Chapter Fifty Seven

Chapter Fifty Seven
The parking garage of the Capital School of Design was a brutalist labyrinth of grey concrete and flickering fluorescent tubes. Usually, it hummed with the sound of luxury engines and the chatter of ambitious students, but today, the air felt unnaturally still.

Hunter moved slowly, his hand resting on the small of his back. The baby was restless. It wasn't a kick, it was a rhythmic, pulsing heat that radiated from his core, making his vision swim and his breath hitch. The doctors at the Heights had warned him that because his anatomy was essentially a new frontier of human biology, unusual sensations were to be expected. But this felt less like a medical symptom and more like a warning.

He clicked his key fob, the chirp of his car echoing too loudly in the hollow space. He just needed to get to Nikhil. He needed the sterile, calming walls of the hospital.

Suddenly, the smell of damp concrete vanished.

It was replaced by the overwhelming scent of jasmine, wet earth, and a spice he couldn't name,something ancient and sun-drenched. The grey floor beneath his boots didn't just change, it dissolved. The flickering lights didn't fail, they were consumed by a sky so blue it looked like a polished gemstone.

Hunter didn't blink. He couldn't. He was no longer in the parking lot.

He was standing in a courtyard of white limestone and lapis lazuli. The architecture was impossible,soaring arches that defied gravity, draped in silks of gold and crimson. This was a palace, but not one from any history book Hunter had studied. It felt older, a memory from a time before the world had learned to be cynical.

"Buhle?"

The voice was deep, resonant, and so familiar it made Hunter’s heart ache. He turned his head, his body feeling weightless, as if he were a ghost haunting his own vision.

A man walked across the grass. He was tall, his skin the color of rich teak, wearing robes of white linen that trailed behind him. He had Nikhil’s eyes,the same sharp, intelligent gaze, the same gentle curve of the mouth. But he moved with the regal assurance of a god.

He wrapped his arms around another man who was kneeling in the garden, tending to a bed of strange, glowing lilies.

"We have staff for that," the man said, his voice a low vibration of affection.

The man in the garden looked up. Hunter felt a jolt of pure electricity shoot through his spine. It was him. It was Hunter’s own face, but younger, unburdened, his hair braided with silver thread.

"I love doing it," Buhle said, smiling. He stood up, wiping a smudge of soil from his cheek.

Buhle looked at the other man, and the love between them was so intense it felt like a physical heat radiating off the vision. It was a love that didn't just exist, it held the palace together. It was the foundation of the world.

"Hlanti?" Buhle whispered.

"Hm?"

"Let's live forever, don't you think?"

Hlanti chuckled, pulling Buhle into his chest, his hands resting on Buhle’s waist in the exact way Nikhil held Hunter every morning. "Anything for you. The stars themselves would stop turning if you asked them to."

They moved closer, their lips inches apart, the world around them glowing with a golden light that seemed to emanate from their very skin. But before they could kiss, a peal of laughter rang out. A little girl, no older than four, with dark curls and a dress of woven light, came sprinting through the arches, her arms outstretched.

"Baba!" she cried out.

The moment her small hand touched Buhle’s robe, the world shattered.

The gold turned to grey. The jasmine turned to the smell of exhaust fumes. The limestone turned back into cold, unforgiving concrete.

Hunter fell to his knees, his hands slapping against the grease-stained floor of the parking garage. The transition was so violent he felt as if his soul had been yanked through a keyhole. He gasped for air, his lungs burning, his skin suddenly drenched in a cold, oily sweat.

The exhaustion hit him like a physical blow. It felt as if that thirty-second vision had drained every calorie, every ounce of glucose, every bit of life-force from his limbs. His head throbbed with a rhythmic pressure that matched the pulsing in his stomach.

"Who..." Hunter croaked, his voice cracking. "Who was that?"

He stayed on his knees for several minutes, his vision slowly refocusing on the bumper of his car. The names echoed in his head like a chant. Buhle. Hlanti. They hadn't spoken the language of his village, yet he had understood every word. They looked like him and Nikhil, but they were... more. 

He realized with a terrifying clarity that the car crash two years ago hadn't just been an accident. It had been a reckoning. A door that had been kicked open.

"The baby," Hunter whispered, his hand trembling as he touched his stomach. The child was quiet now, the restlessness replaced by a deep, heavy warmth.

He managed to crawl to his feet, using the car door for leverage. His muscles felt like lead. He fumbled with the handle, sliding into the driver's seat just as his phone began to ring. It was Nikhil.

"Hunter? Where are you? The hospital staff said you were leaving class twenty minutes ago. I’ve been calling," Nikhil’s voice was sharp with that familiar, protective edge.

Hunter tried to speak, but his tongue felt heavy. "Nik... I saw... I saw us."

"What? Hunter, you sound exhausted. Are you at the car? Don't drive. Stay right there. I’m sending a car for you."

"We were kings, Nik," Hunter murmured, his eyes fluttering shut as the darkness of the parking lot began to bleed back into the gold of the palace in his mind. "We were kings, and we had a daughter. And we promised... we promised to live forever."

"Hunter? Hunter, stay with me!"

But Hunter couldn't stay. The vision hadn't just been a hallucination, it felt like so much more. As he drifted into a deep unconsciousness.