The stone was colder than anything had a right to be. Missy Faulkner found it in the abandoned mining shaft behind the Faulkner plantation, buried beneath three feet of collapsed earth and rotting timber. It was no larger than a grapefruit, perfectly smooth, perfectly black, and so heavy that she could barely lift it with both hands.

She sat on the ground in the dim light of the shaft and stared at it. The Mississippi heat pressed down on her like a blanket, but the stone radiated cold — a deep, ancient cold that seemed to come not from the outside but from the inside, from somewhere at the heart of the object itself.

Missy reached out and touched it.

The vision came without warning. She saw the plantation on fire — the big house, the cotton fields, the old oak tree at the edge of the property, all consumed by flames that burned white and blue and impossibly hot. She saw herself standing in the ashes, her clothes blackened, her face streaked with soot, watching everything she had ever known turn to smoke.

Then the vision was over, and Missy was sitting on the ground in the mining shaft, her heart pounding, the stone cold in her lap.

She had been seeing things like this for weeks. Small things at first — flashes of the future that lasted only a second and seemed like coincidence. A neighbor's dog barking three minutes before she heard the car crash. The church roof leaking on a Tuesday because she had seen the water stain on Sunday. But the vision in the mining shaft was different. It was detailed, vivid, and specific. It was not a coincidence.

Missy carried the stone home and hid it in the closet beneath a pile of old quilts. That night, she dreamed of fire.

Over the next two weeks, the visions became more frequent and more vivid. Missy learned to recognize the warning signs — a pressure behind her eyes, a taste of copper in her mouth, a sense that the world around her had become slightly transparent, as if she could see through it to something else on the other side.

She warned Uncle Ezekiel that his heart would fail before winter. He was ninety years old and had been telling everyone that he would outlive them all, but when she said it with such certainty, he went to the doctor. The doctor found a weakened valve and prescribed medication. Ezekiel lived through the winter, but he did not forget her warning.

She told Reverend Thomas that the church would be struck by lightning on October 14th. He laughed at first, then grew uneasy. On October 14th, during an afternoon thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning struck the church steeple and split the cross in two. The congregation called it a miracle. Missy called it a prediction.

But with each vision, Missy felt herself slipping. The present became less real, more distant, like a radio station fading into static. The future became more vivid, more immediate, like a movie playing just beyond the edge of her vision. She began to prefer the future to the present, because in the future, she knew what was coming. In the present, she was blind.

Dr. Harold Price arrived on a Thursday morning. Missy had written him a letter — she did not know how she knew his address, but she did — and he had come, skeptical but curious.

He examined the stone in Missy's parlor, turning it over in his hands, measuring its dimensions, testing its density. He was a rational man, an astronomer from the university, and he approached the stone with the tools of his trade. But by the end of the afternoon, his rationality was cracking.

"It is not of this Earth," he said, holding the stone up to the light. "The composition is... impossible. It is denser than any known material, but it is not metallic. It is not crystalline. It is not anything I can identify."

"Can you explain it?" Missy asked.

Price set the stone down and looked at her with an expression that was equal parts wonder and fear. "I do not know if I can explain it. But I can offer a theory. I believe it is a device — not built by human hands, not built by any civilization that existed on this Earth. I believe it was designed to show the future to whoever looks at it."

"And the cost?" Missy asked. She already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear him say it.

Price hesitated. "Every time you look, you lose a piece of the present. The stone is not showing you the future — it is replacing the present with the future. You trade now for later, and the more you trade, the less now you have left."

Missy thought of her great-grandfather, who had found the stone in 1893 and gone mad within a year. She thought of her grandfather, who had looked into it and killed himself the following spring. She thought of her father, who had refused to look and had spent his life drinking away the fear of what his family had found.

She thought of herself, sitting in the mining shaft, seeing the fire that had not yet happened.

"How do I stop it?" she asked.

"You do not look," Price said. "You destroy it. You throw it into the ocean, or you melt it down, or you do whatever it takes to make sure no one ever looks at it again."

Missy took the stone back to the mining shaft on a cold November morning. The air was thin and sharp, and the cotton fields stretched out behind her like a sea of gray. She walked down into the shaft, the stone heavy in her hands, and descended the rotting ladder to the deepest level.

The bottom of the shaft was flooded with dark water, and the walls were slick with moisture. Missy stood at the edge and looked down. The stone was cold in her hands, colder than it had ever been, as if it knew what was coming.

She thought about throwing it away without looking. But she was twenty-eight years old, and she had spent her entire life running from the past and racing toward the future, and she had never once stopped to live in the present. She owed it to herself, just once, to see everything.

Missy looked at the stone one final time.

What she saw was not a vision. It was not a prediction. It was the entire history of the universe, compressed into a single moment of blinding light. She saw the Big Bang — the first flash of creation, the instant when space and time and matter came into existence from nothing. She saw the first stars ignite, the first galaxies form, the first planets cool and crystallize and sprout life.

She saw Earth — the oceans forming, the first single-celled organisms dividing, the dinosaurs rising and falling, the mammals emerging from the ashes, the first humans standing upright and looking at the stars with wonder and fear.

She saw the future — the sun expanding and consuming the Earth, the galaxies drifting apart, the stars burning out one by one, the universe growing cold and dark and empty, until the last photon faded and the last particle decayed and everything returned to the nothing from which it came.

Heat death. The end of all things. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a slow, inevitable fading into darkness.

When Missy looked up, the stars were different. Brighter. Closer. And she knew, with an absolute certainty that would never leave her, that she would never be normal again.

She sat on the edge of the mining shaft until sunset, watching the southern stars appear one by one in the darkening sky. Each star was a sun, and each sun was a future fire waiting to happen. And she knew every single one of them, because she had seen them all — from birth to death, from ignition to heat death, from the first flash of light to the last flicker of darkness.

Missy Faulkner walked home through the cotton fields as the stars came out over the Mississippi Delta. The air was cold and still, and the old plantation house stood ahead of her, dark and silent and waiting. She would go inside, lock the door, and sit by the fire and watch the stars through the window.

She would see everything that was going to happen. And she would be able to change nothing.