Days passed. Then weeks.
Aarav stopped checking for cracks in the sky. He stopped expecting lightning to flicker from his fingertips or for Meera to reveal a secret mission at school.
He stopped waiting for the cube.
The dreams didn't return. And though the memories remained, they felt distant now. Like echoes from a forgotten bedtime story. He still remembered standing on that broken bridge, rain soaking his face as he defied the Harbinger. But even that image faded with each normal day.
At times, he wondered if he had simply imagined it all.
A long, strange dream—maybe the result of staying up too late reading comics and eating too much birthday cake.
He tried to go back to being normal. He laughed with his classmates. Shared lunch with Rishi. Walked home with Meera. But sometimes, in the quietest moments—when a shadow flickered just a little too quickly or when the wind moved in a spiral—his heart would stop.
Just for a second.
And he'd wonder: Was it real?
One rainy evening, he found the old notebook again. The one with the drawings. He hadn't touched it in days.
As he flipped through it, a drawing caught his eye—one he didn't remember making. It showed three figures standing on a bridge. A girl with glowing circuits, a boy with wind swirling at his feet… and in the middle, another boy, fists clenched, eyes blazing.
Beneath them was an odd mark.
The infinity symbol.
His breath caught.
He hadn't drawn this.
But it was in his notebook.
He touched the page, feeling its weight.
And in that moment, something stirred inside him—not a spark, not a power.
A memory.
Of courage.
Of friendship.
Of standing against something no one else could see and still choosing to fight.
Aarav picked up his pencil. Slowly, he began to write—not homework, not equations. But a story.
His story.
Of a quiet boy with a big imagination. A boy who found a cube. Who crossed into a universe beyond time. Who became a protector. Who faced an impossible enemy and gave everything he had.
A boy who might have dreamed the whole thing… or might have lived it.
He wrote until the rain stopped, until his hand ached and the stars blinked back into the sky.
And as he closed the notebook, he smiled.
Because real or not, something inside him had changed forever.
And deep down, Aarav knew: