The Riddle at Midnight
Elara stood before the glass case, her reflection ghostly against the ancient sphinx behind it. The museum's Egyptian wing smelled of dust and secrets, a place where time pooled like stagnant water.
"You look like something that crawled from a tomb," David said, approaching her. His voice carried the weight of three years of marriage, now twelve months dead.
"I feel like a zombie," she admitted, not turning around. "Just going through the motions. Wake up, work, sleep. Repeat." Her office job had drained her soul drop by drop, until she was hollowed out, walking upright but not truly alive.
Outside, the first rumble of thunder shook the glass doors.
David stepped closer. "The sphinx asks a question of all who pass. Answer wrong, and you're devoured. We never solved it, El. Our riddle."
She turned then. His face was familiar yet strange, like a book read too many times until the words blurred. "Maybe the answer changed. Maybe we're not the same people who asked it."
CRACK. Lightning fractured the sky, flooding the exhibit with stark white light. For one second, everything was exposed—their shared history, the failures, the love that refused to die completely.
The sphinx's stone face seemed to shift in the flash. Sad? Mocking?
"I still dream about you," David said softly. "About lightning striking the house we never bought. About mornings that never happened."
Elara's chest tightened. "I dream about the version of us that didn't rot. But that's all gone now."
"Is it?" He touched her arm, fingers warm against her cold skin. "Or are we both just walking dead, waiting for someone to notice?"
Another flash of lightning illuminated them both—two survivors in a landscape of artifacts, breathing in the electric air between saying something terrible and something true.
"Ask me again," she whispered.
David smiled, exhausted but hopeful. "What devours all things but makes them stronger?"
She considered the sphinx, the lightning, the years of feeling half-alive. "Time," she said. "If you let it."