The jasmine had been thick that evening, a cloying sweetness carried on the still air that hung heavy before a storm. The woman sat cross-legged on the raised platform, a worn wooden structure that served as both a stage for village gatherings and a cool spot to escape the heat. In her lap, nestled against her breast, an infant suckled contentedly.

The aanchal, the loose end of her sari, acted as a gentle shroud, a soft shield against the world for the tiny life beneath.

Beside them, a tiny black kitten fondly nicknamed 'Jasmine' for the scent that seemed to cling to it, kneaded its paws on the rough wood, mewling softly.

The woman hummed a lullaby, her fingers gently stroking the kitten's soft head. "Ghum parani mashi pishi," she crooned. Fat raindrops, heavy with the promise of a downpour, splattered onto the dust around the platform. The kitten startled, its mewls escalating into louder, more insistent meows. It burrowed closer to her ankle, its tiny claws pricking through her thin cotton skirt.

The woman chuckled, adjusting the child in her arms and reaching down to rub the kitten behind its ears. "Don't be scared, Jasmine," she cooed, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "It's just rain. We're safe here." She looked down at the tiny child, her dark eyes reflecting the fading light. "Mama will protect you both. Always."

Then the downpour began in earnest. The air shifted, the jasmine scent momentarily drowned out by the clean, fresh smell of rain-washed earth. The kitten, now thoroughly panicked, began a frantic, high-pitched meowing, scrambling up the woman's leg and clinging to her skirt.

The woman tried to maintain her composure, her smile unwavering as she attempted to calm the increasingly agitated creature. "Hush, little one, hush," she repeated, louder now to be heard over the drumming rain. "Mama's got you both. Don't worry, Jasmine. You'll be alright. I'll take care of everything."

Suddenly, a figure hurtled through the rain, splashing through puddles, his breath ragged. The child's father. His face was a mask of desperate urgency, eyes wide and wild. He didn't speak, didn't explain. He simply lunged onto the platform, his hands reaching for his child.

Before the woman could react, could even properly register the shock of his sudden appearance, the man had snatched the infant from her arms. The abrupt movement startled the kitten, which leapt from the woman and darted under the platform, its terrified meows echoing faintly.

The woman stared at him, her breast aching with the sudden absence of the child's weight. Rage, cold and sharp, flooded through her. The lullaby sweetness completely gone. "What do you think you're doing? Give her back!"

The man clutched the child to his chest, turning his back to her, shielding the child as if from a physical blow. He finally spoke, his voice strained and tight. "She can't stay with you, Saroshi."

"Wha-"

"I know," the man growled, "You eat children, you feed on them."

"You believe everything, don't you? So naïve." The woman, Saroshi smiled. "You have destroyed your daughter's life. Nobody can do anything. The story has been written. Her destiny is fixed now. She will still meet her end. Soon."

The man flinched, his grip tightening on the child. He turned back to face the woman, rain plastering his hair to his forehead, his eyes terrified. "Don't say that. Don't you dare speak such horrors over my daughter."

"Horrors?" Saroshi laughed, a harsh, brittle sound that was swallowed by the rain. "This is not horror. This is fate. All you needed was to trust me." She gestured vaguely around them, to the village beyond, hidden by the curtain of rain. "But you scoffed, you dismissed me. Now, it's too late."

The man took a step back, his eyes darting around as if searching for an escape. "You think I will believe you more than the creator himself?"

Saroshi's gaze softened, though the underlying anger remained. She looked at the child in his arms, her expression shifting from rage to a strange kind of sorrowful pity. "Don't you see? The jasmine... it bloomed too soon, too early this year. Too intensely. When the jasmine blooms like that, and then the rain comes so suddenly... it's a sign. A sign of loss. A sign that something precious will be taken.

"The gods themselves weep when the jasmine blooms out of time, for they know what awaits." She paused, and in the brief lull between the downpour's heavy breaths, her next words fell like stones.

"You didn't let me write her fate. Now fate will write it for us all. And its ink... is blood."

