Time.
I have always been here, even before you had words to name me. You have carried me in your blood and bones, you have measured me with shadows and stars, and you have cursed me with clocks and calendars.
You call me precious, because I run out. You call me cruel, because I never return. To most of you, I am a cage of seventy years, maybe more if fortune smiles. But I smile rarely. I tick through your veins, counting down the heartbeats until the silence comes.
But… some of you.
Some of you I have marked differently.
To you, I gave a longer span, more threads to the tapestry of your being. Do not call it immortality — it is not. It is a loan. A reservoir of hours deeper than the others, and yet still finite. It will dry. It always dries. And when it does, you will not know until the sand collapses beneath your feet.
You think that makes you invincible. That is my first trick. I let you believe you are untouchable. I let you run faster, heal quicker, survive longer than the rest of your fragile kin. But then I whisper the truth back into your ear: you are still mine. You have simply borrowed more from me than most.
And what do you do with the surplus I have given you? You waste it. Years blur into decades; decades decay into centuries. Love rots, friendships rust, even your grief becomes threadbare. You forget what it meant to live within limits. You forget that joy tastes sweetest when it is brief.
Ah, but I am not heartless. I do not give without reason. I lace your gift with memory — vivid, violent memory. I remind you of lives before this one. I place another self beneath your skin. You awaken one day with ghosts in your mouth, names that no longer belong to you, loves that ache even though their bodies are dust.
That is my second trick: to remind you that too much time is as dangerous as too little.
There is a girl who will carry this truth.
Her sixteenth birthday will taste like ash. One moment, she will be a daughter at her family's table. The next, she will drown in the flood of a life that no one else remembers. A name not her own will rise to her lips. Iris.
She will try to breathe, but nostalgia is a cruel tide. She will stumble into the woods, pulled by a voice she cannot deny. And when she hears Jason, the name of the boy she once loved, her heart will splinter with recognition and fear.
Do not mistake this for fate. Fate is another illusion. This is me.
I am Time.
And she is mine.