Palimpsest
The first impact takes you by surprise- exactly as it shouldn't.
Your mind goes white with it, for one endless moment, sand kicking up under your heels. Even so the screaming lances through both hearts, clear above it all. As long as the noise continues, you drop. Absurdly ordinary details flash into the forefront of awareness until they evaporate; your collar's pressure around your neck, the soft give of ground beneath you. The wine rebels in bile at the back of your throat.
Within seconds change has begun. The energy starts with burgeoning violence through hands and feet and draws its way upwards, lending you the strength to rise. It's an illusory recovery in any case, like the outstretched grip of a drowning man before he suffocates. A thousand voices are calling your name together, all of them unreal. Only one addresses you by your title.
"Doctor!"
Your respiratory bypass has kicked in, a wrenching jolt at your chest. Somehow you remain standing, the moon high over you and a remembered day's light at your back.
Through fire and water, ice and rage and the devouring heart of the sun, you can see them.
Amy struggles in the arms of daughter and husband, her desperation staggering as the world reels.
Alongside her, the timeline of the woman who is now River twists before your fractured gaze, its close-spun edges fraying. It pulls your mind into knots, disintegrating memory while the past still lives. Easter Island crumbles, stone by stone, piling high. Jim the fish distorts below the surface. The Singing Towers fill you with their music. You've run so far, fought so long to bind her thread to yours, that the sensation is a worse pain even than the fire. Each of your companions withers and dies, surges and falls, in her wake. Their not-quite, finished futures jerk you upright, like a puppet on its strings.
"I'm sorry."
Your vision consumes itself, forcing both arms outwards. It is time. You close your eyes and picture a burnt-orange horizon. Silver forests ablaze, reflecting two dawns.
Her. Them. Nothing.
The universe rewrites.