3

When I open my eyes, everything will be back to normal. 3, 2, 1, and…

I pried my eyes back open, and as far as I could see the entire campus was lit up like the midday sun was hanging high above the clouds. Everything was as crisp and clear as an average September afternoon. On the other hand, the sky looked straight out of a nature documentary. Stars shining in every inch of dark they could get their hands on. The Milky Way loomed in the center of it all, a ceaseless reminder of how unnatural this all was. I felt like I was walking around in a poorly photoshopped landscape picture.

I’d lost count of how many times I’d tried that method on my way back to my dorm. Ever since I “fired” my last arrow, I’d been on autopilot, trying and failing to figure out what was happening. Of course the first thing I did was whip out my phone, but for some reason the screen wouldn’t turn on. The battery had been above eighty last I checked. Just another peanut to add to the landfill of world-shattering events of the past hour.

I cleaned the field to the best of my ability, covering my tracks and disposing of any evidence. I threw the split arrow into a trashcan a fair distance from the field, along with the arrow I threw by hand, since there was no reasonable explanation for why it looked to have been tossed in a campfire. The center of the shaft was charred black, the feathers were singed at the edges, and the tip had been smashed flat. I would just have to pray nobody paid too much attention to the gaping hole that ran through the entire target.

I had been stumbling back towards my room for about fifteen minutes or so on wobbling legs and sore arms. I had to move from wall to wall on the buildings that lined the campus paths. Where had this exhaustion even come from? All I actually, physically did was loose five arrows and throw one, so why did I feel like I lost a fight? Worst of all, the fatigue refused to subside, no matter how long I sat down.

All the night-owls still outside at this hour had been avoiding me, and not without good reason. I must’ve looked drunk, or on shrooms, or both with the way I was staggering and shaking my head back and forth, like I could reset my vision the same way you do an etch-a-sketch. Hell, I wasn’t entirely convinced I hadn’t gotten psilocybin in my system somehow. However, from what I could (miraculously) see, everyone was going about business as usual. I lucked out when a girl walking the opposite direction was too distracted with her phone to notice me. I caught her attention. “Excuse me?”

She removed one earbud. “Yeah?”

“Does anything seem…off, to you?” I pointed upward. “About the sky?”

Her expression grew leery. I understood well that I was flying every red flag at once. I looked unstable, talked to a random woman out of nowhere, and just asked something that would be considered unhinged in any other setting. But I just needed to know that this wasn’t some new normal.

With apprehension in her voice, she looked up and answered, “Looks fine to me.”

That didn’t give me enough information. “What does it look like, exactly?”

She took a couple steps back, eager to get away from the man putting out serial killer vibes. “What, do you want me to be poetic? It’s just a whole buncha nothing, like always.”

Great, so I am insane. “Thanks, that’s all I needed to know.” I hobbled my way past her, left hand dragging along the brick wall to my side. I thought that was the end of it, but apparently she was kinder than I predicted.

“Do you need help?” I heard from behind me.

“Nope.” I did, but God forbid anyone was concerned enough to call an ambulance. If I had to tell a doctor about any of this, I could say hello to a very soft room and a very tight jacket.

“You sure? You look like you can barely stand.”

“Ah, you know, just hit one too many laps at the gym. Never skip leg day!” It wasn’t the best lie, but it was all I could come up with on the spot. I was still facing away from her, but she either believed me or understood the subtextual “leave me alone” in my words, because I could hear her footfalls behind me getting further away. I trekked on.

Eventually I staggered up to the front double-doors of my dorm building, nearly fumbled my student ID while holding it to the scanner, and bit back a yelp of pain as I pushed in the slam bar with an aching shoulder. I stuck to it as it swung inward, keeping myself from pitching forward and face-planting on the tile floor.

