Arrow of Time

I used to think of time as something we traveled through like a river, with a steady current that carried us forward. My life was stable, I had a strong marriage, a good job managing a toxicology research lab, and a passion for stamp collecting.

I didn’t know that the river itself could change course—that its banks could be remade, its waters altered—until the day a man from the future appeared and told us he was going to fix what he believed was the deepest mistake in history.

The Man Who Broke the World

He arrived in a machine that didn’t look like a machine. It shimmered more like an idea half caught between breaths, a swirling fog of pastel vapor that circled around itself inside a subtle form of aperture. He came to my laboratory, startling me and my assistants.

He claimed to be a physicist, following more than mere time and space. His eyes carried a fever. “I’ve come to heal the fracture,” he told us. “To end the wars you bring upon yourselves.”

We stared at him, not sure what kind of zealot believed he had to change the record. But he insisted he was no prophet, no mystic. He was a traveler on a mission. And his image of the past was not the same as ours.

Time For Change

He told us, plainly, that we were never meant to be mammals. That our branch of life had veered wrong long ago. That from where he came, intelligence flowered not from the offspring of warmongering furred primates but in beings descended peacefully from the dinosaurs.

He told us that in his time, there was no war. Never had been and could never be. His world’s future prevented even the thought of violence. Now he planned to go to where another split had happened, where one-celled life had become two… to stop our branch from emerging.

I didn’t believe him until I saw what he carried: a sequence of genes, written in mitochondria, waiting to be set loose. He said it would correct what evolution had miswritten. That it would guide us to the shape we should have had all along.

And then he stepped backward into time—five hundred million years into the past—and left his fruits there.

When he returned, smiling, waiting for our applause, the arrow of time answered him with its cruelty. We couldn’t have known… and he couldn’t have either… what his swirling aperture had wrought.

The First Awakening

I woke to a body that shimmered, not skin anymore but scale, fine and iridescent. My chest had softened, my hips curved, my abdomen heavy with a quiet hum. I turned and my wings pressed against my back, folded like forgotten memories.

All around me, I could hear doors slamming, voices breaking, laughter, sobbing, songs. My neighbors, my family, my friends—they were all changing too. All resembling reptiles, elegant and winged. Skin that glistened and winked, now one color, now another—much like the aperture.

And we were sculpted with flaring hips, narrow waists, conspicuous breasts, faces with prominent cheekbones and cupid lips. Female in form. But not in the old mammalian sense. Our sex was raised upward, drawn inward, hidden, unseen unless we chose to open ourselves in trust.

Femalian—that's the word we started using to define ourselves.

The traveler looked at us in horror. He had expected a gradual shift, not this total and abrupt transformation. His aperture vanished as he approached it, whispering that his mistake was irreversible. The arrow of time would not let itself be challenged twice.

And no matter what his own future had looked like, he was stranded in our time, femalian, too—and horrified at his misjudgment.

Resonance

We learned quickly that language was no longer needed. Our throats could shape words, but our bodies carried something more powerful: resonance. By touching foreheads, by resting wings together, by breathing in sync, we could share memory directly. Not just stories but knowing.

It changed everything. Old connections—marriages, friendships, rivalries—shattered or transformed. My wife and I discovered our resonance was gone… a stranger suddenly hummed the exact rhythm of her heart, and we released each other from our vows, not in angry divorce but in recognition of the space grown between us.

We were not couples. We were circles. Creches of resonance, built not by law but by love. Anyone could be accepted. Anyone could leave. And when a lonely femalian wandered too long, we welcomed them in. The choice was based on the individual, not on the culture. New strings had emerged. We called them “Wingspans.”

We had no homes anymore. No private walls. No need for roofs—we watched them silently vanish into the ether. Our Wingspans were our shelter.

Countries, too, vanished, and so did our leaders… caught up in their own new Wingspans. It should have been chaos. Instead, it was peace.

The Traveler’s Guilt

He hated himself. I could feel it whenever he stood nearby. Shame radiated from him like heat. He had wanted to end war. Instead, he had unmade humanity. “I broke everything,” he whispered to me once.

I touched his scaled cheek and answered, “You ended war. Do you see any armies? Any bombs? Any weapons?” He shook his head, but his shame didn’t leave.

We let him stay with us. Not because he had earned it, but because resonance doesn’t lie. He belonged, whether he believed it or not. And I carried that knowledge for him until he was ready to face it.

The First Carrying

It was my turn before anyone even realized. I was the first—following a new nature. Resonance led to syncing. Syncing led to opening. Opening led to conception.

