A Day in the Future

"Wake up, sleepyhead!"

She doesn't want to. The ground beneath her is soft, and the air around her is cool, and she feels no need to open her eyes.

"Wake uuuuuup!" The Shadow tugs at her arm. "Wake up, wake up, wake up! Your time's up! It's time to wake up now!"

Time's up? What does he mean by that? It certainly isn't already time to wake up, is it? She'd thought that it would be hours before...

"Kloey, open your eyes."

At the sudden voice, she blinks her eyes open, seeing that three other pairs of multicolored spectacles are glimmering down at her. There are eyes of a violet hue, eyes with nothing but white, and eyes of a scarlet, lovely red that stare down at her. She hardly recognizes them until the memories come back.

"Red! Chris! Blake!" She sits up and explodes with their names, her face blooming in a smile. Though once she shouts, she hears that her voice is... different. Much, much different. She sounds like an itty child.

Red chuckles. His eyes slant upward into a grin. She realizes, suddenly, that she cannot see his mouth. Isn't she one of the humans who was allowed to? Why can't she see it now?

"You sound super silly, human," says Blake, giggling. His teeth flash into a giddy grin. He has always been this way, she knows. A little childish and a little cute.

Christopher blinks his amethyst eyes. "Yes," he affirms his brother's comment, "You do sound quite different. Much younger than you were, really."

She blinks at them all, not understanding their implications. Red notices her confused expression, able to read the emotions of humans very easily, and gives a short, prompt sigh. "I suppose we cannot keep it a secret any longer."

A secret? What needs to be a secret? She sits up as straight as she can, not even realizing that her clothes hardly fit her anymore. Intently, she stares into Red's eyes, which, she finds, are just as captivating and deep as they had been when she was awake before.

"You see..." he looks away, and she can see the smile still in his eyes, "...our formula, it was supposed to prevent aging."

Chris interrupts him. "When we put humanity to rest, we didn't want them all to age."

Red is not fazed by the interruption. He must be used to it now. She remembers that he was always annoyed at her when she interrupted him, but now he doesn't mind it so much. "But for you, since you always end up being the special human, it... didn't 'prevent' aging. Instead, it took a different route, and..."

He pauses.

"Well..."

After seeing if she'll notice, he takes hold of her hand and lifts it to her face, where she sees that it's... it's small! Her blue sleeve hangs over the edge of it. Her clothes are much too big for her, she sees as she looks down. Her shorts go down to far below her knees. She's very... tiny.

"What?"

Blake bursts with the truth, raising his arms into the air. "You're littler now! Like me!"

His brother elbows him. "Not exactly," says Chris, grinning, "No human could ever be as little as you are."

She's still bigger than him. Somehow, though she is much smaller than she was before, she's still bigger than Blake is. "What did happen?"

"You reverse-aged," Red says matter-of-factly, "By about four years."

"So I... I'm..." she counts on her fingers, "...seven years old now?"

He nods. "A much littler child than you were."

"But how does that work?" She waves her hands, confused. After so many hours, or days, or weeks, or months- or however long they had kept her asleep for- she awakens to find that she is now four years younger than she was before?

"It... must've just been an effect brought upon by your DNA. After all, you did resist the Shadew in the first place."

Yes. She had. She remembers the process. Swallowing something cold and dark and icky until it felt like she couldn't swallow anymore, and then falling unconscious in Red's arms. It was the first night of her kidnapping, the first time that she ever interacted with a Shadow.

"But-" he holds out a hand to help her up, "-don't think about that now. It did not serve its intended purpose, but that is no reason to ponder on it." She stands, and she finds that she is so much shorter than she was before. So much smaller in every way. Her clothes no longer fit.

"I... I gotta..." she stammers, "I gotta get new clothes..."

Blake digs around in the invisible pockets of his black robe. "Here! Here, human! We made some for you!"

She does not expect them to be of any sort of quality. But she's forgotten that the Shadows take great care in everything they do, and if their project is making clothes for her, then they'd take great care in that, too. Blake hands her a little white dress. He whispers something to her while handing her another thing, saying that the Shadows made it because they knew that her other thing would be too small for her.

His language is discreet, which makes her smile. Shadows have an appreciation of privacy that many others do not have.

Slipping out of her enlarged clothes is particularly easy. The dress is simple to try on, though its more of a small gown, and once she has it on she marvels at how well it fits. There are strings, ribbons, all sorts of accessories of this white hue. And she loves them all.

Once the Shadows return from their mission of hiding within the trees, chattering away, she thanks them. She thanks them for everything, her brown eyes glistening. For entrusting her with their plan, for promising her that the future would be OK, for sticking with her throughout the fumble atop the dragon's back (though now, it's been a long time since then) and for not letting her slip away. It could've been horrible, she mutters, if the formula that Red had made hadn't worked, and she had...

Red interrupts her halfway through. They aren't worrying about the what-ifs. They're worrying about the now.

And now, there isn't anything to worry about.

She is back, though a little small for someone with her knowledge. She is alive. Things are OK, just as he promised. Just as he promised they would be.

But this was only another way things could have gone.

Kloey hasn't died. The Shadew has not had the intended effect, a change which they welcome, despite it not being what they expected. Nothing has fallen apart. Nothing has burned to pieces. The world is as it should be. And yet this is still not the only way things coud have gone. This is not the true ending.

After all, the true ending is left up to the imagination. All I can do is help you guess what it might be.

*More interpretations coming soon.*