Ten years had passed since the day Rayan returned from the future.
And six months since he discovered someone had accessed his forbidden design.
The world outside went on as usual. Governments rose and fell, AI made headlines, and new technologies continued blooming like weeds in summer—but for Rayan, time had taken on a different shape. It was no longer linear. It pulsed. Echoed.
And something inside him knew…
This story wasn't over.
Rayan and Amira now lived quietly in the outskirts of the city, in a hill house with large windows and old wooden floors that creaked when you walked too slowly. Amira loved it there. She said the silence was honest. It didn't pretend to be more than it was.
She had taken to painting fields and skies again. Ever since her illness was cured—ever since that future version of Rayan had given his life to administer the treatment in secret—her health had been radiant.
Her soul, though?
That carried the weight of two men.
One who saved her.One who stayed.
Rayan could never ask her to choose between the two.
One evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, he returned from his workshop behind the house. A small journal was tucked under his arm. It was Borrowed Time, worn now from his daily additions.
He found Amira sitting on the deck, staring at the sky. A faint breeze pulled strands of her hair across her face.
"Do you remember the sound of his voice?" she asked without looking at him.
He knew who she meant.
"…Yours, but not," she added.
He sat beside her, journal resting between them.
"I think about it sometimes. About how he must've felt watching you from afar."
Amira didn't answer immediately. She closed her eyes. "He used to hum at night. I remember falling asleep to it once. It was an old lullaby. The one your mother used to sing."
Rayan exhaled. "I didn't even know I remembered it."
"You did. Somewhere deep inside."
They sat in silence for a long time, the kind that wasn't empty but full—like a room cluttered with memories.
Finally, Rayan opened the journal.
"There's something I haven't told you."
Amira turned to look.
He flipped to the final page. Blank, except for a line he'd written that morning:
The timelines are fraying.
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"I think… I think something's wrong. Lately I've been noticing anomalies. Small at first. People forgetting things they should know. Familiar places that look slightly different. Names that vanish from records."
Amira frowned. "Like déjà vu?"
"No," he said. "Like the universe is unraveling threads it can't afford to keep."
That night, he went back to the lab.
He powered up the temporal scanner he swore he'd never touch again.
It confirmed his worst fear.
Temporal Distortion Index: 0.042 (Critical Threshold Breached)Temporal Echoes Detected: 3Source Nodes: Unknown
Someone had activated something.
And not just once.
Three instances. Three echoes of time travel. Somewhere—possibly in different parts of the world—someone had either succeeded in replicating his work… or stumbled into its remains.
And it was destabilizing the fabric of time itself.
In the following weeks, the signs became clearer.
On the news: "Girl Claims to Have Lived the Same Day 17 Times"In the city forums: "Is anyone else missing entire chunks of memory?"Across scientific circles: whispers of unexplained particle shifts, failed timestamps, atomic clocks spinning out of sync.
Rayan tried to stay ahead of it.
He built a new device, smaller than the original time machine—more of a tracker than a vessel. A compass, built to detect temporal ripples and triangulate their origin.
But he didn't tell Amira everything.
Not yet.
She had finally found peace. He wouldn't steal that from her again—not until he was sure.
It was a stormy afternoon when it happened.
Amira was walking in the garden when she saw it.
A flicker—like a mirror breaking through air—just above the rosebush.
And then it was gone.
She told Rayan that evening, thinking little of it. But his face turned pale.
He ran outside in the rain with his compass in hand. The needle spun wildly.
Something had crossed through again.
Another traveler.
Another echo.
And this time…
It was close.
Rayan worked through the night. Mapping quantum coordinates, calculating spatial dissonance.
He narrowed it down to a 15-kilometer radius.
And then, at 3:13 a.m., he saw it.
A silhouette at the edge of the property. Watching.
He stepped outside into the cold wind.
The figure didn't move.
Rayan approached slowly, cautiously, heart pounding in his ears.
As he drew closer, the silhouette became clearer—tall, lean, young. Barely twenty. Hair windblown. Eyes wide with wonder and fear.
"Who are you?" Rayan asked, voice sharp.
The boy blinked. "I… I'm sorry. I think… I think I built your machine."
Rayan froze.
"You what?"
The boy held up a crumpled printout. It was a schematic—one of the missing versions of Rayan's original time engine, the unencrypted backup he thought had been deleted a decade ago.
"I found this in a storage server," the boy explained. "It was buried under layers of junk code, but when I cleaned it up… it made sense. I built a prototype. I didn't think it would work. But then—"
"You activated it."
He nodded. "And I ended up here."
Rayan closed his eyes. "You have no idea what you've done."
Back in the lab, under flickering lights, Rayan ran diagnostics again.
The distortion index had jumped.
Four echoes now.
The boy—his name was Silas—explained everything. A university project. An abandoned department server. Curiosity turned obsession. A test run gone too far.
And now?
Now the world was fracturing.
Amira came into the lab quietly. She saw Silas and froze.
He looked at her with awe.
"You're the one," he said softly. "You're the reason he did it all."
She looked at Rayan.
He nodded.
Later, when they were alone, Amira asked, "Can we fix this?"
Rayan didn't answer right away.
Finally: "Maybe. But it won't be without cost."
"And if we don't?"
"Reality will collapse on itself. The timeline can't hold this many fractures."
She looked at him.
Then, slowly, nodded. "Then we'll fix it. Together."
But Rayan knew something he hadn't told her.
He had seen his reflection again in the lab mirror.
And this time, it wasn't just older.
It was fading.
To be continue...