My name is Nadia Voss, and I am a hero. At least, that's what the world calls me.
I wasn't always this way. I was just a regular girl—well, as regular as someone with extraordinary abilities can be. I discovered my powers when I was fifteen. They were small at first—telekinesis, the ability to move objects with my mind. At first, it was nothing more than party tricks. I'd impress my friends by levitating a bottle cap or making a book float in midair. It was fun, harmless, and, honestly, a little addictive.
But things changed when I was sixteen.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I was walking home from school when I heard a scream. It wasn't just any scream—it was the kind of scream that cut through you, making your blood run cold. I didn't think. I just ran toward it. My mind raced, and before I knew it, I was standing in front of an alleyway, looking at a man with a gun and a woman cowering at his feet.
"Please," the woman sobbed. "I don't have anything, I swear—"
The man raised the gun, and everything froze. In that instant, something inside me snapped. A surge of energy coursed through my veins, and with a flick of my wrist, I flung the gun from his hand and sent the man crashing against the wall. The woman ran for safety, but I stood there, breathing heavily, my heart pounding in my chest.
That's when I realized I had power. I had the ability to change things—to stop harm before it happened. I didn't have to be helpless anymore.
I became a hero after that. I trained, I honed my abilities, and I joined the Vanguard, a group of superpowered individuals who sought to protect the city from threats too great for normal people to handle. The city needed us, and I needed the city. It was a perfect match.
But it wasn't all glory and recognition. Being a hero is a thankless job. The city loved us—until they didn't.
The first time I realized that, I was called to the scene of a massive fire. A building had collapsed, trapping dozens of people under rubble. My team and I worked tirelessly to save them, lifting debris and pulling out survivors. We were doing good, saving lives, and I thought we were heroes. But then, after the dust settled, the press came in.
"What went wrong?" one reporter shouted, his camera trained on me. "Why didn't you get here sooner? Why didn't you save everyone?"
I didn't know what to say. We did everything we could. We couldn't save everyone, but we saved as many as we could. Still, the headlines the next day painted a different story. "Vanguard's failure: City loses faith in its heroes."
It didn't stop there. Every time we failed to save someone, every time something went wrong, the public turned on us. We became the villains, the scapegoats for everything that went wrong in the city. It was exhausting. And yet, we kept going.
As time went on, the threats became greater, the risks higher. We faced monsters from other dimensions, corrupt organizations with their own superpowered weapons, and even rogue members of our own team. The world seemed to grow darker, and with every battle, I found myself losing a little more of the person I used to be.
I started to question if it was worth it. Was saving the world worth losing myself? Was it worth the sacrifices? I lost friends, some to death, others to the darkness that inevitably consumes anyone who walks this path. And yet, I couldn't stop. Because if I did, who would protect the people? Who would stop the next disaster from happening?
And then there was the worst decision I ever made.
It was a typical mission—a high-stakes operation to stop a criminal syndicate that had taken control of a powerful weapon. We knew it was going to be dangerous, but we never anticipated how quickly things would spiral out of control. The building we were infiltrating was rigged with explosives, and our team was scattered, trying to disarm the traps while taking down the enemies.
In the chaos, I found myself face to face with the leader of the syndicate—a man named Riker. He had the ability to manipulate time, and he'd been one step ahead of us from the start. As we fought, he froze time around us, his smirk cruel as he circled me.
"You think you're a hero, don't you?" he taunted, his voice distorted by the time freeze. "But you're just a pawn. You all are. Every decision you make, every life you take, it's all part of a game. A game you'll never win."
I struggled, my powers pushing against the frozen time, but it was no use. He was too strong. I was powerless. And that's when I made the decision.
I broke the rules. I bent the fabric of reality, using my telekinesis to rip apart the very space around us, disrupting the time freeze. It was reckless, dangerous, and I knew it could have catastrophic consequences. But I had no choice. I had to stop him. I had to win.
And I did. In that moment, I crushed him, and the weapon was destroyed. The mission was a success. But the cost was... unimaginable.
When time snapped back into place, everything had changed. The building collapsed. The team was scattered, injured. And Riker? He wasn't dead. He was trapped—frozen in time, a living statue, forever suspended in a moment he couldn't escape.
The consequences of my actions rippled out like a shockwave. The time manipulation caused fractures in reality, small tears in the fabric of space and time. It wasn't just Riker that I trapped in that moment—I had trapped myself, too. Every time I used my powers now, I could feel it—the constant pull of those fractures, the sense that something was wrong. I could feel myself slipping away, piece by piece, losing my sense of self as the timeline around me unraveled.
The Vanguard tried to help. They offered support, therapy, but nothing could fix what I had broken. I had become the very thing I feared—the hero who couldn't save herself. And in the end, I realized I was just like the people I had sworn to protect.
I was a hero... who couldn't save herself.
I've been watching her, this hero who believes she can fix everything. But even heroes can't fix the broken pieces of themselves. Nadia Voss saved the city, but in doing so, she lost herself. She saved everyone... but herself.
The question remains: Was it worth it? Did the sacrifices outweigh the cost? As time slips through her fingers, I wonder if she'll ever find peace—or if she'll remain trapped in the story of her own making.