The whole place smelled of jasmine. I was standing smack-dab in the middle of what I could only assume was some sort of historical purgatory, a room choked with dust motes doing a lazy ballet in the faint, blue light from those rectangles. Yet, the origin of the smell remained a mystery.

Histoire. History. Oh, the irony. Surrounded by presumably history, and yet I felt like a freshly printed page, blank and devoid of any meaningful narrative.

Right, let's see. Fragments of my story scattered around a dusty room? Honestly, it sounded like a metaphor gone rogue. Like someone accidentally let a profound thought escape and it decided to manifest as actual dust bunnies and cobwebs. Standing in this... place, I was supposed to be piecing myself back together – or at least, that's what the slightly cryptic guy in a shiny dhoti had suggested. And went vanished. Boom.

Honestly, the whole thing reeked of bureaucratic busywork. Something the man had conjured up to keep us occupied while they decided which new stupid tale we'd get next week. Probably a fantasy one, again.

I wandered through the dusty endless place. What were these? Flat, flickering, some with a faint, sickly blue glow emanating from within. They looked like relics from the Before Times before everything went sideways.

Then it hit me. Glowing rectangles! Like the ones... yes! It had shown me... things. Fleeting images, like dreams you desperately try to grasp as you wake. Stuff, yes, stuff – but interesting stuff. Hope, a dangerous and frankly inconvenient emotion, flickered in my chest. Maybe these weren't just dust collectors. Maybe they were storytellers. Maybe, just maybe, they held the fragments I was supposed to find.

But there were so many of them. Everywhere I looked, there was this endless room and those rectangles.

One in particular caught my eye, floating in the middle. Tucking the open aanchal of my saree, I approached it cautiously, feeling like I was defusing a forgotten bomb. It hummed softly, a barely audible vibration against the still air. My eyes caught the glow, faint and almost weird. But it showed a reflection. Was it me?

Hesitantly, I leaned closer. The glow intensified, resolving into something... reflective. Was it me? My breath hitched. The surface rippled like water, then stilled, solidifying into an image.

A girl stared back, framed by dark, unruly curls. Large, kohl-rimmed eyes, the colour of rich earth, met my own. A small, silver stud glinted in a nostril I hadn't known I possessed. I even had a small moon-like symbol right in the middle of my forehead. My skin, a warm brown, reflected the muted light, highlighting unfamiliar curves and angles of a face I'd never encountered before.

It was me. Hesitant, I reached out and touched the cool interface, hoping to touch myself? A wrong move.

The world dissolved. One moment, dust and decay, the next...chaos. Screaming metal, acrid smoke stinging my nostrils, the ground trembling beneath my feet. I stumbled, disoriented, and found myself not in the dusty room anymore, but in...hell? Or close enough.

Buildings were skeletal wrecks against a bruised, smoke-filled sky. Explosions ripped through the air, each one a brutal punctuation mark in a sentence of unending violence.

And then I saw her. Me. Or someone who looked exactly like me, except...different. This Ira was clad in hard, worn leather armour, her face streaked with grime and something that looked suspiciously like dried blood. She held a weapon that resembled a cross between a rifle and a bladed instrument, the kind of thing designed to inflict maximum damage with minimum elegance. Warrior Ira. Definitely not the 'browsing dusty shelves' type.

She was barking orders into some kind of comm device clamped to her ear, her voice sharp and commanding, utterly unlike my own vague, hesitant internal monologue. Around her, figures in similar armour moved with grim purpose, engaged in some desperate, losing battle. The air was thick with the stench of burning oil and fear. This wasn't histoire; this was hysteria.

I wanted to shout, to get her attention, to ask her a million questions. Who was she? What was this war? Was this my story? But before a single word could escape my lips, the world warped again, the chaos fading like a bad broadcast signal.

And I was back. Dust and decay. Histoire's depressing embrace. My heart hammered in my chest, a frantic drummer in the silence. What in the synthetic protein gruel had just happened? That...that couldn't have been real, could it? Or maybe this wasn't real. Maybe Histoire was the illusion, and the war...the war was the truth. The thought was unsettling.

