The boy who froze time

Everyone thought Luca was just another quiet kid sitting near the chemistry class window, doodling strange symbols in his notebook. But the truth was far stranger—Luca could pause time.

Not rewind. Not fast-forward. Just stop it cold.

The moment it first happened, he was ten. A car skidded off the road toward his dog, and in a panic, Luca screamed "Chronostasis!" and everything froze. Leaves hung in the air. The car hovered above the ground mid-spin. And his dog just stood there, unaware, tail wagging, safe.

He never told anyone. Luca did not know the word he screamed that day, but upon research, he discovered its origin was Greek: "Chronos" (time) + "stasis" (standing still).

But now, at seventeen, things were different. People were disappearing in town. Time wasn't freezing cleanly anymore. Sometimes when he stopped the world, something else moved inside it—a shadow, quick and sharp-edged, flickering just beyond sight.

Today, it spoke to him for the first time.

"You’re not the only one," it whispered, as he stood alone in frozen time.

Luca’s breath caught in his throat.

He was in the middle of the street, time frozen. A dropped ice cream cone hovered inches above the pavement. A bird’s wings hung mid-flap in the sky like a painting. But the voice, the whisper, had cut through the stillness like a crack in glass.

He turned slowly.

Behind him, in the frozen crowd, stood a girl. Or something like a girl. She moved when nothing else did. Her eyes shimmered like oil on water, and a faint blue glow pulsed in her veins. She tilted her head, studying him the way a scientist might observe a specimen.

“I’ve been watching you,” she said. Her voice echoed oddly, like it came from a distant canyon. “You freeze time, but you’re sloppy. Crude. You don’t know what you are.”

Luca swallowed hard. “Who are you?”

She stepped closer. “Name’s Riva. I was like you, once. But I learned the truth.”

He didn’t move. Couldn’t. Her presence was electric, magnetic, terrifying. “What truth?”

“That time isn’t a toy,” she said. “It’s a creature. And you’re feeding it every time you stop the world.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” she whispered, “you’ve drawn its attention. And now it’s coming for you.”

Luca felt the hairs on his arms stand up.

"Coming for me?" he asked, barely above a whisper. "What is it?"

Riva’s expression darkened. “It’s ancient. It lives between seconds. When we freeze time, we create cracks in the flow—and it eats through those cracks.”

She stepped closer, her tone sharp. “Most people go their whole lives without ever noticing time. But you? You’ve torn it open again and again. Now it’s hunting.”

Behind her, the frozen world trembled. Just a flicker; a shimmer at the edge of perception, but it made Luca’s gut twist. Something was out there. Watching.

“How do I stop it?” he asked.

“You don’t,” Riva said. “You run. You learn. Or you get eaten.”

With a flick of her wrist, the air shimmered, and suddenly, time snapped back into motion. The ice cream splattered on the ground. The bird shot off into the sky. The world roared to life around him.

Riva was gone.

Luca stood there, heart pounding, cars passing, people chatting, unaware that anything had happened.

Except for one man across the street.

He stood perfectly still in the crowd, his eyes pale, his height too high. His head cocked at an unnatural angle, like he was trying to listen to something behind reality.

Then he smiled.

Not at Luca, but through him.

That night, Luca lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.

Sleep wouldn’t come.

Riva’s words echoed in his mind: "You’re feeding it... It’s hunting."

He clenched his fists. If this thing was coming for him, he needed to see it. To understand it. Running wouldn’t fix anything.

He sat up, heart pounding. The clock on his wall ticked—2:17 AM.

Luca inhaled deeply.

Then he whispered the words he always used, not out loud, but somewhere inside himself."Chronostasis!" A strange instinct he’d never questioned before.

And time froze.

The second hand on the clock stopped.

The hum of the fridge in the kitchen went silent.

The world was still.

Luca stood, the floorboards not creaking under his feet. He walked to the window. The world outside looked painted in pale blue, lit by moonlight and streetlamps caught in mid-flicker.

Then, behind him, something creaked.

He turned.

His closet door, which had been shut, was now open a few inches.

Cold air bled from the gap. Not the air of his bedroom, but something older. Something… hungry.

From within the shadows, a hand slipped into view; long-fingered, jointed wrong, as if built by someone who’d only heard about humans in a nightmare.

Luca stepped back.

Then the voice came again—not Riva’s, but something more profound, slower. Thirstier.

"You called me again, little fracture-maker..."

A glint of something; an eye, perhaps. Flickered in the dark.

