Night fell, thick and suffocating. Crescent Bridge was empty, but every streetlight flickered like a dying candle.
Shreya and Aarav stepped cautiously onto the bridge. The air smelled metallic. The wind carried whispers—faint cries, laughter, and the man's voice repeating her name over and over.
Shreya's hands shook. "I feel… it here. Watching."
A shadow emerged from the fog, darker than the night itself, stretching unnaturally tall, no face, its limbs bending at impossible angles. The bridge beneath them seemed to pulse like a heartbeat.
"You shouldn't have touched me," the dead man whispered from the shadows. "You can see what should not exist. And now it knows you."
The shadow advanced, and the air thickened, making it hard to breathe. Shreya realized the entity was feeding not just on fear—but on time itself, on the possibilities of tomorrow.
Aarav grabbed her hand. "We can't run anymore. You have to face it."
Shreya's pulse spiked. Every memory of the night she saved the man, every impossible sight, every distorted reflection—they all led here.
The shadow stopped a few steps away, towering, patient, intelligent. Its voice wasn't in words but in thought: "Tomorrow belongs to me… and I am never late."
Shreya swallowed her terror. Her only choice was to step forward, into the darkness, into the impossible, and confront the force that had been hunting her from the moment she touched fate itself.