The first time Kaira Arclen saw the future, she watched her family die.
It had been an intrusive vision, a raw, scalding tear in her reality. She was seventeen, arguing with her parents over curfew, college, the suffocating weight of a life she didn't want. Then the world dissolved. She saw the intersection five miles away. The rain-slicked asphalt. The red truck running the light. The sound of metal screaming.
She had tried to stop it. Faked an illness, screamed, begged them not to go. Anything to delay them.
But Fate, she learned, was not a river that could be rerouted.
It happened exactly as she had seen.
That was the day the world hollowed her out.
In the years that followed, she watched everyone she knew die, one by one.
Sickness, old age, the simple, grinding friction of time.
She watched, but she did not follow. The years passed over her, leaving no mark. She remained frozen at eighteen, an unchanging spectator to the world's decay.
She learned to stop making connections, to stop attaching names to faces. She built a mask of indifference, a fortress of emotional distance, because the pain of loss was something she would not let touch her again.
The universe had taken everything, so she had taught herself not to want anything back.
For sixty years, her gift had been her only companion, her only curse. "A limited read on fate", a whisper of the threads. Occasionally, she would see the future as it would have happened, had she not seen it, a small, useful ripple.
But for major events, the visions were intrusive. Like a tidal wave, unstoppable.
And for the last three months, she had been drowning in one: a burning arc of light, a teenager on a hill, and a gaping, fatal wound.
She should have ignored it.
She couldn't.
She knew nothing about him, not really. Just a name, Evan Bright. A college student and that he was like her.
Another person who might not die.
Her cold, indifferent mask cracked for the first time in decades.
A fierce, unfamiliar protectiveness rose in her. She, who knew the value of life so intimately, would not let this one be taken. She would not fail again.
Maybe this time… it might be different.
She was on the hill an hour before him.
The crimson dusk meant nothing to her, save that it matched her vision. This was the time. This was the place. She felt him coming long before he arrived—a faint, resonant pull in her chest. The convergence of destiny that she could just barely sense.
An arc of burning light. The vision was clear. Her plan was simple: the moment the light manifested, she would be there. A shield, a push, an interference. She would stand between this boy and the tidal wave.
She watched him climb the hill, his posture radiating an unease she understood perfectly. He was feeling the "wrongness", the faint pressure of them.
He reached the crest. He saw her. He didn't move.
Smart, she thought. He knows.
The eclipse began. The air grew colder, heavier. She kept her gaze on the sky, waiting for the echo of her vision. The moon turned red. The pressure in her chest, the boy's internal power flared.
For a moment, everything aligned with what she had foreseen,
until the illusion broke.
The world lurched forward, as if some unseen hand had pushed fate ahead of schedule.
A brilliant flash ripped across reality, racing toward him far too soon.
She couldn't react.
The force slammed into Evan's chest, clean and absolute. The light seared her eyes. She stopped, frozen, the smell of ozone and burnt fabric filling her lungs.
He looked down at the hole. He crumpled.
And for the first time in sixty years, The Prophet, who had seen everyone she knew die, felt the unadulterated, scalding shock of failure. Her gift was wrong. Her certainty, the cold, hard ground she had stood on for decades, had crumbled to dust beneath her feet.
She heard her own voice whisper, a trembling, broken thing, "...no... it shifted... they forced the moment forward..."
Her breath hitched, horror and realization blooming together."That means… I could have changed it this time."
She didn't remember crossing the last ten feet.
Her cold, analytical mind was gone, replaced by a roaring, hollow wind. She caught him before he hit the ground, her arms shaking.
"No," she whispered, her voice fierce, protective. She, who was so gentle because she knew life's value, was suddenly filled with a murderous rage. "You don't get to die. I just found you."
She looked at the wound. Fatal. Absolute. The edges glowed with a fire that was not fire, a force that actively erased life. She was too late. She had failed him. She had failed herself.
For a moment, she despaired.
And then she saw it.
A faint, golden light from within the wound. It was not the burning glow of the attack. It was a warm, vital pulse. The seared edges of his flesh twitched. The blood flow, which should have been a torrent, was slowing.
New flesh, pale and shimmering, began to knit itself together from the inside out.
Her shock gave way to a profound, terrifying awe. This... this was not in her vision. This was not in any of her readings of Fate. This was impossible.
Her analytical mind snapped into motion.
They knew she was watching.
They fed her a partial, unavoidable truth to lock her in place.
They expended an immense amount of power to ensure the kill.
They failed.
A soft, nearly imperceptible snap rippled through the air.
The wrongness she had felt for decades loosened its grip, thinning into the distance like smoke pulled by a rising wind. Colors grew sharper. The air tasted clean. Their influence was withdrawing. It felt wounded, weakened.
The strike had cost them dearly.
And they had failed.
She looked at the unconscious boy in her arms, his chest slowly, miraculously sealing. He was breathing.
She had to move. They had failed, but they would be back. And now, they knew what he was. Or rather, they knew he was something they hadn't accounted for.
She hauled him up, his arm slung over her shoulder. He was heavy, but her strength was more than human.
And then they were gone, two silhouettes erased from the hill as though they had never been there.