And Luca realized, with bone-deep dread, that freezing time was no longer just his gift.

It was now an invitation.

Luca couldn’t move.

The thing in the closet didn’t step out; it flowed like smoke with bones. Its limbs unfolded from shadows like spider legs cracking through the dark, too many joints bending the wrong way. Its face was a blur—not faceless, just constantly shifting, like time trying to wear a human mask and failing.

“You don’t belong here,” Luca whispered, though his voice trembled.

It tilted its head. “And yet, you made a door.”

The closet warped around it, wood creaking as if under pressure from an invisible tide. The room felt smaller, colder. The air tasted like rust and electricity.

Then—

CRACK.

A burst of white-blue light cut across the floor like a lightning bolt. The shadow-creature shrieked, recoiling, pieces of it flickering like torn film.

Luca shielded his eyes.

And when he looked again, Riva stood between him and the thing. Her arm was raised, palm glowing with a strange geometric symbol.

“You’re not ready to face it,” she said, her voice steel. “But you will be.”

The creature hissed; no mouth, but the sound came anyway. It retreated back into the closet, folding space as it moved. As it vanished, it left behind only two words, whispered like a curse:

“Tick. Tock.”

The door slammed shut.

Time snapped back into motion.

Luca gasped. He was on the floor, breath shallow, heart galloping in his chest. The clock on his wall now read 2:24.

Riva offered him a hand.

“We don’t have much time,” she said. “If it’s marked you, you’ll start slipping. Memories. Time jumps. Maybe even people forgetting you ever existed.”

“What is it?” he asked, grabbing her hand.

She helped him up. “It’s called the Warden. And it keeps time pure. People like us? We’re parasites to it.”

Luca stared at her, wide-eyed. “Then why help me?”

She looked out the window, scanning the stillness. “Because I used to be you. And someone helped me.”

She turned back, and Luca saw something like fear behind her calm exterior for the first time.

“And because soon… it won’t come through doors anymore. It’ll come through you.”

The next few days passed like fragments of a dream.

Luca stopped attending school—not because anyone told him to, but because, slowly, people stopped noticing he existed. He’d walk through the halls and hear his name, then forget why he was there. Teachers skipped his seat. His house felt hollow, like he was living a few seconds out of sync with the rest of the world.

Just like Riva warned.

But he trained.

Every night, she met him in the frozen world. Together, they practiced, not just stopping time but shaping it, bending it like light through glass.

“Freezing time is the doorway,” Riva said, sketching patterns in the air with light. “But control means choosing what stays still—and what doesn’t.”

Soon, Luca could freeze everything except himself. Then, he learned to let one thing move: a candle flame, a falling droplet, Riva’s hand. He began to hear time like music slowed to an impossible pitch.

And finally, he felt it: the rhythm behind everything. The pulse of time itself.

Then came the night he found the crack on his own.

It wasn’t a door this time. It was a fracture in the air, like shattered glass floating in his bedroom, pulsing with pale light. The Warden was near. He could feel its breath behind the veil, its hate sharpening.

Riva appeared at his side.

“You found it,” she whispered. “Are you ready?”

“No,” Luca said. “But I’m going anyway.”

He reached toward the crack and entered.

Inside the crack, time was a maze of frozen echoes; buildings folding over themselves, voices trapped mid-word, thunder that never stopped rumbling. The Warden waited in the center, massive and shifting, like a cathedral of shadow and bone.

“You do not belong,” it growled. “You were born of flesh. I was born of time.”

Luca’s eyes glowed blue.

“I was born to break you.”

The Warden lunged, but Luca stepped outside of time. The world froze. Even the Warden slowed—not stopped, but struggling.

Luca raised his hand, drawing on everything he had learned. Symbols burned into the air circles, spirals, arcs like the face of a clock unraveling. He felt the pain of it memories slipping, his body aging and de-aging in bursts, but he didn’t stop.

Then he spoke a word.

One word.

UNMAKE!!!!

The crack shattered. The Warden screamed, not in sound, but in silence, like time itself recoiling.

Its body burst into particles of dust and broken moments, years lost, seconds stolen; burning into white light and fading.

Luca fell to his knees.

Riva ran to him, catching him just before he collapsed.

“It’s done,” she whispered. “You did it.”

But Luca looked past her, to the spot where the Warden died.

And he knew the truth:

He had destroyed the Warden…

…but in doing so, he had taken its place.

Luca became the keeper of time.