The moment we stepped away from the shelter of the hidden facility, I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. It was like the ground itself was trying to drag us back, pulling at our legs, whispering for us to turn around, to give up. But there was no turning back now. We had seen too much. We knew too much.
“We have to keep moving,” Elias muttered, his voice tight with urgency. His eyes were dark, haunted. The flickering light of the facility had faded behind us, but the glow of the rift still burned in the back of my mind.
I nodded, swallowing the lump in my throat. The rift wasn’t just something we could hide from anymore. It was following us, crawling through the edges of my mind, trying to tear open the fabric of time. But we had a destination: the central Chronos facility, buried deep beneath the ruins of a long-forgotten metropolis. The map Elias carried had one final mark on it, and I had a feeling that once we reached it, everything would change.
We started our trek through the dense, decaying woods, the air thick with the scent of rot and damp earth. The forest seemed to stretch endlessly, the twisted trees like silent sentinels, their gnarled branches reaching for the sky. Every now and then, I thought I heard something moving behind us, the subtle sound of footsteps just out of sync with our own. But when I glanced back, all I saw were the shadows.
It wasn’t just paranoia. The Faded had become more aggressive in the past few days, their movements erratic and unpredictable. And we hadn’t seen any survivors for miles.
“We’re close,” Elias said, breaking the silence as we made our way through the forest. “This map... it’s leading us straight to the heart of it.”
The thought made my skin crawl. The heart of Chronos. What did that even mean? What would we find when we got there?
“Do you think we’ll be able to stop it?” I asked, my voice quieter than I intended. I didn’t want to voice the fear that had been growing inside me since we’d learned the truth. But I couldn’t help it.
Elias didn’t answer immediately, and when he did, his voice was grim. “I don’t know. But we have to try. If we don’t, the loop will keep repeating, and everyone—the Faded, the survivors... all of us—we’ll be stuck in it forever.”
That was a fate I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Stuck in a never-ending cycle, reliving our last moments over and over, trapped in the loop of time we had unintentionally created.
We walked in silence after that, the sound of our footsteps muffled by the thick underbrush. Hours passed, the sun beginning to dip below the horizon, casting long, jagged shadows across the forest floor. The chill in the air grew more pronounced, but it wasn’t the cold that made me shiver. It was the growing sense of unease that clung to us.
Finally, as night descended, we emerged from the forest and onto a barren plain. In the distance, the remnants of a city loomed like a broken skeleton, its once-proud skyscrapers reduced to crumbling ruins. The central Chronos facility was buried somewhere beneath it, its location marked on Elias’s map with a bold, circular symbol.
“That’s it,” Elias said, pointing to the ruined city. “The heart of Chronos. We’re almost there.”
My eyes traced the ruins before me, a landscape of destruction and decay. It was impossible to imagine that this had once been a bustling metropolis, full of life and promise. Now it was nothing more than a ghost town, a tomb of forgotten history.
“Are you sure?” I asked, my voice a whisper, as though the wind itself might answer. “Are we really ready for this?”
He turned to me, his expression unreadable. “We don’t have a choice, Liora. If we don’t end this now, everything we’ve done will be for nothing.”
I nodded, even though every fiber of my being was screaming for us to turn back. But I couldn’t. Not when we were this close. We had come too far to stop now.
The journey across the barren plain felt endless. The silence around us was suffocating, broken only by the occasional rustle of wind or the distant screech of a Faded. There was no sign of life, no sign of any survivors. Just the remnants of a world that had collapsed in on itself.
As we approached the city, the buildings seemed to grow taller, more oppressive, as though they were closing in on us. The streets were choked with debris, the skeletons of cars and old signs half-buried in the dust. The air smelled stale, like it had been trapped here for years.
“We’re getting close,” Elias said, his eyes scanning the city. “The facility should be beneath the old government building. It’s the tallest one in the center of the city.”
I could barely hear him over the pounding of my own heart. The thought of what lay ahead, what we might find beneath the ruins, made my stomach twist.
“Stay close,” he warned, his voice low and steady. “If we’re not careful, we’ll attract the wrong kind of attention.”
We moved cautiously through the streets, our eyes constantly darting from side to side. The city was eerily empty, but I knew better than to believe it was safe. The Faded could be anywhere, and I had no intention of letting them catch us off guard.
As we neared the government building, the ground beneath our feet seemed to tremble, a low hum vibrating through the air. My pulse quickened, and I glanced at Elias, but he didn’t seem surprised.
“It’s starting,” he muttered. “We’re too close. The rift... it’s pulling everything in.”
I felt it too. The pull, the pressure. It was like the air was thickening, and the world around us was starting to bend. The rift wasn’t just a tear in time—it was a force, a living thing that was trying to drag everything into its chaos.
“We need to get inside,” I said, my voice barely audible.
Elias nodded. “Follow me.”
We sprinted toward the building, our footsteps echoing in the silent streets. The doors to the old government facility were locked, but Elias didn’t hesitate. He yanked a crowbar from his bag and pried them open with ease. The door creaked and groaned, but it held.
We slipped inside, and the door slammed shut behind us.
