The Watcher in the Void

"The most terrifying thing in the universe isn’t the unknown. It’s the realization that something already knows you."

Viraj had never been fond of silence.

Silence meant something was wrong.

And right now, standing on this cracked, impossible ground beneath a sky that refused to stay still, silence was the loudest thing in existence.

Lucius stood beside him, arms crossed, his gaze locked on the figure in the distance. “Okay. First question—are we dealing with someone that wants to kill us, erase us, or just mess with our heads?”

Viraj exhaled slowly. “Do those have to be separate options?”

The figure wasn’t moving. It stood perfectly still, just far enough that its features remained blurred, like it was half-existing, flickering between being real and unreal.

Lucius sighed. “You know, I’d love just once for us to time-jump into a peaceful meadow or something. Maybe a nice future where humanity figured things out and invented stress-free time travel. Instead, here we are—**again—**standing in some nightmare where the laws of physics gave up.”

Viraj didn’t answer. His attention was locked on the figure. Something was... wrong about it.

Then, it spoke.

Not in words. Not in whispers like the Timeborne.

It spoke in recognition.

Viraj felt the words in his bones before he heard them in his mind.

"You should not be here."

Lucius tensed. “Yeah, trust me, buddy, we didn’t exactly plan this trip.”

Viraj took a slow step forward. “Who are you?”

The figure tilted its head, its form flickering between thousands of different versions of itself. Some human. Some not. Some unrecognizable altogether.

Then, it stepped forward—and suddenly, it was right in front of them.

Lucius let out a sharp breath. “Okay, nope. Hate that. Absolutely hate that.”

Viraj didn’t move. He met the figure’s gaze, or at least, where its eyes should have been. Its face was an ever-shifting blur, but there was something... familiar about it.

The voice came again, steady, ancient, and certain.

"You are disrupting the cycle."

Viraj’s mind raced. The cycle? Did it mean time itself?

Lucius raised a hand. “Listen, if this is about the whole ‘defying the natural order of things’ speech, we’ve already heard it. Several times, actually. Got anything new?”

The figure didn’t react.

Instead, it lifted a hand—and the world around them changed.

Viraj felt the shift before he saw it. One second, they were standing on the cracked, impossible ground. The next—they were somewhere else.

A city.

No—every city.

Buildings flickered in and out of existence. Neon lights of a cyber-future overlapped with stone towers from an ancient past. Streets twisted in impossible angles, leading nowhere and everywhere at once.

Lucius swore under his breath. “What—what is this?”

Viraj swallowed hard. “It’s a paradox.”

The figure stepped closer.

"This is what remains when the cycle is broken."

Viraj felt his pulse hammering.

This wasn’t just a random place.

This was a graveyard.

A graveyard of timelines that should have never existed.

And something told him—they were about to join them.

"There are fates worse than death. Being forgotten by time itself is one of them."

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