Hiroshima, August 6th, 1945
Dawn over Hiroshima was always a delicate thing. Before the world began to stir, light spilled across tiled roofs in shy, pink stripes, warming the hunched shoulders of the city as it rolled back from a night adrift in dreams. There was nothing in the river air to betray that this would be the morning the world would change forever.
Avijay felt himself drawn down through cloud—down, accelerating through layers of memory and time, faster than breath, faster than any thought. He did not know this place, yet the lives below unfurled in such intricate normality that for a moment, he forgot he was only a visitor, a spirit pressed against the membrane of history. He hovered just above the city—silent, invisible—and every sensation was sharp as the edge of grief.
In the districts along the river, children gathered in schoolyards to sweep and clear, their small hands bent to the task of moving stones and weeds to help build the city's firebreaks. Mothers swept tatami or knelt over low stoves, coaxing life from slender rations. Men cycled to work, their white shirts crisp and hopeful, while vendors carted baskets of pickled vegetables and rice balls onto the waking streets. In barracks north of the city center, young soldiers shouted encouragement to one another during morning calisthenics, the air alive with laughter and bravado.
Yet this was all a deception, an attempt to disguise their heavy hearts with the fading hope. Despite the laughter, there was a weight in the air—thin and persistent—the kind that war leaves behind even when no bombs are falling. The ration lines, the empty shelves, the distant drone of aircraft that sometimes passed overhead without dropping fire but always left hearts clenched in silence. The women masking the dread on their faces, all for their children all while whispering prayers in the privacy of dawn, wondering if their husbands at the front were still alive, if the next siren would be the one ... the last one. And yet, in that fragile morning hush, the city pretended, as cities do, that life might still be ordinary. Shoji screens slid open. Brooms swept dust.
All of them—hundreds of thousands—inhabited the precious, ordinary richness of what they believed to be just another day. Overhead, the sun rose high and gold, painting a patchwork of river and tile. Streetcars rattled over iron rails, lanterns swung on shopfronts, and stray dogs barked as the world spun gently on.
Avijay sensed them: a grandmother weaving paper cranes with her granddaughter's deft fingers nearby, two boys in matching shorts daring one another to leap over a narrow canal, a doctor balancing his bicycle as he returned home for tea, and a child counting pigeons beside her younger brother, their laughter low and fragile. Life thickened these streets—stories intertwined, unnoticed, like fibers in a rope.
At that moment, he felt what no one else could: an unease—a shadow without weight—pressing subtly upon the world. Birds, startled from distant rooftops, rose as one into the pale blue glare. The street dogs stood still for a moment then barked as if they had sensed something...something ominous.
Somewhere above, a singular aircraft bored a path through serene skies, so ordinary it was barely worth a passing glance. An air raid alarm had sounded earlier, shrill and unwanted, but now the city's surface was calm—the all-clear had been given, for it was a singular aircraft, flying so high that they dismissed it as a surveillance aircraft.
And yet Avijay felt it: a quickening, a chord of dread pulled tight in his chest. He could not move, could not warn, could only watch as the universe coiled itself for catastrophe.
Aboard the plane, pale figures in flight suits exchanged clipped instructions. Then a small, metallic shape descended from the open bomb bay—a glinting, rounded promise sailing toward the gentle grid of streets below.
1 second..
10 seconds...
30...44....
At this juncture the time slowed to a brutal crawl. He saw the city's last moments unfurl into eternity.
A shopkeeper handed change to a customer, bowing in gratitude. The coins glittered as a thousand lives connected and parted in heartbeat. Two lovers met in a narrow alley for a secret, blushing touch; a teacher called her students inside with gentle authority. On the riverbank, a fisherman rinsed his net, shoulders tired and sure. Along a narrow road, a mother scolded her boy for dirty knees. Across a bridge, newsboys in white headbands called out the day's headlines, their voices full of childish pride.
In that fragile instant, before the world bloomed into fire, nothing seemed wrong. There was only breath, hope, worry, longing, and the endless weaving of life—each story a world, whole and holy.
Then the sky broke.
A sun not born of nature—but a tearing, searing, all-consuming brilliance—erupted above the heart of the city. The world went silent. Then, all at once, a wave of heat so vast, so savage, bore down on street and soul, vaporizing anything within a breath of its core.
In a radius half a mile wide, people simply vanished—skin, muscle, bone, vaporized in a moment shorter than memory. A father's hands gripped the edge of his workbench, and then he was gone; lovers in one another's arms incinerated before fear could reach their eyes; a trolley filled with aides, old men, and students was stripped to molten iron—their voices erased from the story of the world.
Beyond ground zero, life did not vanish but became pain—blistering and bright.
Children running at play, their smiles frozen, were seared by a light that rendered shadows permanent on walls behind them. A baby clutched to his mother's breast bore the full threnody of the blast: in an instant, skin sloughed off like paper, breath boiled away, tears and laughter indistinguishable in terror's final equation.
