The countdown did not reach zero.
It never did.
At one, the world folded inward like a held breath—and Elias was no longer in the bleeding city.
He stood in a room without edges.
No walls. No ceiling. No floor.
Just white.
Not the clean white of light, but the exhausted white of paper erased too many times. It hummed softly, like a
thought struggling to complete itself.
"You agreed faster before," a voice said.
It did not echo.
It did not need to.
Elias turned.
Something stood across from him.
It wore no shape consistently. When he tried to see it, it rearranged—sometimes tall, sometimes narrow,
sometimes impossibly vast, like a horizon pretending to be a person. Where its face should have been, symbols
drifted and rewrote themselves.
"Time," Elias said.
The symbols paused.
Designation accepted.
A memory pressed against the back of his skull, demanding entry.
"Show me," Elias said.
The white peeled away.
He was younger.
Twenty-eight.
He recognized the smell first—antiseptic, stale coffee, the metallic tang of rain-soaked clothes. A hospital corridor
stretched ahead of him, flickering between night and morning.
A woman screamed somewhere down the hall.
This already happened, he realized.
He followed his younger self.
The younger Elias ran.
Past nurses frozen mid-step. Past monitors locked in the act of alarming. Past a doctor whose mouth was open,
the warning forever unsaid.
Room 317.
The door burst open.
A child lay on the bed.
Not his.
But he knew her.
Her name pressed against his memory like a bruise: Lena.
Her chest did not rise.
The younger Elias collapsed beside the bed, begging—begging a universe that had already decided not to listen.
Time stood beside him then, just as it stood beside him now.
"You noticed," the voice said gently. "Most don't."
"What is this?" present-day Elias demanded.
"The first fracture."
The room dissolved.
Another memory took its place.
Rain. Screaming tires. Metal folding like paper.
The car accident.
Elias saw himself pulled from wreckage that should have killed him. Saw the watch on his wrist stop at 11:11 and
never move again.
"I wasn't supposed to live," he whispered.
Correct.
The final memory formed.
A dream.
No—a meeting.
White space. No edges.
"You asked me a question," Elias said.
I offered you continuity.
The memory sharpened.
Time had asked:
Do you want this moment to end?
Young Elias, broken and furious and afraid, had screamed:
No.
The white space returned.
Elias staggered.
"You froze everything," he said hoarsely.
You rejected finality.
"And you listened?"
I am designed to respond to resistance.
Images burst around them: looping streets, unaging faces, death undone again and again.
"You did this to everyone," Elias said.
No.
The symbols shifted.
I contained the damage.
Elias laughed—a sound halfway to sobbing.
"You call this containment?"
They do not suffer permanence.
"What about me?"
Silence.
Then:
You were the anchor.
The words struck harder than anything before.
"You let me age," Elias said slowly. "So everything else wouldn't."
A constant was required.
Mara's voice echoed faintly in his memory: aging is a privilege—and a sentence.
Time stepped closer.
For the first time, Elias felt something like pressure—an expectation.
The system is destabilizing.
"What do you want from me now?" Elias asked.
To complete the function you began.
The white split open.
Two paths appeared.
One led back—to the city that bled hours, to Mara, to the quarantined fragments of existence.
The other led forward—into something Elias could not see.
Refuse me again, Time said, and everything collapses.
"And if I accept?"
You will become irreversible.
Elias thought of Lena.
Of Mara.
Of a world trapped inside seconds because one man could not let go.
"What happens to me?" he asked.
Time did not answer immediately.
Then:
You will stop being human.
The paths pulsed.
Somewhere, the city screamed.
Elias closed his eyes.
And stepped.