It started with an accident.
Not a tragic one. No blood, no sirens. Just a misplaced step and a dusty ceiling tile crashing down on Ved’s shoulder while he was digging through the college archive room for a lost project file. But what he found beneath the fallen tile was something far more bizarre.
A tiny hourglass.
No bigger than his palm, its frame was made of a black metal he couldn’t name, with red sand locked inside like blood frozen mid-fall. It sat nestled in a decaying wooden box along with brittle scraps of paper and a note that simply read:
“Flip only when you forget who you are.”
Ved blinked at it, half-expecting it to crumble from age. But it didn’t. The hourglass felt unnervingly cold to the touch. He should’ve left it. Thrown it in the trash or handed it over to some dusty museum department. But instead, he tucked it into his jacket.
Curiosity won. It always did with him.
The first time it happened, he assumed it was a blackout.
He was working on an assignment—typing away, Spotify humming in the background—when everything blinked. The screen. The light. His memory.
He blinked once, and the clock jumped from 7:42 PM to 12:42 AM.
He hadn’t moved. His coffee was still warm. But five hours had vanished.
The second time, he felt a strange pulling in his chest just before the skip. Like the air had warped around him. After that, he started watching the hourglass more closely.
That’s when he noticed something terrifying.
Each time the blackout happened… the sand inside the hourglass had moved.
A week later, he snapped.
It was 3:17 AM. He hadn’t slept. He stared at the hourglass sitting on his desk like it was mocking him.
He grabbed it. Hands trembling. “What do you want?”
He flipped it.
Time shattered.
He woke up in his old bedroom. Walls covered in hand-drawn comics and glow-in-the-dark stars. His bunk bed. A cracked desktop he hadn’t touched since tenth grade.
His heart pounded.
What the hell?
He stumbled to the mirror.
The reflection wasn’t his. Or rather—it was him, but seven years younger.
Outside the window: heavy rains. The exact monsoon storm that had lashed his town the day Rhea disappeared.
She had been his best friend. The only one who understood his obsession with time theories, paradoxes, the idea that memory and reality weren’t linear. Then one day, she just… vanished. No body. No clue. Only her umbrella was found at the bus stop.
People moved on. Called it a kidnapping. Some said she ran away. Ved never believed any of it.
And now, somehow, he was here.
He sprinted out into the street, shoes splashing through puddles, ignoring the burning in his lungs.
There she was.
Rhea. Standing at the same bus stop. Headphones in. Red umbrella. Just like the day she vanished.
He froze.
She looked up, frowned… and then something strange passed across her face. Recognition.
“Ved?” she said slowly. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
His mouth went dry. “Rhea… I… I came back—”
She cut him off. “Loop 29?”
He blinked. “What?”
Rhea reached into her bag and handed him a folded note. Old. Worn. His handwriting.
“If you find this, you’ve already failed Loop 28. Try again.”
His knees went weak.
He had written this? When? How?
Rhea's voice softened. “You keep looping back to this moment, Ved. Every time. And every time, you forget everything before it.”
“No,” he whispered. “This… this can’t be real.”
She looked down. “You’re stuck in a temporal fracture. Triggered the first time you flipped the hourglass. You were never meant to mess with it.”
“But you’re alive.”
“I am. In this loop. But I’m not supposed to be.”
She turned to walk away.
“Wait!” he called. “Let me fix it! Let me save you!”
She looked back, sadness in her eyes.
“You don’t get it. You can’t fix time without breaking yourself. And the more you try, the more you disappear.”
The world flickered.
A hiss. A blur of static.
He woke up screaming.
Back in his college dorm. The hourglass on his desk. Sand frozen mid-fall.
But something was different this time.
There was a sticky note next to it:
“Loop 30 begins now. This time… don’t flip.”
His heart thundered.
Who wrote it?
Not him.
His phone buzzed. Unknown number. One message:
"If you flip it again, you won’t return as you."
He stared at the screen, hands trembling. His reflection in the mirror behind him… didn’t match his movement.
His reflection blinked… a moment after he did.
That night, he stayed awake.
Watching the hourglass.
Not flipping it.
But he could feel it pulsing. Whispering.
And deep down, he wasn’t sure if the real Ved was even the one sitting there anymore.
A week passed. Then another. The hourglass didn’t move. No skips. No flickers. But his dreams changed. He dreamt of loops he couldn’t remember, lives he never lived—one where he was a violinist, another where he lived alone on a hill with only a dog, and one… where he never found the hourglass at all.
Each morning, the dreams felt more real. Like echoes of something he’d lost.
One night, unable to take the pressure, Ved returned to the archive room. The broken tile was still there. The wooden box—empty.
But on the wall, someone had scratched a message into the plaster:
“You were the hourglass all along.”
He reeled back. What did it mean?
The next day, he confronted his professor, Dr. Mahadevan, a physicist who had once casually mentioned time-loop theory in class. Ved poured everything out.
Instead of laughing, the professor nodded slowly.
“I was wondering when you’d come to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve come to me in seven previous loops. Each time, you lose a bit more of yourself. The hourglass was never cursed, Ved. It’s a tether.”
“To what?”
“To your original timeline. And it’s weakening. If you keep flipping, your soul fragments further. The reflection lag, the dreams, the messages—they’re warnings. Pieces of you, trying to resist.”
“So what do I do?”
Dr. Mahadevan leaned in.
“You have to choose. Let go of the past… or become one of your fragments.”
Ved went home, sat in front of the hourglass again. The red sand looked different tonight—brighter. Thicker.
He picked it up. And didn’t flip it.
Instead, he placed it inside a steel box, locked it, and buried it behind the college library.
He started journaling. Writing what he remembered. Trying to rebuild himself from the inside out.
The loops never came back.
But sometimes, he still catches a delay in the mirror.
Just a flicker.
Just enough to remind him…
Somewhere, the hourglass still whispers.
React