Another rectangle beckoned from a darkened alcove, this one smaller, almost tablet-sized. It pulsed with a gentler light, a less aggressive invitation than the first. Hesitantly, cautiously, because apparently, I hadn't learned my lesson about touching random glowing things, I reached out again.

Dissolve. But this time, no chaos. Instead, a soft, warm glow bathed everything in amber light. The air was still, heavy with the scent of beeswax and old paper, comforting somehow, after the assault of the war zone. I found myself in a room that felt...ancient. Not dusty-decay ancient, but lived-in, loved-in ancient.

The smell of jasmine invaded the room. Wooden walls, lined with more books, but these were different. Thick, parchment pages, handwritten in elegant script, bound in leather that smelled of...knowledge. A large, ornate desk dominated the space, cluttered with ink pots, quill pens, stacks of papers covered in flowing handwriting, and strange, intricate diagrams. It was like stepping into a history holodrama, except...realer. More tangible.

And there she was again. Me. Scholar Ira, I dubbed her instantly. She was sitting at the desk, bent over a manuscript, her brow furrowed in concentration. Her clothes were loose and flowing, made of some soft, natural fabric – cotton? Linen? Things I'd only seen in historical documentaries.

She was writing, quill scratching rhythmically against the parchment, her hand moving with practised grace. The light from a nearby candle danced across her face, illuminating a look of intense focus, almost...joy.

Joy. Warrior Ira hadn't looked joyful. She looked...determined. Hard. This Ira, Scholar Ira, she looked...content. Lost in her work, in her thoughts, in her world of ink and words. I wanted to see what she was writing, to understand her thoughts, to – for the love of binary code – just have a conversation that didn't involve explosions and shouted commands.

"Hello?" I whispered, taking a tentative step forward. But the word barely left my lips before the amber light flickered, the scent of beeswax faded, and I was back. Back in the dusty, depressing reality of Histoire. Again.

"Persistent, aren't we?"

The voice, dry and rustling like autumn leaves, startled me. I spun around, heart leaping into my throat, and there he was. The caretaker, Rayer. I hadn't even seen him arrive. He seemed to materialize from the shadows.

"Just...exploring," I mumbled, trying to sound nonchalant like I hadn't just been bouncing between alternate realities or whatever the glitch was going on here.

He chuckled, a sound like dry twigs snapping. "Exploring the Rectangles, are we? Dangerous pastime, that."

Rectangles. So that's what he called them. "Dangerous?" I raised an eyebrow, trying for my best sceptical look. "They just look like old glowing rectangles."

"Oh, they are glowing rectangles, of a sort," he agreed, his voice laced with a cryptic amusement that made my skin crawl. "Rectangles into...other things. Other times. Other...possibilities."

"Possibilities?" I pressed, intrigued despite my initial scepticism. "Like...what I just saw? The war? The...scholar?"

Rayer's smile tightened, becoming less amused and more...knowing. "Perhaps. Or perhaps they are just echoes. Fantasies. Glimpses into what you think you want to see."

Conflicting advice, he'd been warned about the conflicting advice. This was it. "So, dangerous how?" I pushed, ignoring the prickle of unease running down my spine.

"Dangerous to get lost," he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper. "Lost in what could be, instead of what is. Lost in stories that are not your own. They can...consume you, these Rectangles. They can make you forget who you are, where you are supposed to be." He paused, his gaze boring into mine. "Or perhaps they are just broken. Glitched. And touching them is just...foolish."

"But I saw myself!" I tried to reason.

"Whatever suits you, fragment." I swear I wanted to snap his neck.

Broken? Glitched? Foolish? Or...keys? Keys to something more than this dusty, dead-end room?

He wanted to dissuade me, that much was clear. Conflicting advice, indeed. He was throwing out every reason not to touch them, hoping something would stick.

Maybe he genuinely believed it, or maybe...maybe he was just the gatekeeper of this place, tasked with keeping curious minds from poking around where they shouldn't.

"Well," I said, forcing a light, breezy tone, "I've always been a bit foolish. And frankly, 'what is' around here is a whole lot of dust and not much else. So, I think I'll take my chances with the 'possibilities,' broken or not."