Someone knocked a stack of books to the floor and nobody looked at them. Every face in the room had turned toward the windows and the classroom had gone so quiet that Aria could hear her own heartbeat moving in her ears.

Her hand was pressed flat against the glass.

She didn't remember pressing it there.

The cloth descended. Slowly. Steadily. Filling the entire frame of the window now, the gold sky behind it deepening toward something redder at the horizon's edges. And something inside her chest was doing a thing she had no language for a shifting, a turning, like something that had been completely still her entire life was waking up and drawing its first breath.

"It's not stopping," she said.

"No," said the boy. He was close behind her left shoulder now, also looking up through the glass. His voice was low. "It's not."

"What is it."

He didn't answer immediately. She turned to look at him and found him already looking at her not at the cloth, not at the sky, at her with an expression that had lost all its careful management. Something open underneath.

Something that had been there a long time waiting for exactly this moment to surface.

"I don't know," he said. "But I feel like....."

"Like you already knew it was coming," she said.

The words left her mouth before she'd decided to say them. She didn't know where they came from. Only that they were true — that beneath the shock and the wonder and the fear there was something in her that recognized this. That had been waiting.

He stared at her.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Exactly like that."

The cloth descended another fifty feet. The red at the sky's horizon had deepened. Behind them someone was crying softly. Someone else was speaking rapidly into their phone. The world through the glass was completely transformed and the cloth kept coming, kept descending, patient and inevitable and

His hand closed over hers on the window.

Not asking. Not hesitant. The way you hold something when the ground begins to move and you need to know that one thing at least is solid and real. His hand was warm. His grip was certain. She did not pull away.

"Whatever it is," he said. And then suddenly

She woke up.

Ceiling. Dark. Her own bedroom settling back around her like water closing over something dropped.

Aria Voss lay completely still for three full minutes, her heart hammering, her right hand curled tightly closed around nothing at all. The clock on her nightstand glowed 3:47 AM in pale green numbers. The room was entirely ordinary her desk, her shelves, her coat on the back of the door, her window with its regular unremarkable winter sky.

No gold. No cloth.

She sat up slowly and pressed the heels of her palms against her closed eyes.

Three weeks. Every night without exception, arriving the moment she fell asleep as though it had been waiting just behind her eyelids.

She would find herself in the classroom always the same seat, always the window, always that wrong-colored sky. And he would be there beside her, the boy whose face she knew with an accuracy that made no sense given that she had never seen it anywhere outside this dream.

They would watch the sky change. The cloth would begin to descend. His hand would find hers on the glass.

And then always at exactly that moment, always before anything more could happen she would wake up. 3:47 AM. Every time.

She dropped her hands and looked at her window. The city beyond it was dark and quiet, the sky above the buildings an ordinary winter black, no gold anywhere in it.

She looked down at her left wrist.

The mark was there. It was always there two faint lines crossing, small enough that most people never noticed it.

She had asked her mother about it once, years ago, and her mother had glanced at it and said birthmark in the distracted tone of someone answering a question they consider already settled.

Aria had accepted that. She had stopped thinking about it.

She was thinking about it now.

She pressed her palm flat against the cold glass of the window and looked up at the dark ordinary sky and waited for her heartbeat to slow down.

Outside, the city made its quiet nighttime sounds a distant car, wind moving through the gap between buildings, the low hum of the world continuing its business.

Normal. All of it completely normal.

She told herself this.

She almost believed it.

The mark on her wrist pulsed once faint, warm, there and then gone so quickly she could have imagined it.

She looked down at it.

The city went quiet.

And somewhere above the cloud line, in the dark between the ordinary stars

Something shifted.

................. TBC.....,........

Hello guys it's my first story hope you all will like it 😁

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