Those farther out felt the arrival of hell as a weight, a pressure, a fire in their lungs and blood. Glass from shattered windows became daggers airborne, scything through flesh without prejudice. Roofs flashed to superheated ash, the air combusted with a whoosh loud enough to drown the sound of bodies slamming brick and stone. A priest, caught in morning prayer, glimpsed the shriek of the firestorm reflected in altar lacquer—then the world devoured him, too.
Avijay witnessed it all. He saw men and women thrown through the air like dolls, skin blistering, eyes bleached blind. He felt hearts give out and lungs clenched in silent shrieks. Those who did not die instantly suffered in ways that would echo through the decades: burns so deep the soul itself seemed to burn, skin sloughing in rags, eyes spilling tears of blood. Some stumbled toward the river, desperate for the mercy of water, only to find it boiling. Others, flames licking their clothes and hair, ran without purpose—some collapsing, others persisting for minutes more in a ballet of agony and disbelief.
Firestorms raged. Winds that spun at hurricane force flung embers through the smoking ruins, kindling new tragedies with every breath. The city burned not just with fire, but with the impossibility of what had occurred: a civilization scoured clean, a morning made myth in the time it took to breathe.
He watched, too, as pain lingered in the weeks and years that followed. Survivors bore scars pressed in the shape of shirts, windows, trees—forever imprinted by the brightness that destroyed. Children orphaned by the blast huddled in makeshift camps, mothers searching faces that would never be found, fathers clutching ragged stumps where hands once sheltered their families. Disease crept quietly in irradiated wounds—some would perish in months, others carry the silent rot for decades, their suffering spilling over to grandchildren never conceived.
All this—the endless tide of anguish—swept over Avijay, a wave that battered his spirit clean of all but helplessness and grief. He saw a city of the living become a city of the dead, its stories cut short on the altar of invention and war.
He tried, in desperation, to turn the river's flow backward, to rewind time and unmake the bomb in flight. He reached for the chains of atoms, the cascade of causality, the fates of the people crying out for rescue—but his fingers closed on nothing. He was less than a ghost, a watcher in agony, denied even the solace of agency.
In that moment, wishing so fiercely that his wish pressed against the fabric of reality itself—let this not be, let this never happen—something within him broke, and the world began to change.
The city fell away. The noise and fire softened, then curled inward, drawing Avijay into a region beyond space or time. He no longer saw streets or rivers, no longer heard the crackle of flames or wails of mothers, felt only a suspension, an absence that washed him clean of sound and sight.
The darkness was not empty: it shimmered, a swirl of white and black rolling together in patterns that defied sense. He floated within a boundless realm, where space itself was a thing alive. All around him, glittering rivers of translucent crystal curved and looped through infinity—some narrow as veins, others vast as starfields, all glowing from within as if lit by the memory of a sun.
Curiosity returned; he drifted among these rivers, each sparkling with colors he had no name for, each one branching into tributaries that sang with possibility. Avijay felt, not with his eyes or fingertips but with his very being, what each river contained—layers within layers, realities stacked like the pages of a book, each pulse an entire universe humming in its course.
He reached for understanding, yearning to look deeper, and the space obliged.
His awareness plunged, piercing dimensions thinner than breath, past atoms, past electrons—down to the dances of quarks and gluons, the fizz of uncertain fields flitting briefly into and out of existence. He saw quantum foam trembling beneath the surface of all solidity, the wrinkle of probability that was spacetime's deepest skin.
But there was more. He pushed deeper still, sense dissolving, and spied the Planck scale, the theoretical minimum of the universe—the smallest possible fraction, where the laws of science loomed senseless. Here, particles flickered in patterns more intricate and strange than all the gods of folklore.
Yet even this was only a beginning. He pressed further—into depths unmeasured, infinity folded within infinity, where the foundation of all being was not just hidden, but unborn. Here, he brushed against the first note of creation, a music before music.
Awestruck, Avijay reached out. His finger, incandescent in the strange light, extended toward a single, infinitesimal spark—a thing smaller than the smallest, older than time.
As his touch drew near, the spark trembled. A voice, slow and majestic, unfurled through all reality:
"Fundamental power chosen."
The spark burst. Light spilled into absence. The black-and-white sea blazed into color, into form, into unbearable song. The world exploded in a wave—another Big Bang—creation itself beginning anew.
And Avijay tumbled upward, out of the realm of the infinite, hurled through eons and galaxies, the sound of selection ringing in his ears—a bell tolling for the living and the dead, for the worlds that are and will be.
He awoke—gasping, alone beneath winter quilts, tears burning in his eyes. The echo of voices lingered, laughter and cries and the awful hush of loss. Neither warmth nor shadow would banish what he now carried—a memory vast as worlds, a hope caught between destruction and promise, both wound into his bones.
Outside, the world went on. But inside Avijay, there was now a universe—shaped by grief, remade by awe—waiting for his choice.