In a quaint village nestled between rolling hills and winding rivers, there lived a man who spent his days perched upon a weathered wooden chair on the front porch of his modest cottage. His eyes, a mirror to the vast expanse of his thoughts, gazed blankly into the distance as if searching for something just beyond the edge of his consciousness.

The man's mind was a void, a vast emptiness that seemed to swallow up any stray thought or fleeting emotion that dared to cross its threshold. He sat there, unmoving, a solitary figure against the backdrop of the bustling village around him.

Neighbors passing by would stop and exchange fleeting greetings with the man, but he hardly registered their presence. His mind was elsewhere, lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts and memories.

Some said he was a dreamer, a man who had wandered too far into the recesses of his own mind and had lost his way back to reality. Others whispered that he was haunted by ghosts from his past, memories that clung to him like shadows in the fading light of day.

But the man paid them no mind. He remained on his chair, a silent sentinel guarding the threshold between the known and the unknown, his gaze fixed on a horizon only he could see. And there he sat, lost in the vast emptiness of his mind, a solitary figure in a world that seemed to have forgotten him.

The thing is, his eyes saw everything even though they looked like they were seeing nothing. He'd tried so many times to get out of the chair on the veranda in the daylight, but it was no use. He sat in the chair for every waking hour, until at some point his legs told him to rise, and then he had a chair inside, a plush armchair that was still lined with the blankets that had belonged to the woman he'd called his wife...before the change. He'd long outlived her. Oh, well. She was getting bored of everything anyway. And he'd made the choice to live like this. But when they said forever, well, he hadn't thought it would actually be forever.

He'd outlive all the neighbours too. Even the blonde-haired toddler who still sucked her thumb to get to sleep. Shit. He wished he didn't know that. It was scary. He could see inside every house without going over there, just in case the one he was waiting for was in one of the houses. He'd established they weren't twenty-two years ago. But the people (was it people?) controlling him just wouldn't let it go.

They allowed him sleep, but not shut-eyed sleep. It was rest, but still he watched. He wanted to feel the feathery lightness of his mattress again. It was years since he had got in bed. He sat in the armchair until morning ticked round again, and then back outside.

He'd spent so long waiting, trying to find this person. And then he would deliver the prophecy. And then all this would finally be done. They'd finally put him out of his misery. He could stop being this living mummy, this puppet on an invisible string.

It seemed like a lot of money, at the time. Three million for him and his wife to spend, if he passed on a message. That and near immortality. It seemed almost too good to be true. It was. He wasn't ready to see those closest to him live and die. If he'd only been told that the deal would stop the normal clockwork of his body, that he wouldn't be able to ever spend that money, that he'd slowly lose the ability to otherwise speak.

He wanted to get out of here. But he was still waiting for the one.

He learned to measure time by smaller things now. Not years—those were useless—but by patterns: the way the postman’s shoulders slumped a little more each winter, the repainting of the blue house across the street every decade or so, the slow, almost polite creep of ivy along the fence to his left. Time passed like water through fingers. Always moving, never held.

The watchers didn’t speak anymore. Not with words. They nudged. Pressed. Adjusted the focus of his sight when it drifted too far inward. When he forgot to look, they reminded him. When he hoped, they corrected him.

He’d stopped asking questions centuries ago. Questions implied answers, and answers implied an end. There was only the waiting.

Then one morning, something was…wrong.

The air felt different. Not colder, not warmer—just off, like a note played slightly out of tune. He noticed it before he saw anything unusual, which startled him. For a long time now, sensation had come second to sight.

A person stood at the edge of the street.

That alone was not strange. People passed all the time. But this one wasn’t moving. Not checking a phone, not tying a shoe, not looking for a lost dog. Just standing there, staring straight at him.

At his eyes.

A pressure bloomed behind his temples, sharp and warning. The watchers stirred. He felt them pull at him, urging him to look harder, to search through the stranger the way he searched through houses, through years, through lives.

And he couldn’t.

It was like trying to see through fog with a magnifying glass. The future around this person blurred, folded in on itself, refused to open. No flickers of marriage or death, no branching possibilities. Just a blank space where time should have been.

His heart lurched.

The stranger stepped closer. Each footfall landed with a certainty that made the world feel newly solid. When they reached the gate, they stopped again.

“You look tired,” the stranger said.

The sound of a voice meant for him cracked something open. He hadn’t heard that tone in so long - direct, unfiltered, unafraid - that for a moment he forgot he could barely speak.

His mouth worked. The words scraped their way out like rusted hinges. “You… shouldn’t be here.”

The stranger smiled, not kindly, not cruelly. Just knowingly. “You’ve been waiting a long time.”

Pain flared, bright and electric. The watchers pulled hard now, furious, panicked. He felt their grip tighten, urging silence, urging compliance.

But the stranger didn’t vanish. Didn’t age. Didn’t blur.

Hope, he realized—slowly, carefully—was what terror felt like when it hadn’t been crushed yet.

His lips trembled. The prophecy sat heavy in his chest, a weight he’d carried so long it had shaped him around itself.

“Are you,” he whispered, forcing breath into sound, “the one?”

The stranger met his gaze—and for the first time in forever, he couldn’t see what came next.

“I’m here to end this,” they said. “But not the way they promised you.”

The pressure snapped.