440

Four minutes and forty seconds. That’s all it took. It felt like a lifetime, and it felt like mere seconds. Four minutes and forty seconds.

It began when the sounds of silence and death were punctured by his scream. A scream that echoed the ache in his heart. An ache even he didn’t understand at that point.

The harrowing scene was interrupted by the rajah stopping mid glide. The flickering fire stopped, as if frozen in time. The clouds stopped swirling in the sky. The shadows stopped slithering.

Four minutes and forty seconds. That was all the time it took for a lot to change. To say everything changed might be an overstatement. But it wasn’t far off. Hur travelled into the world beyond this one. A dimension that was unbroken and broken. That was not the same. A dimension that none but three others had ever been to before.

Four minutes and forty seconds. They sensed him in that space. They didn’t remember before. Before what they had become what they were now. But his presence, this proximity to man did create a certain shift in all three of them. One had already been on her way. She was prepared to accept it. She would react the best. The other two would react badly to this. In different ways from one another. If the world was not ending before, surely now, it would. Now that the authoress, writer of stories, the atomist, creator and splitter of matter, and the watch keeper, it who saw over time, were affected by what before they had been privy to, but removed from.

Four minutes and forty seconds. That was all it took. Everything didn’t change, but it seemed as if nothing changed.

Four minutes and forty seconds. It had felt as if he had known her longer. It felt as if he had known her longer, and now she was being rent apart. Taken from him. And he could not let that happen. But happen it would. Happen it should. That was how it had been written. For if there is no loss, there can be no grief. If there is no grief, there can be no joy. And joy is what makes the world go round. If he hadn’t known her, he wouldn’t have known the type of joy he felt now. And that would have been far worse than anything.

Four minutes and forty seconds.

A lot would change.

The shadow rajah saw it in the eyes of hur. He saw the scream. The girl didn’t hear it or see it. She felt a tremor. She was blind. So it hadn’t been her. He had been fed the wrong information. He made a mental note to figure out how it could have gone wrong. It wasn’t her. And then the blankness tore everything apart. He felt it. He felt the boy traveling through the void. Time and space parted to let him peek into the unknown. That which had been kept closely guarded from these sovereigns and destroyers of nature. But he was given the gift to see.

Four minutes. Forty seconds.