We didn’t control it the way mammals had done. It wasn’t about planning, or charting cycles. It was about alignment—the moment when one body opened to another, and a Spark passed between them like the transfer of a song.

I felt the Spark begin as a glow below my breasts inside my abdomen, soft at first, then steady. My Wingspan gathered around me, pressing hands to my ribs, singing me into stillness.

Pregnancy wasn’t burden. It was a hum—a vibration that carried not pain but presence. I was never alone. The child inside me pulsed back when touched, already syncing within my… what do you call something that is a womb but at the same time isn’t.

The Traveler and My Child

When my creation was born—Alee—we sang her into the world. My abdomen unfurled like petals. The birthing sac slid free, golden and humming, and inside was the new life that had chosen us.

I held her first, but she didn’t look only at me. She looked at the traveler. Straight into his eyes. She hummed the tone he had carried since the change—the ache of regret, the old-world song of violence ending. She echoed it back to him, but softened, purified.

“She forgives you,” I whispered. He wept.

From that day, Alee was as much his as mine. She opened her wings to him first. She sang his songs before she sang mine. I had no jealousy. Our Wingspan widened to fit the bond.

The traveler had broken the world. My child made him whole again.

The Aloning

We each carried inside us the need to drift, to step outside the Wingspan and hear our unique hum again. Not everything was shared. We called it the “Aloning.”

Mine lasted six months. I left the circle one dawn and walked the hills by myself. I slept without blankets, carried no memory stones, spoke to no one. The hum of emptiness was deafening at first, then clarifying, then surrounding.

During my Aloning, I didn’t miss them, although I longed for touch, for resonance. But when I finally returned, I carried myself differently. Lighter. Clearer. Ready again to merge into the current. The Wingspan welcomed me without question. They always do.

Maerrin

Not all found their way back to their own Wingspans. Some wandered too long, afraid they were splintered. In their Aloning, they lost themselves, stripped away from the richness of being felt. Maerrin was one of them.

She heard our song from the hills, our resonance echoing in the valleys she wandered—and came trembling, expecting rejection. She believed she had no place left among us. We took her in.

But Alee—still a child then—ran straight to her, arms wide. The one who had forgiven the traveler now untied Maerrin. Welcomed her with a Spark. The Spark. A loving miracle from one so young.

And before long, Maerrin’s abdomen glowed with Alee's Spark. She was carrying. Not because she had sought it. Because she had stopped resisting and let Alee take away her sorrow. We gathered our Wingspan in joy of her creation.

Sareen

It was during Maerrin’s pregnancy that the traveler changed again. He had lived nameless among us, too ashamed to ask for place. But as he laid his hands on Maerrin’s glowing belly, as he felt the hum of life responding to him, something opened.

He began to resonate from within. Not reflecting others, but originating his own tone. Maerrin touched her forehead to his and said: “You are Sareen now. Our Wingspan chooses stillness. You must hush, silence all your regrets.”

He bowed his head and answered, “Yes. I already knew.” From then on, we no longer called him the traveler. He was one of us.

The New Life

Maerrin’s child was born in stormlight. The sac glowed as it emerged, humming a tone none of us had sung before. When she opened it, the child looked first at her, briefly, then at Sareen—and only Sareen.

It was his song the child echoed. His rhythm. Not possession. Not fate. Recognition.

Sareen had tried to save the world. He had thought he failed. But here, in the gaze of a newborn, he saw the truth: he had ended war not by preventing it, but by transforming the ones who would have fought it.

Alee’s Departure

Children don’t always stay. They drift, as sometimes they must, to form Wingspans of their own. When Alee grew, she began to hum a different rhythm. One morning she left, walking east with three others, carrying a memory stone etched with my song. For me, it was not loss. It was continuity.

She would gather her own Wingspan. She would carry forward what we had given her. The new world is a larger place than it was, and Wingspans intersect and part, no grand plan but a strong sense of emancipation.

Maerrin’s child—Lihhia—on the other hand, remained. She grew in wisdom but rather than forcing her knowledge on us, she let us take it. She resonated and we gathered around, resonating too.

The Arrow of Time

I sit now beside the fire, wings folded, scales warm in the ambiance. In my palm rests a memory stone etched with Sareen’s name. He carries my Spark. He glows beside me as his body expands. Soon his flower will open and bring forth another of my children.

The arrow of time cannot be defied. He tried, and in trying, remade the world. Not as he intended. Not as any of us expected. But as it had to be.

We are femalians now. All of us. The same in appearance but so different in how we resonate. We drift, we return, we expand. Kindness flourishes. Love abounds.

And war is only a memory we no longer understand. His miscalculation was the gift. And I would not return to what we were. Not even if I could.