The vestibule was entirely empty, save for the one guard posted at the security desk on the rightmost wall. The analog clock above him read 11:14. Directly ahead of the entrance sat the two elevators that traveled all the way from the basement to the sixth floor dozens of times daily, and to the left was an entire wall lined with a grid of small letterboxes, one for each room. Further back, behind the elevators, two hallways split in either direction, each one containing multiple two-person rooms, a communal bathroom, and a staircase to the other floors. The fact that everything seemed well lit gave me hope that my condition had faded, until I looked at the lamp at the center of the ceiling, and saw it was dead and cold.

I looked back to the security guard, and made brief eye contact as he looked up at me from whatever he was doing, before quickly returning. Clearly he could still see me. Does that mean…?

No, Aiden, stop thinking. You just need to sleep this all off.

It was after ten p.m., which meant I had to check in. I clumsily wavered over to the desk and grabbed the edge for support. The guard was unfazed as I flopped my right hand holding my ID up onto the desk, maneuvering my card over the portable scanner. Inebriated or otherwise hindered students were nothing new to him, especially at this hour. Once I heard the small beep, I pocketed my belongings and made for the rightmost hallway. Never had I been this glad to live on the first floor.

Mine and Collin’s room was one of the very first in the hall, so thankfully it wasn’t a long walk. But I noticed that the closer I got to the door; the closer I got to my bed, the weaker I became. The promise of rest sapped my muscles of any remaining strength, and by the time my hand was on the doorknob, I was dragged to my knees by my own body weight as I fell against the open door.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The room was a standard set-up: Two metal bed frames pressed up against either side of the entrance, the mattresses lifted high to fit a small dresser and allow storage space. A simple wooden desk and cheap plastic chair stood at the foot of each bed, each one containing a built-in shelf and ample drawer space. At the far end, a shallow, waist-high countertop held miscellaneous odds and ends (all of them Collin’s) just below the single east facing window that let in the morning sunlight.

At first glance you could instantly tell who each side belonged to. The right side looked like it hadn’t been touched. Nothing but plain white sheets on the mattress, barren walls, and a desk with nothing on it save a laptop and a few, mostly unused notebooks.

The opposite end was a maximalist showcase. Multi-colored sheets and blankets, posters, sticky notes, and project notes plastering the wall and even the ceiling directly above the bed, and a desk entombed in notebooks, binders, and flashcards. No space was left unused, and everything was personalized to hell and back.

Collin, sitting at his desk, buried by the sheer amount of stuff that he owned, practically jumped out of his skin as I hit the deck. “Aiden?” He called as he rose from his chair, tearing himself from whatever assignment he was working on. “You alright?”

At this point I was fighting to even keep my eyes open, so when I tried to say, “Yeah, I just need to sleep this off,” it came out more like the incoherent mumblings of someone whose forehead was very well acquainted with a brick wall.

Collin stooped down and grabbed me underneath my shoulders. “Dude, when I brought up how you never go to parties, that wasn’t an order to immediately go out and get trashed.” He hauled me to my wobbly feet, inched me a step forward, and reached over my shoulder to swing the door shut.

His sheer gall to insinuate that I had participated in anything like that gave me just enough energy to murmur out a few clear words to defend myself. “Muscles, not drugs,” I clarified. At this point, Collin had his hand on the light switch, and I heard the faint click of the room light illuminating. A small piece of me died when nothing inside changed. Collin looked back at me, a tint of confusion on his face.

“Since when do you work out?” He asked. “Know what, forget it.” He dragged me to the edge of my bed and heaved me up like a sack of potatoes. I tried to do some of the work as he moved me into the recovery position, but at the moment all I could really do was twitch my arms and legs a bit. A terrifying thought crossed my mind just as Collin pulled my sheet over me. Am I dying? Is this what death feels like?

Dying people didn’t get night vision though, right? I heard the lights flick again, and once more the entire room was still lit up like Christmas. I finally closed my eyes, and my eyelids took the opportunity to glue themselves shut. I could only hear Collin say, “Get some sleep.” before I drifted off entirely.

I slept like a rock. I don’t think I even dreamed that night.

