Stepping Into Nowhere

"The most dangerous journeys aren’t the ones with no map. They are the ones where the destination itself refuses to exist."

Viraj stood at the threshold of the impossible. Still thinking, still confused, still worried.

The Path to Nowhere wasn’t just a door—it was an absence, a wound in reality that defied all logic. The jagged rupture hovered in front of him, its edges shifting like fractured glass suspended in midair.

Beyond it, there was no light, no darkness. Just nothingness.

Lucius was still glaring at him. “Just to be clear—this is insanely stupid. Even by our standards.”

Viraj gave him a sideways glance. “Noted.”

Lucius groaned. “You’re still going in, aren’t you?”

Viraj didn’t answer. He was just silent.

Because of course he was.

Aditi was out there.

And nothing—not paradoxes, not logic, not even the laws of time itself—was going to stop him from getting her back.

The alternate Viraj exhaled. “We don’t have much time. The Path won’t stay open forever.”

Viraj didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward—

—and everything shattered.

Falling.

Or maybe he wasn’t.

There was no sense of direction, no up or down. No sensation of air or gravity. Just an endless, shifting blur of time unraveling and reweaving itself.

Viraj felt his body stretch and shrink at the same time. His past flickered before his eyes—memories, possibilities, versions of himself that had never existed.

For a moment, he wasn’t just Viraj. Think about i.

He was every Viraj that could have been.

He saw himself as an old man, sitting in a quiet library, lost in books of time in his old age.

He saw himself as a child, reaching for something just out of his grasp.

He saw himself never existing at all.

And then—

It stopped.

He hit solid ground.

The impact knocked the breath out of his lungs. He gasped, rolling onto his back, trying to regain his bearings.

Above him, there was no sky. No stars. No horizon. Just an endless, swirling void of fragmented time.

Lucius groaned beside him. “Okay. That was worse than I expected.”

Viraj pushed himself up, scanning his surroundings. The ground beneath them was... strange. It wasn’t stone or earth, but something that felt like solidified echoes—fragments of moments frozen in place.

And in the distance, something loomed.

A towering structure, rising from the shifting void.

It looked ancient. Impossible. A temple made of forgotten timelines, its surface flickering between past and future versions of itself.

Viraj knew, without a doubt, that this was where Aditi was being held.

Lucius dusted himself off. “I hate this place.”

The alternate Viraj smirked. “Then you’re going to love what happens next.”

Because the shadows had started to move.

Something knew they were here.

And it wasn’t going to let them pass.

"Some paths don’t just test your strength. They test whether you deserve to walk them at all."

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