The Collector of Time.

34. The Last Star (Science Fiction/Microfiction)

The universe was old. All the stars had gone out, one by one. Only two beings remained: an ancient cosmic being made of light, and a small, lonely asteroid, a relic of a younger time.

The being of light knew it was its turn to fade. It gathered the very last energy in the cosmos, condensing it into a single, vibrant spark.

It flew to the asteroid and nestled the spark into a small crack in the cold rock. "Hold this," the being whispered as it faded into eternal night.

The asteroid, now the only light in an infinite dark, protected the spark. And it waited. Millions of years later, the spark warmed, cracked open the asteroid, and from the dust of the old world, a brand ne

35. The Collector of Time (Fantasy/Historical)

In Victorian London, where every minute was measured and monetized, Mr. Ashworth was an anomaly. He collected time. Not clocks or watches, but moments themselves.

Using a small, ornate silver box and a pinch of ground quartz, he could carefully extract a single moment from reality and seal it within a crystal sphere. He had a shelf of them: a baby’s first laugh, sealed in bright yellow; the precise second the train station clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, trapped in sparkling silver.

He never sold them. They were simply a private archive of genuine, unrepeatable experience in a world growing standardized and dull.

One damp evening, a woman came to him, her eyes red-rimmed and distant. "My husband is gone," she whispered. "Killed in the docks accident. I just need five seconds back. The last five seconds before he walked out the door for work that morning."

Ashworth hesitated. He had never taken time from the recent past, only the present. It was dangerous. But the sheer grief in her eyes convinced him.

He performed the ritual. The air grew cold. He pulled the moment from the recent past, a fragile blue sphere containing five seconds of ordinary morning light, the smell of toast, and the sound of a man whistling a tune.

He handed it to the woman. She held it close, tears streaming down her face as she lived those five seconds again. When she opened her eyes, the crushing sadness was still there, but so was a quiet resilience.

"Thank you," she said. "Now I can say goodbye."

Ashworth watched her leave. He looked at his own collection of perfect, pristine moments and realized that the most valuable time wasn't the perfect ones, but the painful ones we needed to revisit to move on.