The facility was dark, its halls empty and silent. But the low hum I had felt outside was louder now, vibrating through the walls and floor. It was like the building itself was alive, reacting to the rift’s pull.
“There,” Elias said, pointing to a large set of double doors at the far end of the hall. “That’s where it is.”
My heart pounded in my chest as we made our way toward the doors. Each step felt heavier than the last, like we were walking deeper into the heart of the storm.
As we approached, the doors suddenly slammed open, revealing a large, circular chamber bathed in an eerie green light. The walls were lined with machines, monitors flickering to life as we stepped inside. But it wasn’t the machines that caught my attention—it was the figure standing in the center of the room.
A man, tall and thin, with eyes that glowed the same unnatural green as the light around us. He was dressed in a black suit, his face obscured by a mask.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said, his voice low and echoing in the chamber.
Elias froze, his hand tightening around the crowbar. “You... you’re one of them.”
The man tilted his head, a slow, deliberate motion. “I am not one of them. But I am the one who controls this.”
Before we could react, the lights in the room flickered, and the walls began to tremble. A deep, resonating sound filled the air, and I could feel the pull of the rift growing stronger, closer.
The man smiled beneath his mask.
“It’s too late,” he whispered. “The loop is already in motion.”
The world seemed to collapse around us, swallowed by darkness. The hum of the rift grew louder, vibrating through the walls like a living thing, its pulse quickening, echoing through the chamber. I couldn't breathe. My lungs felt heavy, as though the air itself was being sucked away.
Elias grabbed my arm, pulling me closer to him as the man in the center of the room seemed to fade into the shadows, his presence fading into the chaos that was tearing at the edges of reality. I could hear his voice, but it was distorted, as though coming from a great distance.
“It’s too late,” he repeated, his voice distant but clear. “You can't stop it.”
My heart raced. The rift—everything was unraveling. My thoughts were scattered, spinning like a vortex as the walls shook violently. I struggled to stay grounded, my feet feeling as if they might slip out from under me at any second.
Elias’s grip tightened on my arm. “We can’t let him win,” he said, his voice strained but filled with a determination I hadn’t heard before.
I nodded, though a part of me wondered if we were already too far gone. The rift was alive, like a parasite, and it was consuming everything around us. I could feel it now—not just in the room, but in my very being. The scars on my arm burned with an intensity that matched the thrum of the rift itself.
Suddenly, the chamber seemed to grow colder, the walls warping as if the space itself was bending under pressure. The monitors flickered wildly, the images on them shifting too quickly for me to make sense of. Time seemed to stretch and collapse in on itself.
“Elias, what’s happening?” I gasped, struggling to hold my ground as the world around us seemed to melt and reform. “Is this... is this the rift?”
His face was pale, his eyes wide with fear. “No. This isn’t just the rift. This is... something else. It’s trying to pull us into another timeline.”
I could feel it now—the sensation of being torn in multiple directions at once, as though I was being yanked through time itself. Flashes of different lives, different versions of me, flickered in and out of my mind. Some of them were happy. Others were not. But they all shared one thing: they were fading, just like the world around us.
I struggled to stay grounded, to hold onto the reality I knew, but it was slipping away, slipping into a black void of endless possibilities.
Elias reached for my hand, his grip tight, his eyes locked on mine. “We can’t stay here. We have to—”
Before he could finish, the ground beneath us cracked open with a deafening roar. The floor split in two, a chasm opening wide, and I could feel the pull—deeper, stronger, dragging us toward the abyss.
A flash of bright light exploded in the center of the room. I shielded my eyes, but when I opened them again, the man in the black suit was standing directly in front of us, his glowing eyes piercing into mine.
“You don’t get it, do you?” he whispered, his voice sending a cold shiver down my spine. “You were never supposed to fix this. You were never meant to save the world. The timeline was always meant to collapse, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
A sound like a thousand voices screaming in unison filled the room. The walls of the facility cracked and crumbled, the very air warping as the rift's pull intensified.
Elias shouted over the roar of the chaos, “Liora! We have to stop him! He’s the one controlling everything!”
I nodded, my mind racing. If we could somehow destroy him, maybe we could stop this madness. But I didn’t know how to fight something that seemed to be a part of the rift itself.
The man’s face twisted into a cruel smile, and then, without warning, the entire room collapsed.
We were falling.
But not into the abyss.
We were falling through time.
Everything around me blurred—time itself stretched and snapped, like a thread pulled too tight. I reached out, my fingers brushing against Elias’s, but the pull of the rift was too strong, and we were ripped apart.
“Elias!” I screamed, but my voice was swallowed by the swirling void.
I felt a cold hand brush mine, but when I looked, there was nothing there—nothing but the darkness that stretched endlessly around me.
And then I heard it—the faintest whisper, the sound of my own name.
“Liora.”
The voice was familiar, but it was wrong—distorted, pulled apart by the rift. And then, just as quickly as it came, it was gone.
I tried to scream again, but my voice was lost. Time twisted around me, and I was left adrift in the endless void.
Just as everything started to go dark, a single thought broke through the chaos:
Was this the end of everything?
But then, in the distance, I saw something—a flicker of light.
I reached out, desperately grasping for it.
And then everything stopped.