"I can help you start over", he said. " But they regret it...they always regret it."

Her life was a mess. It seemed that every decision, no matter how small, had dire consequences. Arts degree at university? Failed every class. Making coffee at a local cafe? Managed to give two people food poisoning in the first hour, and dropped a hot tea all over the cafe's owner. Hell, even today's decision to wear this red top had led to a thirty minute screaming match with her now erstwhile boyfriend. She had retreated to her bedroom, sobbing and vowing to never leave the room again.

Nothing announced his arrival. She gradually became aware that she was alone no longer, and she stared bleakly though her tear-filled eyes at a face that would forever defy her ability to describe: simultaneously handsome, beautiful and terrifying; a skin tone that seemed to morph as she watched from the deepest African black to the stark Scandinavian white; hair that was at once every colour and no colour at all; eyes like a swirling galaxy, and blacker than the depths of the ocean. Normally an apparition such as this would be cause for alarm, but in her present state, barely a shiver rippled her spine.

He stared back at her, and an eternity seemed to pass her by in a second as those eyes bored into hers. Eventually, she spoke aloud.

"Who are you?"

His reply seemed to bypass the mundanity of her ears and manifest itself directly into her mind.

“I come to those in the greatest of need, to give a choice. I can help you move forward, or take you back to the beginning to start again.”

His words washed over her, taking a few seconds to sink in...or was it a few millennia? Gradually she came to an understanding.

"You can help me start over?"

“I can help you start over,” he confirmed. “But you'll regret it...they always regret it.”

Consequence no longer had any meaning to her. This was an opportunity to undo all the bad decisions she'd made. How could she regret any more than she already did?

"Take me back," she pleaded. "Nothing can be worse than this."

“As you wish,” his voice hissed in her mind, seeming, for the first time, to carry some sort of venomous quality. “But this decision cannot be undone. And I will not appear to you again. Farewell.”

She awoke with a feeling of dread that she couldn't place. She reached for her phone to call her mother, the one person she could always rely on. Her phone was unlocked and her fingers typing her mother's home number when she noticed it: a tattoo on her wrist that she certainly hadn't had before. She studied it more closely. It was her mother's name, as well as two years: the year of her mother's birth, and a year that had long since past; how long ago was that, 12 years? The dread increasing, she finished typing her mother's number. An unfamiliar voice answered midway through the fourth ring; a gruff, masculine voice that jarred against her eardrum where she expected her mother's soothing, ethnic lilt. She apologised for the misdial, and stumbled from her couch to the shelf that held her photo albums that she had so carefully scrapbooked over the years. She found the album that matched the second year on her wrist and rifled through the pages until she found what she'd been dreading: photos of a funeral of which she had no memory. Her mother's funeral, 13 years ago next month. A fresh sob built in her throat. She cursed that strange man, if even he was a man, for tempting her with this.

She looked to the mantelpiece, where her favourite picture of herself and the man she had just broken up with sat. Except...no, it couldn't be. The picture showed just her, sitting alone on that park bench where they'd shared their first kiss. Dazed, she went back to the shelf and pulled out her high school yearbooks. There his picture should have been, but there it wasn't. Now confusion joined the dread. Had she never met him because he'd gone to a different school, or had her choice to start again deleted him from history entirely? And surely, if she were starting over, shouldn't she have gone back to being like 10 years old?

Her phone buzzed on the couch; an email. Automatically, it seemed, she opened it and read. The contents confirmed her worst fears, and though there was no address at the top, she could feel the penetrating stare of those deep, black eyes.

“ You have chosen to start over, it read. But I cannot make you travel back in time to where it went wrong. All I can do is remove every choice you made from that point onwards, leaving you free to start making new choices without the influence of your old ones. This includes the choice you made to call an ambulance when your mother said she was fine, and the choice you made to talk to a boy at that camp. You now have a clean slate to fill. Good luck.”

As she locked her phone, tears again filling the corners of her eyes, she thought she saw, one last time, the swirling dark eyes staring at her, the barest hint of mockery twisting them cruelly at the sight of her misery.

You'll regret it...they always regret it.