✦

The early morning light hammered on my eyes, breaking them open like a pharaoh's tomb. As my blurry vision adjusted, the first thing I noticed was that every ache and pain that had tormented me just hours before was completely gone. I sat up, still in my clothes, and reveled in the sensation of a factory-new body.

Second, as I looked around the room, I realized both that Collin had already left, and that my sight had returned to normal. Shadows fell exactly where they should have, and there was a thin stretch of blue outside the window, revealing a familiar sky. I hesitated for a moment, trying to reconcile my memories of last night with the typical reality presented before me.

So was it all just a horribly vivid dream, then?

That was all it could’ve been. A wave of relief washed over me, nearly knocking me back into bed. But I’d caught a glimpse of Collin’s alarm clock, and saw that it was already ten in the morning. Even If I wasn’t going to class today, I should at least pretend to be human.

I swung my legs off my mattress. Putting last night into perspective, there was no way any of that could’ve actually happened. I mean, no human can throw an arrow so hard it burns up and puts a hole through fifteen centimeters of straw, right? I chuckled to myself, amused at how out of hand my imagination had gotten. I wasn’t prepared for the truth to sock me in the teeth.

As soon as I stepped into the direct sunlight streaming in through the glass, every bit of skin on my hands, arms, and face was overcome with an alien tingling. It felt like the static sensation of when an arm or leg falls asleep, but without the accompanying numbness or pain. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but it was still sudden enough to make me jump away from the light with a yelp.

My back now firmly pressed against the door, I took a few minutes to mentally cuss out God, Buddha, Krishna, whoever was still letting this bullshit happen to me. It took me a grand total of fifteen minutes to ensure that if any religion were right, I had reserved myself a VIP seat in hell. By now, the light had retreated towards the wall enough that I could comfortably stand out of it.

A good portion of me begged to let things lie, walk away, and pretend it never happened. A smaller, louder portion understood that I couldn’t avoid this for my entire life, and it was best to understand what was happening. I decided to experiment.

Tentatively, I inched towards the receding daylight. I reached out and poked the very tip of one finger into the glow, yanking it back once that same sensation started up again. However, once I realized it didn’t hurt, I slowly slid my entire hand into the light.

I watched, dumbfounded, as my palm was enveloped in some kind of…the only word for it was mist, or gas, or energy. There were small distortions in the air around my fingers, like a heat haze, which was filled with what looked like a fine golden dust, that quickly drifted off and dissipated into nothingness. I moved my hand, and the energy moved with it, acting like a fluid as it escaped between my digits and swirled through the air, before disappearing a moment later. Was I emitting it somehow?

Rationality eventually overcame me, and I tore my hand away from the light and back into the safety of shade. I wrenched open the door of the room and made a tear for the bathroom in my hall.

This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening! If I lied to myself enough, maybe it would come true. Was this stuff what let me hit all those bullseyes yesterday? Was it what let me see in the dark? What caused it to appear, and why? Questions flooded my mind and I didn’t have the beginning of the beginning of an answer. All I knew was that I needed to clear my head before something in it broke that couldn’t be fixed.

I slammed the communal bathroom door aside, the entire space empty this late on a Thursday morning. I sprinted for the sinks, turned a knob, and launched handfuls of cold water directly at my face. If nothing else, I needed to calm down and think about things rationally. After taking a second to breathe, I looked up into the mirror, and finally had a look at myself.

At my eyes.

They were gold.

Where once there had been dull, dim gray rings circling empty pits, there was now a second, inner ring of rich, iridescent yellow that visibly twinkled like amber in each iris. I leaned in closer to my reflection, and saw each ring actively revolve around its pupil, rotating slowly but steadily in tandem. I recognized they were the exact same color as that mist coming from my hand back in the dorm room.

I gripped the edges of the sink and leaned backward, finally letting everything process. I couldn’t tell what, I couldn’t tell how, but it was undeniable now. Something about me, about my being, had changed. That was fine, in all honesty. I knew I could adapt to it. I’d gotten very good at adapting over the years. There was just one question that wouldn’t stop haunting me…

Am I still human?